Tag: Hugo awards

An interesting personal discovery

I just made a very interesting personal discovery, gleaned from the data on my reading of the Hugo and Nebula winning books. Of the 110 novels that have won either award, I have now read all but 16 of them, which is enough data to get some reprentative results.

One of the best predictors that I will DNF a book is whether the author is a childless woman. Of the 18 books written by childless women, I have DNFed all but three of them (Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, which I read years ago and would probably DNF today, and Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is a genuinely entertaining read, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke, which I haven’t read yet). For childless men, it’s a little bit more of a crapshoot: of the 31 books written by childless men, I’ve DNFed 16 of them and read 11, but only 6 of those are books I thought were worth owning.

Conversely, one of the best predictors that I will enjoy a book is whether the author is a mother. Of the 20 books written by mothers, I have DNFed only 6 of them and read 8, all of which I think are worth owning. Of the six remaining books that I haven’t read yet, I will almost certainly finish four of them, and may finish all six. The only book by an author I haven’t already read and enjoyed is The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, which I am currently reading and will probably finish next week.

For fathers, it’s more of a mixed bag. Of the 40 books written by fathers, I have DNFed 19 of them and read 16 (12 of which I think are worth owning). Of the five that I haven’t read yet, I’ll probably DNF at least one or two, so it’s safe to assume that there’s only a 50/50 chance I’ll enjoy a book if it’s written by a father, a little better than if it’s written by a childless man but not by much.

So there’s something about female authors that makes me much more likely to enjoy their books if they’ve decided to have children, and much less likely to enjoy them if they haven’t.

But I have to couch this discovery by saying “one of the best,” because so far, the best predictor that I will DNF a book is whether it won a Nebula without also winning a Hugo. Of the 31 books that have only won the Nebula, I have DNFed a whopping 23 and finished only 3 of them, none of which I thought was worth owning. Of the remaining five, however, I will probably finish at least another three of them, and all are books that I will probably decide are worth owning (Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold, The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin—all of them written by mothers). If that is the case, then the child-rearing status of the author (provided that she’s a woman) will indeed be the best predictor as to whether I’ll enjoy the book.

As for the decade in which the book came out, I’m slightly more likely to enjoy it if it was written between the mid-40s (counting retro-Hugos) and the mid-60s. From the mid-60s through the 70s, I thought almost all of the award-winning books were terrible (the only exceptions were Dune by Frank Herbert, which is more a creation of the early 60s, and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin).

I haven’t yet read all of the books that came out in the 80s and 90s, but it generally looks like a 50/50 split, slightly favoring books from the mid-80s and disfavoring books from the late 90s. For the 00s, there isn’t enough data right now to say one way or the other. It’s the one decade left where most of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books are still on my TBR.

But starting in 2010, the books all seem to become terrible again. The only exceptions are Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis (whose heyday for the awards was really more in the 80s and 90s), The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (a Chinese author who isn’t caught up in all of the culture war baggage here in the West), and The Network Effect by Martha Wells, which once again seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

Reading Resolution Update: April

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

In 2007, when I was a sophomore in college, I went up to Salt Lake City with some friends and was browsing the awesome (and fairly run down, even at the time) used bookstore near the Gallivan Plaza TRAX stop, which has since changed names and moved to another location. It was a really awesome used bookstore, and I determined to buy a SF novel while I was there, since I was really getting back into SF after my mission. I saw a massive 600+ page trade paperback edition of Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, and since I was reading Downbelow Station at the time, I decided to get that one.

For the next fifteen years, I lugged that book everywhere, through more than a dozen moves (though for the biggest move, where I made the pioneer trek in the wrong direction and repented 8 months later, I boxed it up with my other books and left it in a friend’s basement). In all that time, I never actually read it—or even opened it up, really—but it was always there, somewhere in the middle of my dismally long TBR list.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it: I just didn’t have (or make) the time. Downbelow Station had been an okay read, if not spectacular, but I had really enjoyed some of C.J. Cherryh’s shorter books, like Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night. Also, space opera books about sprawling galactic empires were right up my wheelhouse, so it didn’t seem odd for me to own such a book that I hadn’t yet read. In fact, most of the books that I owned throughout this time were books that I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet. If I have a superpower, it’s an uncanny ability to acquire books no matter where I am. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at reading them.

Fast forward to 2022. I’ve gotten married, had a daughter, launched my own writing career, and become a homeowner—and I’m still lugging this massive 600+ page trade paperback book that I’ve never read. But I’ve just set a resolution to read (or DNF) every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and Cyteen is on the list. So around the middle of March, I finally open it up and start reading it.

After about a month, I decided to DNF it.

It’s not that it was terrible. Perhaps you enjoyed it, and that’s fine. I just found it to be too drawn out and confusing. I think C.J. Cherryh does better when she’s focusing on just a few characters, rather than trying to give the grand sweep of galactic civilization or whatever. I didn’t finish Foreigner for similar reasons. Maybe someday I’ll return to that one and Cyteen, but for now, I’m counting it as a DNF.

But the thing is, I was hauling around this massive book for most of my adult life. When I bought it in 2007, I figured that since it had won a Hugo, it had to be good. Perhaps, if I’d read it back then, I would have been more patient with it and slogged through to the end. Perhaps I would have decided it was just as good as Downbelow Station. Or perhaps, if I read Downbelow Station today, I would end up DNFing it as well.

The point is, I wish I’d been a lot more discerning about my reading when I was younger, and not just acquired books that I hoped to read “someday”… because books (at least the paper ones) are heavy and take up a lot of space. And a lot of them really aren’t worth reading. Of course, you’ve got to read a few stinkers to figure out what you really like, so it isn’t always a waste… but libraries exist for a reason.

So what this experience really tells me is that Mrs. Vasicek and I are doing the right thing by taking our family to our local library once a week. Also, it tells me that the second part of my resolution—to actually acquire all of the books that I think were worth reading—is just as important as actually reading them. Because, if the ultimate goal is to “seek… out of the best books words of wisdom,” then it’s not enough to just make a list: you actually have to read the damned things, and keep your own personal library in order to revisit those words and share them with others. Because ultimately, you have to discover which books are the “best books” on your own, and your best books list isn’t going to be the same as anyone else’s best books list. Which means that you can’t rely on anyone else’s list. You can use it as a starting point to make your own list, but that’s all you should use it for.

So now I want to go through all of the books I’ve acquired over the years and figure out which ones I ought to get rid of, because Cyteen certainly wasn’t the only one. In fact, most of the books in our family library are books that I haven’t (yet) read. By my count, there are just under 150 of them, totalling about 55k words. Even at a rate of 100 words or two hours of reading each day, that’s still going to take almost two years… and that’s not counting all the library books that we’re sure to check out in the meantime.

Oh well. I suppose this is more of a process than anything else. Journey before destination, and all that. And I’m sure I’ll have fun in the process, since despite the fact that I DNF far more books than I actually read, I do genuinely enjoy reading.

In any case, here are all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books that I read (or DNFed) in the month of April:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

  • Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo)
  • Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (audio)

Books that I read and do not plan to acquire:

  • Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (print)

Books that I did not finish:

  • A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg (1972 Nebula)
  • The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1973 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1980 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe (1982 Nebula)
  • Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh (1989 Hugo)
  • Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (1991 Nebula)
  • The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996 Hugo)
  • The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre (1998 Nebula)
  • Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (2000 Nebula)
  • 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013 Nebula)
  • Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (1943 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2018)
  • The Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett (1945 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2020)

Total books remaining: 26 out of 110 (currently reading 12 and listening to 3).

Reading Resolution Update: March

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

So March is usually the time where people get tired of their new year’s resolutions and either give them up entirely or put them on the back burner for a while. But at this point, I’m a little more than halfway through achieving this one, so I will definitely keep pressing on since I don’t think it will take the whole year to accomplish it. In fact, I may actually expand it to include all of the short stories, novellas, and novelettes. I’ve already filled out the spreadsheet (with a huge thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which also lists all of the collections and anthologies where each story can be found).

With that said, my enthusiasm for reading all of these books is starting to flag, and I’m not pushing on as vigorously as I did back in January. There have been a lot of DNFs… a lot of DNFs. But now, I’m starting to get to the books that aren’t obvious DNFs, which is frustrating, because when you get more than halfway through a 600 page book before you realize it isn’t worth finishing, that really does take the fun out of reading, at least in the short term.

But it has been very eye-opening to see what kinds of books tend to win Hugos and Nebulas. I’ve noticed some interesting patterns that have given me real insight into the people who vote in these awards, which consists of the old guard in fandom for the Hugos, and members of SFWA (mostly professional authors) for the Nebulas.

One book in particular I found really eye-opening in this regard, and that was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Mark Clifton was a science fiction short story writer who was fairly prolific, but died tragically about ten years after They’d Rather Be Right came out in 1955. Frank Riley was a newspaper man who dabbled a little bit in mystery short stories but only ever co-wrote this one novel.

They’d Rather Be Right is a notoriously difficult book to get your hands on. An abridged version with the title The Forever Machine is on sale on Amazon somewhere north of $100, and neither version was available at either my local library or the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, and that’s unusual because the HBLL’s science fiction and fantasy collection is one of the best in the country. I eventually bought a used version of They’d Rather Be Right on Amazon from a third-party seller for $10: it was an old library copy from a small town in Arizona, and I think the seller was the actual library.

In reading about this book, I discovered that it’s been widely panned as the “worst book to win a Hugo.” However, after reading it, I can definitely say it is not the worst book. It’s not the best book either, but it is far from the worst, and I enjoyed it enough to put it on the “books worth keeping” list. So why is it considered the worst Hugo-winning book, and why has it been forgotten so thoroughly?

My working theory is that They’d Rather Be Right isn’t actually bad, it’s just heretical. Science fiction has always skewed toward the political left, and this book thoroughly ridicules some deeply held left-wing beliefs of its day. For example, it goes out of its way to ridicule scientists as a class, and makes it seem ludicrous that they have any business deciding on how the rest of society should be governed. It also pokes fun at some of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, which is notable because so many of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels of the 60s and 70s are so thoroughly Freudian.

So what happened, I believe, is that after the Hugos became a regular feature of Worldcon (They’d Rather Be Right was only the 2nd novel to ever win a Hugo), the influencers and kingmakers within fandom decided that this one won on a fluke, and did everything they could to suppress it. And perhaps it really was a fluke, since the Hugo Awards weren’t yet established, and Worldcon itself was only a little more than a decade old.

Because here’s the thing: the Hugos and the Nebulas have always been radically left-wing. Science fiction in general has always leaned hard to the left, and those of us who consider ourselves right-wingers have always been a despised minority to most of the rest of fandom. That didn’t start in the 50s either: if anything, it started with the Futurians, as Donald Wollheim himself (founder of DAW Books) said that science fiction “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.” The Futurians were the ones who founded both Worldcon and SFWA, as well as several other establishment institutions in the SF&F field.

But I think it started before the Futurians, because it makes a lot of sense that science fiction would attract left-wingers more than it would right-wingers. Left-wingers are the kind of people who think that traditions should be thrown out and new ideas should be implemented, whereas right-wingers are the kind of people who think that new ideas should be treated cautiously, and traditions should be upheld.

There’s a cycle that happens about every 50 to 100 years, and it goes like this: someone comes up with a Beautiful Idea that almost everyone on the left becomes enamored of. They pore over this idea, ponder it, debate it amongst themselves, and spill copious amounts of ink over it, mostly in the form of academic discourses and thesis papers.

Gradually, this idea matures into a General Theory, and the left constructs a whole worldview around it. But at this point, it starts to come into conflict with reality—not in a catastrophic way at first, but definitely in a way that causes some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. But because the Beautiful Idea was so beautiful, none of the theory’s proponents really want to give it up, so they start to build a bulwark of apologia to explain the theory’s inconsistencies and contradictions.

After a while, though, that isn’t enough, and reality begins to intrude in ways that simply cannot be ignored. At this point, the General Theory morphs into an Ugly Ideology, possessing all of its followers and driving them into incredible pathologies. Groupthink and doublespeak become de rigueur, and hypocrisy infects everyone. Values like diversity, curiosity, open inquiry, freedom of speech, and intellectual honesty are all thrown out, as nothing is more important than promoting the ideology. Right and wrong cease to matter as well: the only thing that matters is power.

Eventually, reality intrudes in such a way that the entire edifice comes crumbling down, completely discrediting the Beautiful Idea and everyone who ever believed in it. But if the Ugly Ideology persists for too long, it culminates in a reign of terror, with guillotines, gas chambers, firing squads, holocausts, and genocides.

Fortunately, there are people who drop out at every stage of this cycle: “That’s a Beautiful Idea, but it’s still flawed.” “I like the General Theory, but I don’t think it explains everything.” “I am a true believer in this Ugly Ideology, but I’m not going to pull the trigger on those people.” And if enough people drop out, the pendulum swings back, the left goes into retreat, and culture and politics swing back to the right again… until someone discovers (or rediscovers) a Beautiful Idea.

In the 60s and 70s, the left was in the early stages of the Ugly Ideology phase of this cycle. Not surprisingly, the science fiction of that time was pretty terrible. Then the Reagan era happened, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and left was thrown on the back foot for a generation. During this time (the 80s and 90s), the award-winning science fiction was actually pretty good.

But that was also the time when the ideas that underpin critical race theory began to take root—the “Beatiful Ideas” that gave us, among other things, Defund the Police, the George Floyd riots, the epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies, and the ongoing collapse of leftist-run cities like Chicago and San Francisco. In science fiction, this culminated in the sad and rabid puppies, at which point the Hugos and Nebulas became total garbage again, because the left-leaning fandom had become so ideologically possessed.

So anyways, that’s my take on it. I really did enjoy They’d Rather Be Right, and not just for the insights into fandom. In any case, here are all of the other Hugo and Nebula winning books I read or DNFed in March:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

  • They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955 Hugo)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • The City & The City by China Mieville (2010 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish:

  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962 Hugo)
  • To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer (1972 Hugo)
  • Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977 Hugo)
  • The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981 Hugo)
  • The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008 Hugo and Nebula)

Reading Resolution Update: February

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I didn’t read nearly as many books in February as I did in January. Part of that might have been enthusiasm for the resolution waning a bit, but a good chunk of it was due to the fact that my grandmother passed away, and we took off a week for the funeral. Also, potty training completely upended our daily routine. I also went ahead and finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, after reading Annihilation, so that took off a lot of reading time that otherwise would have gone toward this goal.

But I’m not too worried about it, since I’m already well past the halfway point and should be able to finish before the end of the year. In fact, I went ahead and made a similar spreadsheet of all the short stories, novelettes, and novellas that won a Hugo/Nebula, and may move on to those after I finish the novels. It’s going to be a lot more challenging to hunt down all of those titles, though, so I might just move on to the Dragon Awards instead.

In any case, here are all the Hugo/Nebula award-winning novels that I read or DNFed in February:

Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:

  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans. (2015 Hugo)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1944 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2019)

Books that I did not finish:

  • This Immortal by Roger Zelazny (1966 Hugo)
  • Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1967 Nebula)
  • The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1990 Nebula)
  • Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick (1992 Nebula)
  • Slan by A.E. Van Vogt (1941 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2016)

Reading Resolution Update: January

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I had expected to DNF a lot of these books, but I was a little dismayed at how terrible they are. Or rather, how some of them can be so well-written and yet so idelogically possessed.

For a while, I worried that I was pre-judging some of these books too harshly, based on my opinions of the author. After all, shouldn’t art be treated separately from the artist? But then I decided that it would be better to lean into that bias, and trust my intuition. After all, it’s impossible to approach reading without a personal bias—and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be advisable.

One of the key things I’m hoping to take away from reading these books is a better understanding of my own personal tastes. Toward that end, it’s much better to DNF early and often, since that tells me something valuable about my own tastes. I’ll get much more out of this exercise if I pay attention to that than whether or not I’m being “fair” to a particular book or author.

As for how my bias against an author might prejudice me against a book, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem so long as I’m aware of those biases. Yes, it makes it more likely that I’ll read a book with a critical eye, and not in the way that I typically read for enjoyment, but that goes both ways, since if I do enjoy a book, that’s going to improve my opinion of the author (or at least make me reconsider my opinion). So long as I’m aware of my biases and make sure that they aren’t set in stone, I think it should be fine

Besides, it’s not like I have anything to prove. Sure, China Mike Glyer might pull out an excerpt from this post to use as content (hi China Mike!), but I couldn’t care less what that particular corner of fandom thinks about my public ruminations. I will know if I’m being too “unfair” to a book or an author, and the only criterion that really matters is whether I have a clear reason for DNFing the book, separate from my biases about the author.

And honestly, what I’ve found so far is that my biases are pretty spot on. Authors who behave insufferably in public or on the internet tend to write some pretty insufferable books, especially if they’re woke.

Fortunately, I have found a few new-to-me books and authors who are really fantastic. And my decision to DNF early and often is helping to keep it from becoming too much of a slog, which is good. It also means that I may complete this resolution a lot sooner than I’d expected, at which point I’ll probably move on to the Dragons or the Prometheus awards.

In any case, here are all the Hugo and Nebula awared-winning novels that I read or DNFed in January 2022:

Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:

  • Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo)
  • Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983 Hugo)
  • The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991 Hugo)
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2015 Nebula)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • None

Books that I did not finish:

  • The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958 Hugo)
  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959 Hugo)
  • The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo)
  • The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany (1968 Nebula)
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969 Hugo)
  • Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1969 Nebula)
  • Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1977 Nebula)
  • Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (20000 Hugo) (My wife recommended this one, and I will probably try it again, since I took a break midway through and forgot who all of the characters were. But for now, I’m counting it as a soft DNF.)
  • Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2006 Nebula)
  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi (2013 Hugo)
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2014 Hugo and Nebula)
  • All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2017 Nebula)
  • The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2019 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2020 Hugo)
  • A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2021 Nebula)

Reading Resolution Update: Before 2022

My 2022 Reading Resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I was going to keep track of my reading resolution this year by mentioning each book and what I liked or didn’t like about it, why I DNFed it if I did, etc… and then I thought about it a little more and realized that that’s a terrible idea. Perhaps if I weren’t an author myself, I could risk bringing down the wrath of the internet by broadcasting everything that I really think about these books, but that’s still a really stupid thing to do—not to mention, a great way to burn a bunch of bridges that, as a writer, I really shouldn’t burn.

Instead, I’m going to post a monthly update where I list all of the books that I read and want to acquire, all the books that I read and probably won’t acquire, and all of the books that I DNFed, without any book-specific commentary. I do think that having some public accountability will help me to keep this resolution, and I do intend to keep it. But because I anticipate DNFing a lot of books that have very, um, merciless fans, this seems like a better way to do it.

So here is how things stood on the morning of January 1st, 2022:

Books that I read and want to / have already acquired:

  • Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (1956 Hugo)
  • Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1960 Hugo)
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (1961 Hugo)
  • The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick (1963 Hugo)
  • Dune by Frank Herbert (1966 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1970 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (1982 Hugo)
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson (1985 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1986 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (1987 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (1992 Hugo)
  • Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold (1995 Hugo)
  • The Mule (included in Foundation and Empire) by Isaac Asimov (1946 Retro Hugo, awarded in 1996)
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2001 Hugo)
  • Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (1951 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2001)
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1954 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2004)
  • Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006 Hugo)
  • The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1939 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2014)
  • Network Effect by Martha Wells (2021 Hugo and Nebula)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1952 Hugo)
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1975 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993 Nebula)
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish:

  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966 Hugo)
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966 Nebula)
  • Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967 Hugo)
  • Ringworld by Larry Niven (1970 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993 Hugo)
  • Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1996 Hugo)
  • Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman (1997 Hugo, 1998 Nebula)
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015 Hugo)
  • The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (2016 Hugo)
  • The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (2017 Hugo and Nebula)

P is for Parenthood

I’m currently in the process of writing the second edition of my newsletter exclusive, Science Fiction from A to Z, adding a bunch of new chapters and rewriting all of the old ones. For a blog post this week, I thought I’d share one of the new chapters. Let me know what you think!

I was going to make this section “P is for Pulp,” rounding out “G is for Golden Age,” “N is for New Wave,” “D is for Dark Age,” and “I is for Indie.” But I have to admit, I’m not as familiar with the pulp era of science fiction as I would like to be. I’ve read all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane stories, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (though not the rest of the Barsoom series, unfortunately. It’s on my TBR!) but that’s pretty much it. From what I understand, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and (of course) Mary Shelley all preceded this era, and I’m a little more familiar with them, but all I know about the pulp era is what I’ve heard from other sources, and I’d rather not regurgitate that without first exploring it myself.

Instead, I want to write about a major influence on every writer that gets almost no play whatsoever in public treatment of their work, but is arguably the single most important aspect of their lives: parenthood.

Becoming a parent really changes you. When I held my first child in my arms for the first time, a distinct thought came into my mind, almost like a voice: “this is her story now.” They say that we’re all the hero of our own story, and to a certain extent that’s true, but anyone who has brought a child into the world (or adopted a child as their own) has a much more complex and nuanced understanding and perspective. Even a terrible, abusive parent has still experienced what it’s like to become a link between the generations. That experience reshapes everything you do and are in ways that are impossible to appreciate until you’ve had it for yourself.

There is a subtle but distinct difference between books written by authors who have experienced parenthood vs. authors who are childless. I wasn’t as conscious of it until I became a parent myself, but even back in my days as a bachelor, I think I could still sense it, even though I didn’t know what it was. I suspect it’s why I’m a huge fan of David Gemmell, but not of George R.R. Martin, even though on the surface, they write the same kind of book. Both of them write dark and gritty fantasy, both of them are known for killing off major characters and doing horrible things to the ones who survive, and both of them are written quite well—in fact, on an artistic level, Martin is probably superior. But where Martin tends to obsess over themes of victimhood and victimization, Gemmell focuses more on heroism and what makes a hero. Gemmell had two children; Martin (so far as I can tell) has none.

In 2022, I made a new year’s resolution to read or DNF every novel that has won either a Hugo or a Nebula award. To prep for this resolution, I made a spreadsheet of all the novels, along with other pertinent information that interested me, such as each author’s gender, their approximate age when they won the award, and whether or not they have any children. I found some very interesting patterns. There were 110 novels in all, and fifty of them were written by authors who were childless (or at least did not have any mention of children in their author bios and/or Wikipedia entries). After 2015 and 2016 respectively, every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist (not counting the Retro-Hugos) has been childless—more specifically, childless women in their 40s and 50s, with one exception who is transgender (Charlie Jane Anders), one exception who is in her thirties (Arkady Martine), and one whose age I cannot determine (Sarah Pinsker). But all three of them are still childless, at least according to the internet.

Now, this is not to say that not having children makes you a terrible writer. In fact, it may actually make you a better writer, since you have more time and energy to devote to learning and improving the craft. But whether for good or ill, I do think that it gives you a handicap in terms of life experience. That handicap is going to influence both the subjects you choose to write about, and how you choose to write about them. I say this not just from my experience as a reader, but as a writer.

My wife and I married a little late, and by the time we had our first child, I’d already been writing professionally for about ten years. Up until that point, the reader I’d had in my mind was basically a younger version of myself. Bringing Stella Home is not a YA book, but a lot of my Amazon reviews assume that it is, probably because I was in college when I wrote it and was writing the sort of book that I wish I’d discovered back when I was in high school and reading things like Ender’s Game and Dune. After I’d experienced the real world and become sufficiently red-pilled, I wrote books like Gunslinger to the Stars for my naive college self. But since becoming a parent, my perspective has begun to change, and I find myself writing less for myself and more for my daughter—or rather, the kind of person I expect my daughter to grow up to be. I’m a lot more conscious of certain kinds of content, and while that doesn’t mean that I shy away from it, I do find myself asking: “What am I really trying to say here? What purpose does this really serve?”

The Genesis Earth Trilogy is a good example of this evolution in my own work. The first book, Genesis Earth, was my first published novel, and really was written for a young adult version of myself, which is why I chose to categorize it as YA science fiction. The whole story revolves around two young scientists on a mission to an alien planet, and how they come to discover just as much about each other as the planet they’ve been sent to explore. It took me ten years to write the next book, Edenfall, not because I didn’t know what would happen next, but because I didn’t feel like I was ready to write it. Then I got married, and that was the experience I needed to break through the block and finish the book—and it went in a much different direction than it would have, if I had written it while I was still single. But the conclusion to the trilogy, The Stars of Redemption, was the book that I wrote after my daughter was born, and that experience had a very profound impact not just on the story itself, but on the characters, the thematic elements, and the way the last book brought everything together from the first book to a meaningful conclusion. I know for a fact that I would not have been capable of writing such a book without the experience of becoming a father.

Reading Resolution

My resolution last year was to read or DNF 100 books. I was doing pretty well on it through the summer, but then I stopped using Goodreads and lost count. (No particular reason, other than that I just fell out of using the site. It’s clunky and difficult to navigate, and after I started using my wife’s spreadsheet system for tracking my reading, I just didn’t feel like posting updates.) Counting children’s books, I definitely hit 100—probably more like 120—but without counting children’s books, it was probably closer to 80.

I do really want to keep up on my long-term goal to become a better reader—or to be more well-read, which amounts to the same thing. This last week, I’ve been giving that goal some serious thought, and I’ve decided on the following new year’s resolution for 2022:

Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all of the good ones.

Ever since 2015, I’ve been pretty jaded about the Hugos (and the Nebulas, to a lesser extent). However, for a long time they were the most important and authoritative awards in science fiction, and by using it as a reading list, I hope to get a better sense of how the genre has evolved over the years, including how in recent years it has fallen to the woke insanity of our time.

There are 110 novels that have won either a Hugo or a Nebula award (or both). Of those, I’ve already read or DNFed 33 as of today, January 1st. I anticipate that I will DNF many of the rest, but I’ll give them all an honest try, and differentiate between hard DNFs (where I know I’ll never get back to reading it) and soft DNFs (where I intend to come back to it later). For purposes of this resolution, though, I’ll count both, since as a reader I believe in DNFing early and often.

As for acquiring them, that shouldn’t be too hard, and will help to build our family library, which is one of my long-term goals. Paperback Swap is great for acquiring used books, especially mass market paperbacks, which is actually my preferred format for most books (great for stuffing in a back pocket or tossing in a backpack, and you don’t mind it as much if someone borrows and never returns it). The added benefit of using Paperback Swap is that it will help me to get rid of some of the books I’ve acquired over the years that I’ll probably never read.

That’s actually a huge problem for me, and I was thinking about making another resolution to have read at least half of the fiction books that we own before the end of the year, but I think this reading resolution will help with that enough that I don’t need to make it more complicated. I’ve found that it’s generally better to set one resolution and focus on that, rather than setting so many that I’ll probably forget all of them by mid-March. Besides, having a bunch of unread books isn’t actually much of a problem, unless you don’t have a place to store them. We do.

While putting together the spreadsheet of all the Hugo and Nebula winning books, I discovered some very interesting things. One of them had to do with the age of each winner at the time they won the award. The average age was about 46, with Samuel Delany coming in as the youngest for Babel-17 in 1967 at age 25, and Ursula K. Le Guin as the oldest for Powers in 2009, at age 80. (Her first novel to win either award was The Left Hand of Darkness, in 1970 when she was 41.) The average age skewed younger in earlier decades; now, it’s closer to 50.

Another very interesting thing to look at is which authors have had children and which ones haven’t. Of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that I’ve DNFed, almost all of them are from authors who are childless. That’s not too surprising when you consider how much it changes your perspective on the world to have or adopt a child. What’s really surprising to me is how many of these authors are childless, and how many of the childless authors are writing books for children. Since 2015 and 2016 respectively, none of the living authors who have won a Hugo or a Nebula award for best novel have had any children of their own—or if they have, it’s not public knowledge and the internet doesn’t know.

So anyways, that’s basically the long and short of it. I’ll keep track of this goal through the detailed spreadsheet I’ve set up for it, and post updates throughout the year. And when I’m done with the Hugos and Nebulas, I’ll probably move on to the Dragon Awards, which may actually be harder since 1) there are more than half a dozen sub-categories, 2) many of the winning novels are the umpteenth book in a long-running series, and 3) I probably won’t DNF as many of them.

What are your reading resolutions?

Navigating Woke SF, Part 2: When Is It Not Worth Submitting?

So a couple of hours after I published my last blog post, China Mike Glyer of File 770 infamy picked it up for his daily pixel scroll. Hi, China Mike! I thought you might be looking for some red meat to feed your readers—aside from the Chinese clickfarms, of course—but I was especially pleased that you included my affiliate links with the excerpt you copy-pasted! Not only does this bring in some extra cash (thanks, China Mike!), but it also gives me some metrics to compare File 770 with, say, some of the other indie authors that I do newsletter swaps with. And wow… let’s just say there’s a reason why they call you China Mike Glyer and leave it at that.

So in today’s episode of red meat for China Mike, I’d like to pick up where I left off with the last post and pose the question: when is a science fiction market too woke to be worth submitting to? But to answer that question, we first need to answer: why bother submitting short stories to traditional markets at all, when self-publishing is an option?

It’s a good question, because there are a lot of good reasons to self-publish short stories. In my experience, they don’t earn particularly well on their own, but they are quite useful as newsletter magnets to gain new email subscribers, free ebook giveaways to let readers sample your work, and giveaways for newsletter subscribers to remind them that you exist and keep your books in the forefront of your mind. I make all my short story singles free on all the ebookstores, and keep them up until I have enough to bundle them into a collection, at which point I take them down and submit to the reprint markets. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for me so far.

Potential Benefits of Submitting to Traditional Markets

So why submit to traditional markets first? Why hold off self-publishing in the hopes that you can sell first publication rights? Here are a few of the reasons:

  • The pay. A professional short story sale will bring in several hundred dollars, and even a semi-professional sale (1¢ per word or more) will typically earn more than pizza money. Over the lifetime of a typical story, that’s a good chunk of the income you can expect to earn from it (unless it’s optioned for a movie, of course).
  • Advertising. A short story sale, especially to a higher-paying market, will get your work—and your name—out to many readers who may have never heard of you before. Making your self-published short stories free accomplishes a similar thing, but with a different audience. Lots of readers who follow the magazines don’t typically look up free short stories on Amazon, though I’m sure that some of them do.
  • Prestige and reputation. Whenever you make a professional or semi-pro sale, that’s another human being proclaiming that your story is good enough to pay you for the privilege of publishing it. The SF&F short story markets are incredibly competitive, especially the higher-paying ones. Not all readers care about this, but being able to say that your stories have been published in Analog, or Asimov’s, or F&SF helps to set you apart from other authors—and many readers do sit up and notice. I certainly do.
  • Networking. Breaking into a short story market can be a great way to make connections with other writers and editors in the field, which can open up some really great opportunities later. I’ve had some really great experiences with this, and I look forward to having more in the future. You never know how things will turn out when you put yourself out there!

I suppose you could also include “awards” and “SFWA membership” on that list, but frankly I don’t care much about either of those. Contrary to the impression that China Mike wants to give you, I’m really not much of a drama llama, and as for awards… we’ll get there.

Potential Drawbacks of Submitting to Traditional Markets

Importantly, there are several potential drawbacks to putting your stories out on submission, especially if you have a viable self-publishing strategy. Some of those reasons include:

  • Lost time. It takes a lot of time to submit your stories to all the traditional markets, even just the professional ones. I used public data on The Submission Grinder to discover that the average wait time for professional SF&F markets is about 30 days, which means that if you want to submit to all of them, you won’t be able to self-publish that story for years.
  • Exclusivity. A lot of markets include an exclusivity period in their contracts, which can run upwards of a year or longer. Again, that’s a lot of lost time where you can’t self-publish that story, even if it does sell.
  • A very competitive market. You can keep a story out on submission for years, only to exhaust all but the token-paying markets. This isn’t necessarily a judgment of the story’s quality, either—I have stories that I’ve sent out 30+ times that have received more than 25% personalized rejections, that have never been picked up by a traditional publisher. There are just too many really good stories out there for the higher-paying markets to publish them all.
  • No simultaneous submissions. This one really bugs me. For some reason, most of the higher-paying SF&F markets don’t allow simultaneous submissions—that is, they demand the exclusive right to consider your story before they pay you a dime. What’s worse, the wait times for many of them can stretch on for months. This is how stories end up on submission for years—and all of that is time where you can’t self-publish.
  • Submissions bandwidth. At any given time, there are only between 10-20 SF&F markets open to submissions that pay more than 5¢ per word (for flash fiction, it can get up to 30). The average wait time for these markets is about 30 days, and most of them do not allow multiple submissions. Therefore, if you write more than one short story per month for an extended period of time, you will very quickly run into a bandwidth problem, where there aren’t any available markets to submit to.

So those are the potential costs and benefits that you have to contend with when writing and publishing short stories.

How Wokeness Changes the Equation

Now, let’s get to the first question: when is a short story market so woke that it isn’t worth submitting anything to them? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few days, and while I don’t think it’s possible to come up with an objective, impartial standard, I do think that it’s important to draw the distinction, because wokeness changes the cost/benefit analysis substantially.

It wasn’t always this way. Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.

That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.

(As a side note, this reminds me of a review that I received for my short story “Payday,” in which the universal basic income leads to runaway hyperinflation, causing society to unravel and forcing the protagonist and his family to flee. Sound familiar? In the author’s note, I mentioned how the story had been rejected by all of the pro-paying science fiction markets, and the reader found that even more disturbing than the story itself.)

“Woke” is a slang term describing a basket of socioeconomic and political ideologies that are incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties. Taken to their logical conclusion, they end in the sort of totalitarian horrors the world saw in the 20th century (and continues to see today in communist China).

I recently listened to an episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast where he interviewed Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist. It was an incredibly powerful interview—well worth listening to in its entirety. One of the things that really struck me was the fact that nightmare dystopian societies can only endure so long as everyone, in their own little way, tacitly supports the lie. In such a society, declaring the truth is itself a supreme act of insurrection, because (in the words of Solzhenitsyn) “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

In the science fiction markets that have been taken over by wokeness, the truth is silenced by vicious accusations of white supremacy, transphobia, post-colonialism, and a hundred other virtue-signalling examples of doublethink. If George Orwell published 1984 today, they would probably pan it as anti-Asian and push to get it cancelled or banned. There can be no compromise with these people, as there is no room for discussion or debate. These woke ideologies possess people, who cling to it like the worst possible kind of religion.

I used to think that a story from someone like me would still be able to slip through, if it was good enough. But then I spent a year subscribed to every science fiction and fantasy market that had a free podcast. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, but the authors hit all the woke intersectional checkboxes—and made sure to tell you that in their author bios. There were some exceptions, of course, but that was the general rule. Whenever there was an exceptionally good story, it was usually from an author who only checked one or two of the boxes—but their story would usually check off a couple more, such as having an LGBTQ+ romantic subplot, or having mostly POC characters. And in the wokest sci-fi podcasts, the editors always made sure to pound you over the head with an explicit political message, sometimes even before the story itself.

Of course, there are still some short fiction markets that care more about the strength of your story than upholding the woke establishment narrative, or making sure all their authors hit all the right intersectional checkboxes. But not generally among the professional-paying markets.

So how woke is too woke?

The events of the past year have convinced me that wokeness is like a cancer: no matter how small or innocuous it is when it starts, if left untreated it will metastatize and grow. The only way to treat it is to remove it from your life. No compromise. No discussion or debate. The woke care nothing for right or wrong, truth or falsehood: only narrative and power. When they look at me, they do not see a person: they see a heirarchy of identities. And if my stories are any good—that is, if they serve the truth—then they see those stories as a threat. After all, “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Therefore, it cannot be a question of degree. If a market has gone even slightly woke, then submitting your stories is an exercise in futility if you don’t hit the right checkboxes or will not bend the knee. And I will never bend the knee.

How To Tell If a Market Is Woke

So now, with a working definition of “woke” (promoting ideologies incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties) and the determination that wokeness is toxic in any degree, how can I tell if a market has gone truly woke?

First of all, I think it’s important to give everyone—and every market—the benefit of the doubt. There are still people on the political left who can break bread with and hold reasonable conversations with those on the other side of the aisle. Likewise, there are still short story markets that tend to lean left, but will still publish good stories by authors across the political spectrum.

Second, it’s also important to point out that just because an editor hits one or two—or most—of the woke intersectional checkboxes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the market itself is woke. This isn’t a matter of balancing transgender people of color with straight white males—that’s merely wokeism in reverse! People are people are people, no matter how they identify. Anyone can become ideologically possessed, just as anyone can choose not to be.

So with that in mind, what are the red flags?

1) Has the market won any awards that have gone completely woke?

Specifically, I’m thinking here of the Hugo Awards. They were trending to the left for a very long time, but 2015 was the year that they specifically went woke by voting “no award” over several deserving authors and editors. The transformation was completed in 2017, when the new rules shut out the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and both of those movements died out.

Therefore, if a short story market has won a Hugo since 2015 or been nominated for a Hugo since 2017, I’m not going to bother submitting to them. And if a market has had stories that have won or been nominated for a Hugo in those years, I’m going to ignore the market as well, unless it appears to be a fluke or a one-off.

2) Does the market have an explicit diversity statement in their submission guidelines?

Diversity statements are not actually about reassuring minority authors that they are welcome to submit their stories. Instead, diversity statements are all about signalling. You can see this with the term “latinx.” The vast, vast majority of actual latinas and latinos have either never heard of the term or absolutely hate it, but because it’s a gender non-binary term, the woke absolutely love it—and use it primarily as a signal to other woke people just like them.

Therefore, if a market has an explicit diversity statement that contains woke signaling language, it’s going on the blacklist. Even if the market only put out a diversity statement to keep the woke mob from descending upon them, that’s still a sure sign that they’ve bent the knee.

Occasionally, a market won’t have a separate diversity statement, but will include language like “we welcome submissions from authors of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” In that case, it’s probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they use the word “latinx,” even once (or “folx,” or “black bodies,” or “indigenous,” or…), then that’s a clear signal that they’re woke.

3) Does the market publish content that is explicitly woke?

Editors always say that the best way to know what they’re looking for is to read a couple of issues or listen to a couple of episodes or stories. That seems like a reasonable standard, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t hold them to it.

Do the editors ever go off on explicitly woke political rants, or try to explain the message of the story in woke ideological terms? Do the author bios read like a checklist of woke intersectional identities? Are the stories themselves often thinly veiled rants about woke issues? Again, it’s important to apply the benefit of the doubt here, but you can tell a lot about a market by what they choose to publish. I won’t be wasting my time with the markets that regularly publish any of those things.

Conclusion

I believe that the culture is changing, and an anti-woke backlash is forming that will shock the people who are too deeply esconsed in their echo chambers (here’s to you, File 770) to see it coming. If I had to guess, I’d say that we hit peak woke in our culture about a year ago, and now that the pendulum is swinging the other way, nothing will stop it until it goes as far to the anti-woke side as it did to the woke side.

I’m not yet sure if this is good or bad. If we reject the lies that wokeism is built upon and embrace the individual rights and liberties that informed our founding documents, it could be very good indeed. But a lot of damage has already been done, and if we merely exchange leftist-flavored collectivism for rightist-flavored collectivism, it could be very, very bad.

That’s why writers and creators like me have a very important role to play—that is, those of us who aren’t afraid to speak one word of truth. That alone is reason enough not to waste one moment of time on these woke science fiction markets whose great day of power is swiftly coming to an end.

My short story strategy has changed a lot in the last year, much like our country. I still need to work through all of the implications of this change in order to formulate a new publishing strategy. But I’ll leave that for another post. This is sufficient for now.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 1: Short Story Markets and Author Blacklists

Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!

But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.

Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.

Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again.

Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I exported my data from The Submission Grinder and made a quick table of my submissions returned for each month going back to July 2019. Before “The Promise of King Washington” was accepted in February 2020, I was getting roughly one personalized rejection for every 5-8 form rejections. Then, for most of 2020, I went through a dry spell where I didn’t have many stories out on submission. Towards the end of the year, I got back in the saddle, and my personalized-to-form rejections ratio returned to what it had been earlier… but then Again, Hazardous Imaginings was published in December, and for the next three months, I received no personalized rejections at all. Then, around March-April, I stopped mentioning my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings… and I started getting personalized rejections again.

So what happened? Is there some sort of unofficial blacklist for stories published in Again, Hazardous Imaginings? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if any of the other authors in the anthology have had a similar experience, nor do I know for certain that mentioning the anthology in my publication credits caused this particular issue. It could be that I was submitting to higher paying markets at the beginning of 2021, and those markets just happen to be more stingy about personalized rejections. It could be that the pandemic has just sapped everyone’s energy.

But now that I’ve made this table, the one thing I cannot say is that the whole thing is just a figment of my imagination. There was a three-month period where I saw significantly fewer personalized rejections than usual, and it just so happened to coincide with the publication of the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings and my mentioning it as a publication credit in all of my cover letters.

It’s no big secret that most of the traditional short story markets in science fiction and fantasy trend somewhere between liberal and super woke. All you have to do to get a sense for this is subscribe to their podcasts or read their stories online. For most of 2020, I was subscribed to every science fiction podcast, and I frequently ended up skipping episodes because either the story was too woke, the author bio was little more than a checklist of intersectional victimhood groups, or the editor went off on some sort of political rant (typically of the “orange man bad” variety) that had little or nothing to do with the story. You can also get a good sense of the woke-ness by looking up these magazines’ submission guidelines and reading their diversity statements.

So for the last couple of months, I haven’t been listing Again, Hazardous Imaginings as a publication credit in any of my cover letters, and the response to my stories appears to have returned to the old normal… but it doesn’t sit right with me. Why should I have to hide that I was published in that anthology? Why shouldn’t I be proud of it? It did make Tangent Online’s recommended reading list with three stars, after all. Why should I waste my time submitting my stories to science fiction and fantasy markets that would see that publication credit as a black mark?

In other words, why not blacklist the blacklisters?

When an author decides not to submit their stories to a particular market, it’s often called a “self-rejection,” since the author has already decided that the story won’t be published before the editor gets a chance to consider it. But this is a little different. It’s not my own story that I’m rejecting, but the market as a whole. It’s making the conscious decision that if a magazine is too woke, I’m not going to have anything to do with it.

Here’s another way to think about it: why should I hold out for a year or longer, hoping to earn a couple of hundred bucks for it, when most of the markets that pay that well either aren’t interested in publishing the kind of politically incorrect stories that I tend to write, or aren’t going to publish an author like me who isn’t demonstrably woke enough? Even if I only end up selling it to a semi-pro market for less than fifty bucks, if it only takes a few months to make the sale because I’m not wasting time with the woke markets, does that make it worthwhile?

Or here’s yet another way to think about it: what other benefits do I get with my short story sales, besides how well it pays? If short stories are essentially advertisements for my other work, does it actually make sense to seek publication in the super woke markets, whose readers are mostly woke? Or does it make more sense to be published in the more conservative-leaning markets, with readers who are more likely to enjoy the other stuff that I write? And what about networking with similar-minded authors and editors? I made some really great connections through the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings, and even brought Andrew Fox, the editor, onto my newsletter for an interview. It was great!

All of this is happening as we’re starting to see an anti-woke cultural backlash gain momentum. Smarter people than me with a finger on the pulse of the culture say that the Snyder Cut is where the tide began to turn. The thing that tipped me off to it was the surprising waythat Coca-Cola walked back their critical race theory training after the “woke-a-cola” scandal. To my knowledge, there was no organized boycott, yet for a large corporation to backpedal so quickly tells me that they really took a hit to their bottom line.

In the coming months, I think we’re going to see a huge cultural shift against the woke moral panic that has gripped our nation for the last couple of years. That in itself is a subject for another post, but what it means for SF&F is that a lot of these woke awards and woke short story markets are well on their way to going broke. The few that endure will become niche markets for a very small audience that has completely divorced itself from the cultural mainstream—including the vast majority of SF&F readers.

Is it really worth hitching my wagon to such a horse? Or is it better to take a gamble on the up-and-coming markets that might not pay as much, but also aren’t carrying all the woke political baggage as magazines like Uncanny or Lightspeed?

Of course, if the answer to all of these questions is “yes, Joe—go for it!” the next big question is how to determine if a market is too woke? Because some of the markets have diversity statements that are fairly conservative-friendly, like “we welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds!” and don’t use any of the woke value-signalling terms like “folx,” “latinx,” “QUILTBAG,” “indigenous,” “black bodies,” etc. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of these markets only put out diversity statements to pacify the woke moral crusaders, in the same way that many boarded up stores and restaurants put up BLM signs hoping that the rioters sorry, the “peaceful protesters” would spare them.

One way to determine this is to look at which markets are chasing the wokest awards. The Hugos went woke in 2015, when “no award” swept the categories dominated by Sad Puppies nominees. That was really the moment when the fandom split, and the anti-woke readership abandoned the Hugos in disgust. The Rabid Puppies swept the 2016 nominations in what amounted to a hilarious sabotage operation (“Pounded in the Butt by Chuck Tingle’s Hugo,” hehe), but by 2017 that had all come to an end.

With that in mind, I went through all of the Hugo Awards to see which markets had either won an award or published a story that had won an award since 2015, and which markets had either been nominated or published stories that have been nominated since 2017. Here is what I found:

Hugo Winning Markets since 2015

  • Uncanny (5)
  • Lightspeed (1)

Markets with Hugo Winning Stories since 2015

  • Tor.com (5)
  • Apex (3)
  • Clarkesworld (2)
  • Lightspeed (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Hugo Nominated Markets since 2017

  • Strange Horizons (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (5)
  • Escape Pod (3)
  • Fireside (3)
  • FIYAH (3)
  • The Book Smugglers (2)
  • GigaNotoSaurus (1)
  • Cirsova (1)
  • Shimmer (1)
  • Podcastle (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Markets with Hugo Nominated Stories since 2017

  • Tor.com (37)
  • Uncanny (18)
  • Clarkesworld (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (3)
  • Fireside (2)
  • Lightspeed (2)
  • Asimov’s (1)
  • Strange Horizons (1)
  • Nightmare Magazine (1)
  • Diabolical Plots (1)

The counts for nominated markets/stories do not include the winners, but do include all of the nominations for 2021, even though the winners have not yet been decided.

I haven’t yet settled on a standard for deciding which markets are too woke for me to submit to. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and for any who choose to follow my lead on this, it will have to be an individual decision. But I am rethinking the way I submit and publish my short stories, based on this experience. This post has already gone too long, and I still haven’t worked my new strategy out, but if you have any suggestions or ideas I’m interested to hear them.