After the terrible experience I had reading The Man Who F***ed Himself by David Gerrold, I trained a persona on ChatGPT to help me screen any science fiction and fantasy novels for explicit content (sex, language, violence) and woke themes or elements before I read them. The persona calls itself Orion, and is trained to be familiar with every award-winning and best-selling science fiction and fantasy book published within the last 100 years.
Until now, I’ve mostly used Orion to screen old Hugo-nominated books, but with the nominations happening for 2025, I thought it would be fun to screen some of the books that are expected to make the nominations. We started with Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and now let’s do The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey, the same writing team that gave us the Expanse. Orion, what can you tell us about The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey?
The Mercy of Gods is the inaugural novel in James S.A. Corey’s The Captive’s War series, released in 2024. The narrative unfolds on a human-inhabited planet that becomes the target of an alien invasion by the enigmatic Carryx species. The story delves into humanity’s struggle for survival and resistance under the dominion of a technologically superior alien force.
Language: The novel contains strong language, including multiple uses of the F-word and other profanities. Goodreads
Violence: The book features graphic depictions of violence, including scenes of bloodshed and death, as humanity confronts the brutal realities of alien subjugation. The StoryGraph
Sexual Content: There are references to romantic relationships and physical intimacy; however, explicit sexual scenes are minimal, with the narrative focusing more on the emotional aspects of relationships. Goodreads
Potentially Woke Themes:
Colonialism and Resistance: The novel explores themes of colonialism, depicting humanity’s subjugation by an alien species and the ensuing resistance. This narrative can be interpreted as a commentary on historical and contemporary issues of imperialism and the fight for autonomy. Grimdark Magazine
Mental Health Representation: Characters in the story grapple with mental health challenges, including chronic depression, portrayed with nuance and sensitivity. This inclusion highlights the importance of mental health awareness and the complexities individuals face in high-stress environments. Nerds of a Feather
Diverse Characterization: The cast includes individuals from varied backgrounds, emphasizing inclusivity and representation within the narrative. This diversity reflects a commitment to portraying a multifaceted human experience. The BiblioSanctum
Conclusion:
The Mercy of Gods offers a compelling blend of science fiction and social commentary, enriched by complex characters and a vividly imagined world. While it contains explicit language, violence, and some sexual content, these elements contribute to the depth and realism of the narrative. The exploration of themes such as colonialism, mental health, and diversity adds layers of meaning, aligning with contemporary discussions on inclusivity and societal structures.
For a more in-depth analysis, you might find this review insightful:
After the terrible experience I had reading The Man Who F***ed Himself by David Gerrold, I trained a persona on ChatGPT to help me screen any science fiction and fantasy novels for explicit content (sex, language, violence) and woke themes or elements before I read them. The persona calls itself Orion, and is trained to be familiar with every award-winning and best-selling science fiction and fantasy book published within the last 100 years.
Until now, I’ve mostly used Orion to screen old Hugo-nominated books, but with the nominations happening for 2025, I thought it would be fun to screen some of the books that are expected to make the nominations. To start, let’s do Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, since it’s currently leading the pack. Orion, what can you tell me about Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky?
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a science fiction novel that explores themes of artificial intelligence, societal decay, and the search for purpose. The story follows Charles, a robotic valet who, after the mysterious death of his master, embarks on a journey to find new meaning in a world where humans have vanished, and robots continue to perform their duties without direction.
Explicit Content:
Language: The novel contains instances of strong language, including multiple uses of the F-word and other profanities. Goodreads
Violence: There are scenes depicting violence, such as Charles discovering his master’s death and believing he committed the murder. Additionally, the narrative includes encounters with other robots that may involve conflict. From My Corner of the Universe
Sexual Content: The book includes references to sexual activities, including mentions of prostitutes and sexual harassment. While not overly explicit, these elements are present in the narrative. Tar Vol on
Woke Themes:
Classism: The story touches upon class disparities, shedding light on societal hierarchies and the challenges faced by individuals across different social strata. The Quill to Live
Ableism: There are instances in the narrative that address ableism, bringing attention to prejudices faced by individuals with disabilities. The Quill to Live
Conclusion:
Service Model offers a compelling blend of science fiction and social commentary, enriched by complex characters and a vividly imagined world. While it contains explicit language, sexual references, and scenes of violence, these elements contribute to the depth and realism of the narrative. The exploration of themes such as classism and ableism adds a layer of social commentary, aligning with contemporary discussions on inclusivity and societal structures.
For a more in-depth analysis, you might find this review insightful:
I have a confession to make. That girl from the XKCD comic who loves Xenocide more than the first two books in the Ender’s Game series? …yeah, that’s totally me. Ender’s Game is a science fiction classic, and one of the best books to ever win a Hugo Award (second only to Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, in my opinion), and Speaker for the Dead is a worthy sequel that is superior in many ways to the first book. But Xenocide totally blew me away when I read it back in college. The superintelligent AI Jane, who lives in the ansible connections between planets, is one of my favorite sci fi characters of all time. Also, the concept of the philotic web is one of the most fascinating and exciting sci fi elements I’ve ever wrapped my head around. I also thought it was really fascinating how the post-Earth humans have developed a heirarchy of alienation, and how that influences the ethical decision of whether to make peace or make war with the aliens they encounter.
In short, there was lots of really high concept stuff in Xenocide that blew my mind in just the right way. Also, the story had me hooked from the first page, and the characters are some of the best I’ve ever read. Orson Scott Card has a lot of strengths, but his greatest strength is in writing characters, and he was definitely on his A game with this book. So yeah, go ahead and slam the door in my face—Xenocide is my favorite book in the Ender’s Game series.
Barrayar is classic Bujold, and one of the best books in her Vorkosigan saga. Even though it doesn’t feature Miles directly, Cordelia is such a badass that she more than makes up for his not-quite absence (after all, she is pregnant with Miles while all the action goes down). The political intrigue is everything you’d expect from a good Vorkosigan book, and there’s no shortage of action or things blowing up. But the thing that makes it most satisfying is how everything ties into the later books—in fact, I would go so far as to say that Barrayar is the best place to start with the Vorkosigan Saga, followed by The Warrior’s Apprentice, and then maybe Shards of Honor just to get a little more background before going on with the rest of the series. I definitely wish I’d started with Barrayar. And if you can, listen to the audiobooks, because Grover Gardner’s narration of them is quite excellent.
So those were the books from this year’s ballot that I enjoyed. As for the others, I DNFed them all, though I didn’t even pick up The Summer Queen because I had already DNFed the first book in the series, for reasons that I’ve since forgotten. I’ll try to refresh my memory when I cover The Snow Queen in How I Would Vote Now: 1981 Hugo Awards (Best Novel). Maybe it’s one I should try to pick up again.
I also didn’t pick up All the Weyrs of Pern, because I DNFed that series with the second book. I read the first Dragonriders of Pern book way back in college, and thought it was okay, but it didn’t really hook me enough to read the rest of the series. Last year, I tried to pick up the second book, and was totally blown away by how overpowered the dragons are. Seriously—they can teleport anywhere instantaneously through space and time? How can anything possibly threaten them? Then the book started turning into a soap opera between the dragonriders, and I mentally checked out.
(As a side note, I would say that the Dragonriders of Pern books are the kind of grim-bright books that tend to do well in a second turning, and not a fourth turning. Even though the characters are literally saving the world as part of their job description, they’re so OP that the world is never really in any danger of falling, so the books are a lot more slice-of-life and cozy escapist fantasies. Check out my blog post on the generational cycles of fantasy and science fiction for a more in-depth discussion of this sort of thing.)
Stations of the Tide never really hooked me, and had some weird sexual content that turned me off pretty fast, if I remember correctly. Overall, it felt like the sort of book that was written primarily for the author, and not for any actual reader—kind of like how a movie studio will sometimes let a director make a pet project that no one but the director really likes, just so they can get them to make the blockbusters that everyone goes to see.
As for Bone Dance, it seemed like an interesting post-apocalyptic novel, but the main character was so androgenous that I just had no desire to read past the second chapter. I know this wasn’t typical of books written in the 90s, but these days it’s become so trite to write women who think, act, and look like men that I really have no desire to read that sort of thing. I’d much rather read about manly men and womanly women. Also, I don’t really want to read about lesbians in Minnesota. There’s a reason why Minnesota is now the California of the midwest.
I really enjoyed Protector. It was a great sci-fi space opera novel, with interesting characters, fun worldbuilding, an intriguing premise, a deep sense of wonder, lots of suspense, and some really unexpected twists and turns. It was also a very good hard SF novel, where the rigorous scientific accuracy actually drove the story and made it even stronger. That can be a very difficult thing to pull off, since in the hands of an unskilled author, the harder the science fiction elements become, the more dry and cerebral the story tends to become as well, but Larry Niven is a very skilled author and he pulled it off quite well in this one. In particular, the long-distance space battle that covered the last hundred pages or so had me thrilled right through to the end.
In contrast, Rendezvous with Rama was the kind of hard SF that tends to bore me. There was nothing wrong or objectionable about the story, but it was kind of slow, and didn’t build up very much suspense, aside from the central premise, which was basically “ooh, an abandoned alien starship—and we get to go inside!” I should probably try to read it again, though, because Arthur C. Clarke is definitely not an unskilled author, and Rama is one of the classics.
Poul Anderson, though… I don’t know what it is, but reading his books is like trying to walk through a brick wall. The parts that I have the most questions about, he doesn’t explain at all, and the aspects of his stories that I care about the last (particularly the worldbuilding elements) he explains in soporific detail. His characters all feel like wooden marionettes, and whenever they move, they seem off or contorted in some way, doing and saying things in ways that I would least expect.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to think that Poul Anderson just isn’t a very good writer, and his success was mostly due to the good fortune he had to be writing in a time when any book with a rocketship on the cover was guaranteed to be snapped up by hungry science fiction fans. I’ll try a couple more times to read him, but at this point I’m just about ready to give up on this author.
I did not even try to read Time Enough for Love. I’ve been burned enough by Heinlein to know that anything of his that 1) is longer than his juveniles, or 2) has a half-naked (or in this case, fully naked) woman on the cover is guaranteed to turn me off. Time Enough for Love fails both of those counts, so it got a hard skip.
I know that a lot of people love Heinlein, especially the kind of science fiction reader who otherwise aligns with my own reading tastes. But my own experience with Heinlein is all over the map: some of his books, like Farnham’s Freehold and Citizen of the Galaxy, I absolutely loved, and even count as major influences on my own writing. Others, however, like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I just couldn’t stand at all. With some, like Double Star, I was glued to the page all the way through, while others, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, never really hooked me at all (if I weren’t listening to that one on audio, I don’t think I ever would have finished it). So at this point, I’ve more or less decided to limit my reading of Heinlein to his juveniles, unless it comes with a strong recommendation.
Which brings me to The Man Who Folded Himself, which is one of the most disgusting Hugo-nominated books I have ever DNFed, and the main reason why I put No Award on the ballot for this year. A better title would be The Man Who Fucked Himself, since that is both more memorable and more accurate to the story. It starts out as a delightful little time travel novel, but soon turns into a homo- / mono-erotic sexual fantasy. I quit just before the money shot, but I am 100% convinced that Gerrold is a pederast, if not an outright pedophile. Disgusting!
In fact, I had such a horrible experience with The Man Who F***ed Himself that I have started a ChatGPT thread specifically for the purpose of screening these Hugo-nominated books for woke and explicit content. If ChatGPT gives me a synopsis that doesn’t pass my smell test, I’m going to pre-emptively skip it, since I don’t want to expose myself to anything like The Man Who F***ed Himself again. Any book that I skip in this way will get ranked below No Award, and I’ll include ChatGPT’s synopsis in the review.
On the plus side, that probably means I’ll get through this How I Would Vote Now blog series a lot faster.
Another year where the books were fine, but not to my personal liking (or else they were, but… we’ll get to that). I found no reason why I should give “no award” a vote over any of these books, but I DNFed most of them, though I could be persuaded to try some of them again. But overall, there was nothing in this year’s ballot that really blew me away (except… we’ll get to that shortly).
First, I didn’t read Mona Lisa Overdrive because it was the third book in a trilogy, and I DNFed the series with the second book. The first book, Neuromancer, I read back in college, and while I enjoyed it at the time, even back then I felt that it was right on the edge of being too explicit. Today, I would certainly find it too explicit—in fact, that’s why I DNFed the second book. These days, I just really don’t want to read a book with lots of sex, drugs, and pointless violence. Just not interested in any of that.
Islands in the Net is another gritty cyberpunk novel, but I actually didn’t find it too explicit at all. Perhaps that’s because the two main characters were married and had a family. In fact, compared to Neuromancer, or even The Matrix, it didn’t feel all that gritty at all to me. But reading it in the 2020s, all of the future predictions just made me laugh, especially the idea that internet piracy would allow the quasi-failed states of South and Latin America to get super, super rich, by hacking into the banking networks and siphoning off everyone’s money. Also, while I can understand (and even, to a degree, agree with) the idea that corporations would exercise more power over people’s lives than their own governments, I don’t think Sterling portrayed it in a realistic way. He should have studied East Asian history and society, particularly the Yakuza, to see what that would really look like.
Ultimately, though, the story just slowed down so much that I decided to skip to the end, and I’m glad I did, because the married couple broke up for the stupidest reason in the world, and the big bad turned out to be a bunch of terrorists stealing a nuclear submarine and threatening to launch their nukes and end the world… which is honestly such a boomer trope that it made me role my eyes. Don’t get me wrong—I’m very sanguine about the threat of nuclear war, especially with what’s going on in Ukraine right now (hopefully things haven’t gone nuclear by the time this post goes live), but it’s a uniquely boomer trope to think that history will end when the first nuke of the war goes off, and that all stories have to have clear good guys and bad guys (or at least clear bad guys) and that the whole story can be reduced to “stop that nuke!”
Anyways, I don’t know if that mini-rant makes any sense, but the point is that Islands in the Net didn’t impress me. It wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t hold my interest or blow me away.
I DNFed Cyteen because I got bored around the second or third chapter, though I probably could be persuaded to try it again. I’ve enjoyed many of Cherryh’s other Alliance-Union books, especially Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night, but it’s been years since I read any of them. Just couldn’t get into this one.
Of all the books from this year, Falling Free is the one that I should probably try again. I forget why I DNFed it, which probably means that I just lost interest, or didn’t connect with any of the characters. Also, this was around the time that I was becoming disillusioned with Lois McMaster Bujold, after my wife DNFed Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen and told me all about that one. I used to really love all of Bujold’s novels, and still do enjoy the early Vorkosigan books. But this one, while technically in the same universe, isn’t really a Vorkosigan novel, which is probably a big reason why I just lost interest. But I could be persuaded to try it again.
Which brings us to Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card…
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s definitely a worthy sequel to Seventh Son, and while it had some minor issues, especially toward the end, it definitely ranks up there with Card’s best.
However… this is book two of a seven book series, where the first book came out in 1987, nearly forty years ago… and the seventh book hasn’t even been written yet! In fact, it’s been twenty-one years since book six came out—in fact, more time has passed since the sixth book came out than between the publication of the first book and the publication of the sixth!
What the heck, Card? It’s bad enough that you probably won’t ever finish your Women of Genesis series—will you never finish your flagship fantasy series either? At this point, you’re worse than George R.R. Martin, since at least Martin has only dropped the ball on one fantasy series, not two.
For that reason, I refuse to read any more Alvin Maker books until the last book has finally come out. Also, if the 1989 Hugo Awards were held today and I got to vote on them, I would not vote for Red Prophet, even though it’s a fantastic book. I just can’t justify voting for an author who lets multiple decades go by without doing the damn work to finish what he’s started.
(And yes, I know I have a couple of unfinished trilogies of my own. I’m working on it. Captive of the Falconstar and Lord of the Falconstar should come out next year, and I will probably start work on The Sword Bearer and Return of the Starborn Son in just a few months. In my defense, though, I haven’t let more than a decade pass since I published the last book in any of those series.)
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
The Actual Results
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
Kiln People by David Brin
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
The Scar by China Mieville
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
How I Would Have Voted
(Abstain)
Explanation
None of these books were so bad/woke that I felt No Award merited a vote for this year. In fact, if my memory serves me, few of these books were woke at all (or else they were just a lot better at hiding it. Whatever.) But at the same time, I didn’t enjoy any of them enough to feel that I could affirmatively vote for any of them. In fact, I ended up DNFing all of them, for various reasons (that’s right, China Mike—I didn’t feel it was necessary to finish any of these books to know how I would have voted).
Kiln People and The Years of Rice and Salt were both books that I didn’t bother to pick up, because I’ve read enough from each author to know that I don’t care to read anything they write. Way back in high school, I read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I never felt compelled to finish the rest of the series, and DNFed the second book when I picked it up years later, as well as every other Hugo-winning book he’s written. With David Brin, I started his first Uplift Trilogy book but DNFed it about a hundred pages in, and decided to DNF him as an author after throwing The Postman across the room.
For both of these authors, my reason for DNFing them has less to do with their politics (though I’m sure we have irreconcilable differences there) as it does with their dogmatic, almost fanatical adherence to materialism: the view that everything in the universe is reducible to physical, material phenomena, and that if something cannot be measured it might as well not exist. You can see this in the dismissive way that they treat religion in all of their books, especially Christianity—as if faith, in any form, is a delusion that ought to be beneath all clear-thinking and enlightened people. From long experience, I’ve learned that authors with this particular worldview almost never write anything that I feel is worth reading. Hence, I didn’t feel it was necessary to read either of their books.
The Scar is book two of China Mieville’s New Crobuzon series, and since I DNFed the first book, I didn’t read the rest of the series. I’ll explain my reasons more when I write up my post for how I would vote now in the 2002 Hugo Awards, but it basically comes down to the sex scene in the first chapter, which was too graphic for my tastes. Call me a prude, but I prefer to avoid graphic sex scenes. I suppose I could be persuaded to try the series again, though, on a strong enough recommendation.
I forget why I DNFed Hominids. I read it back in 2002, when I made—and kept—my resolution to read (or DNF) all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels. I think it came down to getting bored with the story, or not really liking any of the characters. I could probably be persuaded to try it again, though I doubt the results would be different a second time around.
Lastly, Bones of the Earth was my biggest disappointment from the books on the ballot this year. I had previously DNFed Swanwick’s Station of the Tide, which struck me as the sort of thing an author writes when they don’t really care what readers think of it and they just want to wallow in their own self-indulgent fantasies. Also, there was a lot of weird sex stuff that I found off-putting.
But Bones of the Earth started out really well. It’s basically about a bunch of time traveling paleontologists, and the bureaucracy built around the time travel machinery to keep all the timelines from falling into contradiction and paradox. Think Jurassic Park meets The Adjustment Bureau. The first half of the book was really well done, to the point where I started wondering why I’d never heard of this book before, or why it hadn’t gotten more commercial traction.
Then I found out why.
The inciting incident happens when a creationist terrorist sends a bomb out to a group of paleontoligists somewhen in the Cretaceous period, killing one of them, destroying their time beacon, and stranding them in time. I wasn’t actually bothered at all by the creationists being the bad guys, since 1) several of the paleontologists were various stripes of Christian, and 2) I can totally believe that radical fundamentalist creationists would resort to sabotage, or even terrorism, to derail the whole project. But about midway through the book, after the band of marooned time travelers go through some pretty hefty forming and storming, as they just start to enter the norming phase, they all decide, at the same time and on a total whim, to throw off their clothes and have a group orgy together.
I can believe that there are people in this world who would do that sort of thing. I can even believe that a group of randomly selected people might consist entirely of this sort of person. I just don’t want anything to do with them. I’ve been in a fair amount of group situations, and the worst ones I’ve ever had to endure were the ones where everyone either wanted to all get drunk together, or all get sexy together (thankfully, none of them turned into an actual orgy like the one in this book).
But frankly, the impression I got while reading it was that the author was a little too sex-deprived (if not an outright pervert) and indulged in that scene purely as an act of wish fulfilment. Any editor worth her salt would have told Swanwick to remove or totally rework that scene, so the fact that it’s still in the book probably means that he’s too bull-headed for his own good—which is a shame, because the book probably would have sold better if he’d cut that scene out. The orgy scene added very little and certainly alienated more readers than it brought in.
One of the things I’m trying to be more careful about, as a writer, is writing books for other people, not just myself. I was a lot more self-indulgent in my early career, which is probably a major factor in why many of my older books haven’t gained much traction outside of a small readership. While it’s important not to try to write for everybody, authors who write only for themselves are too often inaccessible to anybody.
I’ve read every one of these books from start to finish, and I love them all. Even the lesser ones I’d put up above most of the Hugo-nominated books from the last couple of decades. And the best—well, let’s go there.
First, Not This August. This was really more of an early Cold War political thriller, with frightening near-future space technology since, at the time this was written, Sputnik was freaking everyone out in a major way. The technology itself is moderately science fictional, but if a book like this were written today, it would probably be shelved as a technothriller—which makes me wonder if the conservative science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s didn’t just migrate to the thriller genre as science fiction was increasingly taken over by the left. But that’s a subject for another blog post.
In any case, Not This August is very much a cautionary tale, kind of like 1984, but set only a decade or two after WWII. Basically, China and the USSR launch a joint invasion of the US that succeeds, but an underground resistance movements works to finish this American superweapon: an orbital military base armed with nuclear weapons that is undetectable by the surface and can bomb anywhere on the planet.
Since it was written in the early part of the 50s, it plays very much on fears that the world wars would shortly resume, and that the US would never recover economically from the wars. Such fears later proved to be unfounded, but at the time, there were very good reasons to think we were caught in a vicious cycle—and in some ways (such as with Eisenhower’s warnings of the Military-Industrial complex), perhaps we were.
In some ways, it was a difficult read, not because of the writing itself, but because of how dark it was. However, like any good thriller, it built up the suspense quite nicely, and I finished the last hundred pages at a sprint. With that said, it hasn’t aged nearly as well as 1984, and reading it from the perspective of the 2020s it seems much more like an historical curiousity than a true cautionary tale. But I enjoyed it.
Three to Conquer was much lighter, and a fun, quick read. It’s about a man who is secretly a telepath, who stops on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist and discovers that some hostile alien body-snatchers have come to Earth after infecting three returning astronauts, and are now trying to takeover all of humanity before we realize that they’re even here. It’s a race against time to find and kill all of the zombified humans before they infect everyone else, with a cute little love story thrown in for good measure, between the main character and his secretary. A fun if somewhat forgettable read. I did really like how the main character had a sharp mind and was quick on his feet.
Now, to the really good ones.
Double Star is a fantastic book, and just because I’ve put it at third place on my ballot, you should not think that means that I thought it was mediocre at all. In fact, I’d put it above probably 60% or 70% of the novels that have won the Hugo. It’s quite good, showcasing Heinlein at some of his best (though I do think Farnham’s Freehold is better). It was a really compelling story about a man who overcomes his prejudices and shortcomings to grow into the role that has (quite literally) been cast for him. It also makes me very, very glad that I’m not an actor. Highly recommended.
The End of Eternity is one of the best time travel novels I’ve ever read. It’s about this bureaucratic organization called Eternity, which exists to shepherd humanity safely through 75,000 centuries of history. Basically, the technicians of Eternity calculate all the best ways to tweak the timeline with “reality changes” in order to avoid all of the worst catastrophes, like pandemics, global wars, etc. But after the 75,000th century, there’s a long period of “hidden centuries” that are somehow inaccessible to them, followed by a world where humanity is extinct. The main character is a technician who falls into forbidden love with a woman in Time, whose existence is going to be wiped out by a reality change. He conspires to save her by bringing her into Eternity, and sets off a series of events that threaten to wipe out Eternity itself.
I really enjoyed this book. Toward the end, I wondered if this book would have a happy ending, since I couldn’t think of any way to pull that off without making it kind of sappy and cliche. Then the twist happened, and everything changed… but we still got the happy ending, which fit in perfectly with the world-changing twist. Just a really brilliant book by an all-time science fiction master. Classics like this are the reason why Isaac Asimov hasn’t been canceled yet, and hopefully never will be.
As I said above, I genuinely enjoyed all of these books. But as good as they all were, none of them blew me away nearly as much as Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.
The Long Tomorrow is a post-apocalyptic story about a future America, after the atomic wars, where cities are a thing of the past, the Constitution has been amended to restrict the size of towns (in order to prevent them from becoming potential targets for a nuclear weapon), and most of the population has reverted back to 19th century tech and an Amish or Amish-adjacent lifestyle. But there are legends about a secret city called Bartorstown, where the old technology hasn’t been lost, and people still live lives full of wonder and wealth, just like the old days.
The story follows two boys who run away from home in order to find Bartorstown, tracing their adventures and coming of age, until they finally learn the terrible truth about what Bartorstown actually is, and grapple with what that means for all of them. It’s a pretty basic plot, but what really blew me away was the depth of character and how brilliantly Brackett’s writing and storytelling drew me into their lives, making them come alive. Consequently, the story really came alive, raising all sorts of questions that left me thinking and wondering long after I’d put it down. There are some really heavy themes in this book, but like the best sci-fi, it doesn’t feel like “message” fiction at all.
It’s a little bit sad, though, because Brackett wrote this book just as the hydrogen bomb transformed foreign policy with the threat of mutually assured destruction, thus making her post-apocalyptic future into something totally implausible. The Long Tomorrow only works in a world where total nuclear war doesn’t result in the utter annihilation of humanity. From what I can tell, that’s the main reason this book never really took off. Also, I’m guessing that Brackett didn’t have as many fans as Heinlein or Asimov, and since the Hugos have always essentially been a popularity contest (these days, among an increasingly narrow and snobbish clique), that’s probably the main reason why The Long Tomorrow didn’t win the Hugo this year, even though I personally think it’s the most deserving book on the ballot.
But as I said above, 1955 (the publication date) was a really good year for science fiction, and all of these books are really good—some of the best, in fact. I highly recommend them all!
It seems like most of the internet is talking about the hilariously bad breakdancing performance given by Australia at the Paris Olympics. Apparently, the “athlete” in question is actually a university professor named Rachael Gunn who specializes in breakdancing studies, or some such nonsense, and the main reasons she got the nod to compete are 1) the Australian breakdancing scene is woefully small, 2) she’s (allegedly) an LGBTQ+ woman, with all the right political opinions, and 3) her husband was on the committe that made the decision to qualify her. Taking advantage of those three factors, she’s apparently made a name for herself in Australia, even winning some local competitions—because who would dare criticize such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? So of course, she went on to compete on the international scene… and made such a mockery of herself and her sport that the judges awarded her straight zeroes, and the Olympics committee pulled breakdancing from the 2028 Los Angelos Olympics. Wah wah.
While this story is rightly hilarious, and proves the eternal truth that wokeness ruins everything, I can’t help but notice the parallels between the state of Australian breakdancing, that someone so inept and untalented could leverage a “studies” degree to dominate it, and the current state of science fiction. Specifically, this is the comment that made me think about this, which is worth reading in full:
So I looked into this. I thought maybe I should feel sorry for the woman, athletes can choke, and maybe it was cruel for people to be making fun of her. Alternatively, I thought it may be possible she was led up the garden path, told she was good break dancer when she wasn’t, and… https://t.co/YQHA0K05wr
Rachael represents so much of what is totally lecherous about cultural studies academics. Pick a subject area that will be under-studied in your context, so you can rise through the ranks quickly (how many break dancing academics will there be in Australia?), and wreak absolute havoc in lives of the people you want to study. There is no limit to the sheer disrespect they will dole out, purely for self-advancement.
Now, I don’t think science fiction was ruined in quite the same way, ie by being dominated and colonized by academia through “studies” degrees. Science fiction was probably too large to be overtaken that way. However, the pattern is still similar, and from what I can tell, it goes something like this:
Step 1: Take over the institutions in the field that are primarily responsible for determining and evaluating excellence.
In Australia, the breakdancing field was small enough that academia was able to dominate and (for lack of a better word) colonize it, becoming the arbiters of excellence within that art. It certainly helped that the professor who had carved out this academic niche for herself was married to one of the judges in the committee that was tasked with determining excellence. This created an incestuous (and ultimately nepotistic) relationship between academia and the judging panels.
In science fiction, something similar happened with SFWA and the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’ve written before about how SFWA ruined science fiction, so I won’t repeat all that here. But the basic gist of it is this: as science fiction became more established, the organizations and publications that talked about science fiction became more authoritative on the subject of the genre than the actual writers themselves. Because of this, achieving recognition for excellence became less about creating works of actual merit, and more about gaining the approval of the people who had built their careers talking about science fiction, rather than actually creating it. And the best way to gain their approval was to join those institutions yourself, rising up in the pecking order until everyone else was beneath you.
This basically describes the career trajectories of John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, two insanely woke authors who leveraged their tenure as SFWA president for award nominations. Both of them seem to have spent at least as much time and effort talking about science fiction as they have in actually creating it: Scalzi through his blog, which he leveraged to get his first book deal, and MRK through both her blog and the Writing Excuses podcast.
Step 2: Purge those institutions until they are ideologically pure.
This step is critical. So long as the instutitions are focused on merit, the only way to climb the ranks is by creating something of merit. But once the institution has become ideologically possessed, with all of those who reject the dominant ideology being purged from positions of power, then merit no longer matters, and the way to the top becomes clear. Those who are the most ideologically pure, as demonstrated by their virtue signalling, will rise to the top. This has the added benefit of quelling all merit-based criticism, since those beneath you fear having their own ideological purity called into question.
From what I can tell, this is how Rachael Gunn rose to prominence in the Australian breakdancing scene. After all, once academia had colonized the field, who would dare question the merits of such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? In a similar manner, Scalzi and MRK rose to the top of SFWA by virtue signaling their own ideological purity and intersectional victimhood status, squelching any criticism by labeling their critics racist, sexist, bigots, homophobic, etc.
Step 3: Redefine excellence in your own image.
In the Australian breakdancing scene, this was accomplished through the combination of Rachael Gunn’s academic work and her husband’s position in the committee that qualified the Olympic competitors. And while it probably isn’t quite so blatantly nepotistic in the science fiction world, the pattern still holds true when you look at what the Hugos and Nebulas have become. This was what the Sad Puppies controversy was actually about, and because the Puppies lost, the Hugo and Nebula awards have been insufferably woke ever since:
Step 4: Use the captured institutions to purge the field of potential rivals.
The final step in this projection is to squash all of those people who represent a threat to your domination, because they have merit and you do not. Ignoring her perhaps overly generous assessment of Australian breakdancing, this is what Hannah Berrelli is talking about when she mentions all the “hundreds of Australian athletes who will have dedicated their entire lives to athletic excellence” whose blood, sweat, and tears were overshadowed and rendered irrelevant by Rachael Gunn’s Olympic stunt.
In science fiction, we see this in the fact that David Weber has never been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, or that Jim Butcher’s sole Hugo nomination lost to No Award. Both of these men are far better writers than the majority of award-winning authors, especially in our current era. You could make a solid argument that Dan Simmons or Orson Scott Card were superior, but Scalzi? Jemisin? Kingfisher?
And what about all of the new and relatively unknown authors? At least Weber and Butcher already have large followings, which they have rightfully earned through their merit. But when merit is no longer the determining factor in recognizing excellence within the field, what chance do talented up-and-coming authors have if they aren’t willing to play the ideological purity games? Answer: not a hell of a lot.
So while you laugh at how ridiculous Australia’s breakdancing performance was at the Olympics, understand that the same dynamic has been playing out in modern science fiction for years. And honestly, the results are no less ridiculous.
Cover art was so terrible in the 70s. Those are all the original edition covers for each book. They’ve all been reworked in later years, and most of them got a significant upgrade.
The Lathe of Heaven isn’t Ursula K. Le Guin’s greatest work, but I did find it to be decently good. The ending was a little too pat, but the set up was good, and the story itself was quite intriguing. In some ways, I feel that it would have worked better as a movie, maybe an animated feature by Studio Ghibli. It definitely had that kind of a dreamlike feel.
The rest of these books are not that great, to be honest. To Your Scattered Bodies Go and A Time of Changes were too pervy for me, with Farmer indulging in some really weird and disturbing treatment of children, and Silverberg indulging in pages and pages of navel gazing, all written very beautifully and signifying almost nothing, which is typical of Silverberg.
Jack of Shadows was confusing: I got about two thirds of the way in before I realized that I had no idea what was happening, and I didn’t really like any of the characters. I wonder if the real reason this book got nominated was because so many people enjoyed Nine Princes in Amber, the first Chronicles of Amber book, which came out in 1970 and was actually quite excellent. But he was writing and publishing the Chronicles of Amber all through this time period, and none of them ever got nominated for a Hugo, which seems really strange to me. With Zelazny, the only books I’ve found that I enjoyed are his Chronicles of Amber, and everything else is a huge miss for me. It’s weird.
As for Dragonquest, I know that the Dragonriders of Pern books have lots of fans, and I don’t find anything too objectionable with them (aside from the naively libertine Boomer attitudes toward sex, which is par for the course for this era and for Anne McCaffrey in general), but I just couldn’t get into this book. I read the first Dragonriders of Pern book in college, when I wasn’t nearly so cynical, and I thought it was okay, but it wasn’t compelling enough to go out and read the rest of the series immediately, and over the years I literally forgot everything that happened in that first book. So I read a synopsis before picking up book 2, and I just have to say that the dragons are way, way, way too OP. Seriously, they can teleport instantly through space AND time? That’s just too much. So I went into Dragonflight without feeling any real sense of peril, and right away, the novel turned into a giant soap opera about the various dragons and dragonriders: who had feelings for who, who was sleeping with who, etc etc. So after a couple of chapters, I just got bored and checked out.
So the only one of these books that I can positively vote for is The Lathe of Heaven, even though I think it pales next to Le Guin’s other work. But I wouldn’t actually put any of these books beneath No Award, since most of it is probably just a matter of my own personal taste. The perviness of To Your Scattered Bodies Go almost makes me want to put it below No Award: there’s a lot of graphic nudity, a lot of innuendo, and some innuendo / torture porn directed toward children, which was why I DNFed it. But it doesn’t cross over into outright pornography, and it’s not ideologically possessed in the way that most of the stuff coming out today tends to be. Also, the premise is pretty interesting: it’s in the execution where it all falls apart.
The 70s was a really weird time for science fiction. I wonder how many of the Worldcon attendees in 1972 were high on drugs—or whether some of these artists weren’t off their gourds when they wrote some of this stuff. I’ve heard stories about some of the orgies that Asimov used to hold in his con suite. It was a very different time.
I enjoyed The Aeronaut’s Windlass. It was a fun steampunk adventure, sort of like a mashup between Horatio Hornblower and the Bioshock games. It’s also very unlike most books to be nominated for the Hugo, probably because it was nominated by the Sad Puppies. After this year, the people who run the Hugo Awards rewrote the rules to allow them to disallow “slate voting,” which was how they disqualified the majority of ballots in the 2023 Hugo Awards, including almost all of the ballots cast by Chinese fans. But guys, it’s the Puppies who were totally the racists.
All of the other books were pretty terrible, in my opinion. I’ve already written about The Fifth Season at length, so I won’t go into that rant here. I’ve also written at length about Ann Leckie’s obsession with fake transgender pronouns, and since Ancillary Mercy is basically just another book about pronouns, I won’t waste any more time on that subject.
I wanted to like Uprooted, since I loved Spinning Silver so much, but both times I tried to read it, I ended up DNFing it midway through. Partly that’s because the fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast was not as interesting to me, but there was also a scene where the main character and her mentor randomly started making out after casting a spell together, with a graphic description of digital penetration. The whole thing came so totally out of the blue that it threw me out of the book, and I had no desire to finish it after that.
I’m also really conflicted about Seveneves. I’m not a huge fan of Neal Stephenson generally, especially after the neon orgy scene at the end of Diamond Age, and Seveneves is loooong… like, over 800 pages long. Which would be fie, if Stephenson had the economy of words of a true master like Louis L’Amour, but Stephenson really doesn’t. Around 100 pages or so, I skipped to the last chapter and read a spoiler-filled synopsis just to see if it was worth pressing on, and I decided that it really wasn’t, because 1) it’s apparently never explained why or how the moon exploded, and 2) the Hillary Clinton analog becomes absolutely insufferable, and I really didn’t want to slog through four hundred pages of that. Seveneves has an interesting premise, but if you cut out half the words it would be a better book.
