Tag: Ken MacLeod

How I Would Vote Now: 2001 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

The Sky Road by Ken Macleod

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

The Actual Results

  1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
  2. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
  3. Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
  4. The Sky Road by Ken Macleod
  5. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
  2. No Award
  3. Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

Explanation

I remember when everyone used to rave about George R.R. Martin. Many people said he was the American Tolkien, and not just because of the “R.R.” initials in his name. They said he was revolutionizing epic fantasy—that he was doing tremendous things for the genre, subverting expectations in a way that was pure genius. All of us who were writing fantasy at the time fell somewhere under his shadow.

Today, I believe that few people have done more to destroy epic fantasy than George R.R. Martin. His Game of Thrones TV series, which was probably faithful to his outline for the books, ended so badly that no one talks about the show today, except to share this meme:

Larry Correia also makes an excellent point that by failing to finish his series, Martin has placed an impossible burden on up-and-coming epic fantasy authors by burning out readers on the genre. Because of Martin (and also Patrick Rothfuss), readers became unwilling to try out a new author until they had already finished their epic fantasy series. But because epic fantasies are so massive they take a long time to write, making this almost impossible for both indie and tradpub authors if the first book isn’t a commercial success.

The one upside to this vicious cycle is that it gave us my favorite fantasy meme of all time:

(So what does it say that Sanderson now sports a beard? Are we living in the shadow universe??)

But I think that Martin ruined epic fantasy much earlier than all that. In fact, I think that the worst damage he did to the genre was back when books 2 and 3 came out, because of how it normalized pornography, graphic violence, and nihilism. Because of this, I think it’s more accurate to call Martin the anti-Tolkien, because Tolkien’s secret sauce was the deep spiritual undercurrent in all of his works. And it’s because of Tolkien’s reverence for things spiritual that Lord of the Rings will probably still be read two hundred years from now, when no one remembers George R.R. Martin’s name.

Martin set out to subvert reader expectations, including the expectation that his books would exalt the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the time, epic fantasy readers were burned out on all the Tolkien clones, and were hungry for something new. Martin’s dark and gritty tone was a breath of fresh air—or so they thought. And the TV series brought in a host of new fans, most of whom came for the bare boobs and the brutal bloodsport.

But Martin’s books were fundamentally broken, and he knew it. In his eagerness to subvert expectations, he put himself in a position where he could not write a satisfying ending without denying the fundamental premise on which the whole series attempts to stand. Sargon of Akkad says it best in this video:

So in the end, it turned out that the greatest expectation Martin subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned books. All of which is why I believe that A Storm of Swords rightfully belongs below No Award on this ballot.

A Storm of Swords wasn’t the only dark and gritty book on the ballot for this year. I screened Midnight Robber with AI, and ultimately decided to skip it. Here is what ChatGPT said:

Sexual Violence: A central plot element involves Tan-Tan being subjected to sexual abuse by a family member. This experience shapes much of her growth and her eventual rebellion against the oppressive environment. While these events are not gratuitously described, they are explicit enough to be disturbing and are critical to the narrative.

Hopkinson’s work delves into themes of colonialism, identity, and resilience. By incorporating Caribbean dialect and folklore, the novel celebrates cultural heritage and critiques systemic oppression. Tan-Tan’s transformation into the Robber Queen symbolizes empowerment and resistance against patriarchal and colonial structures.

I also decided to skip The Sky Road, partly for content issues, but mostly to avoid the leftist message fiction. Here is what ChatGPT said:

The Sky Road is probably not a good fit for you because politics is central to the story rather than merely part of the background. It spends substantial time on communist and socialist ideas, revolutionary history, ideological factions, nuclear politics, and debates about how society should be organized… On top of that, the book begins with a casual extramarital sex scene and treats the relationship without much moral concern.

I cannot stand message fiction. Not from the left, and not from the right. I recently tried to read Camp of the Saints, which lots of people on the right are now extolling because of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, but I DNFed it ten pages in because it’s just pure message fiction.

I really wanted to like Calculating God, because 1) Robert J. Sawyer is a genuinely good writer, and 2) the premise (that an alien scientist shows up at Earth and is surprised to find that many of us don’t believe in God, because all of the aliens certainly believe) was genuinely intriguing. But after getting about halfway through the book, it started to devolve into a cartoonish plot pitting the good guys against Creationist saboteurs. Skipping to the end, I realized that the book is devoid of all nuance: Sawyer’s answer to the creationism vs. evolutionism debate isn’t to point out that it’s a false binary, but to posit a transhumanist deism as the actual one true path. Really?

This is my issue with Sawyer: he isn’t at all comfortable with ontological ambiguity. If the Bible says that God created the world in seven days, then it must mean seven literal days, not seven temporal periods, or seven poetic divisions for literary effect, or seven stages in the temple liturgy meant to symbolically represent God’s role in the creation to the pre-literate, pre-scientific society of the ancient Hebrews, or any of the other non-literal readings of Genesis. That frankly makes him more of a creationist than me, a deeply religious and devoted believer in Christ.

This aversion to nuance and ambiguity seriously hobbles his books. I remember reading the last paragraph of The Terminal Experiment and laughing out loud when he described how the soul particle (which was the premise of the book) of the main character flew up and merged once again with God, who is really just the source of all soul particles in the universe. He obviously thought he was being profound, but he made it so literal that I felt he was trying to bash a round peg into a square hole with a sledgehammer. Frankly, the book would have been better if that last paragraph had been cut.

Calculating God wasn’t terrible, though, or an annoying woke (or anti-woke) message book, so I’d still vote for it after No Award. I just think he flubbed it.

As for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I think it’s a great fantasy book, and totally deserving of the award, as are all of the Harry Potter books. After 2001, though, I think the Hugo organizers changed the rules to exclude juvenile fiction, because they didn’t want Rowling to run away with the award every year. Which seems totally snobbish and asininene to me, but whatever. I don’t pretend to know how these things work.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2006 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

The Actual Results

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Accelerando by Charles Stross
  3. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod
  5. A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  3. No Award
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

Explanation

This is going to be controversial, but I don’t think any of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books should have been nominated for the Hugo Award. In the first place, those books are pure fantasy, and while the line between fantasy and science fiction can become blurry at times, with everyone drawing it in a slightly different place (Dragonriders of Pern, for example), I do think it’s important to draw that line somewhere, because each of us as readers draws that line somewhere. Some readers read only fantasy, some read only science fiction, and even among readers who read both, they scratch very different itches.

(As a side note, A Dance With Dragons came out right when I was indie publishing my first few books, and I remember being super annoyed that it was monopolizing all of the top spots on the Amazon bestseller charts for subgenres like science fiction > action & adventure, even though it was very clearly not a science fiction book. That annoyed me as both a writer and a reader.)

More than that, though… how do I say this? I know that a lot of people are (or were) huge fans of Game of Thrones, that it had a huge and lasting cultural impact, and that the writing quality of both the books and the miniseries was quite excellent, at least for the first few books/seasons… but to what end? The HBO series itself is blatantly pornographic, and the books are even worse, glorifying the immorality and horrific violence that characterizes the series. Worse, there is no good or evil in this world: only power. This means that there are no heroes, only victims and victimizers.

I’m not sure how much Game of Thrones is responsible for shaping our current cultural decay, and how much it was simply a reflection of the culture in which it was created, but this obsession with power and the victim-victimizer complex lies at the heart of all of the social pathologies currently driving the West to cultural and spiritual suicide. It’s the force driving our own modern Game of Thrones, between the MAGA disciples of orange Jesus and the machinations of our Big Tech and Deep State overlords, with their hordes of hypnotized NPC zombies protesting in behalf of [current thing], all while remaining carefully masked. It turns out that when you embrace Martin’s paradigm, rejecting good and evil for the pure pursuit of power, and define everyone by their victimhood status, it leads to the death of everything in your culture that is good, true, and beautiful.

And even laying all of that aside, the fact that Martin hasn’t finished the damned series yet has done more to destroy the epic fantasy genre than all the other things that his career has otherwise accomplished. If you’re a new fantasy writer and you have a great idea for an epic fantasy series, you’d better have a good day job or a sugar daddy/momma, because most readers won’t give your series a chance until after you’ve finished the last book. But can we honestly blame the readers for this, when Martin ran off with their money and left them all burned?

Back when Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire was still ascendant, fans and readers were all mesmerized by how skillfully George R.R. Martin could subvert their expectations and pull off twists that no one had foreseen. It turns out that the biggest expectation that Martin ever subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned series.

Anyways, that’s enough ranting about George R.R. Martin and the pathological effect that I believe he’s had on the culture. I read A Game of Thrones back in 2010 and decided to skip the rest of the series. The writing was fantastic, but I hated all of the characters and could tell that things were going to get way too dark and way too graphic in the later books. And now, I wish I lived in a world where George R.R. Martin was still a mostly unknown midlist author, with a small cult following but not a lot of influence on the culture overall. It would be a much better world.

I skipped Accelerando, because I’ve read enough Charles Stross to know that his particular brand of grungy cyberpunk nihilism rubs me the wrong way. Learning the World wasn’t terrible, but I DNFed it because I got bored, though I could be persuaded to try it again. It was just too much of an idea book, without enough story to really hook me.

Old Man’s War… my thoughts on that one are complicated. I cannot stand Scalzi as either an author or a human being. He’s basically an obnoxious internet influencer who made it big back in the days of the blogosphere, before “influencer” was a job title. Of course, to be an influencer, you have to either 1) be an extremely attractive woman, or 2) be off your rocker somehow, and that definitely describes Scalzi. He is an obnoxious blowhard who likes to argue with people on the internet for fun and profit, except he’s apparently not as good at social media as he was at blogging, so he’s pivoted to writing science fiction and playing the SFWA mean girls game instead.

But most of that happened after Old Man’s War, so it’s not exactly fair to judge the book on all of that. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it back in 2008 when I read it. It’s basically a retelling of Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but without all of the nihilism and politics—and since the nihilism and the politics are the things that got me hung up on both books (though I actually enjoyed the politics of Starship Troopers; the part that slightly annoyed me was getting a lengthy treatise on human sociology instead of an adventure novel), Old Man’s War was basically a retelling with all of the good parts and less of the bad parts. So I’ll grudgingly give Scalzi his due and admit that his first book is good enough to deserve an affirmative vote.

But Robert Charle’s Wilson’s Spin is easily the best book on the ballot from this year, and possibly the best Hugo-nominated book that I’ve read from this whole decade. It’s fantastic. One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. The rest of the trilogy is just as good, too. In fact, Spin and its sequel Axis were a huge influence on my own Genesis Earth, though it may not be obvious at first glance. I read Spin when I was studying overseas in Amman, Jordan, while I was still working on the first draft of Genesis Earth. The next year, I read a whole bunch of Robert Charles Wilson’s other books, and I have to say that I have yet to read a book he wrote that I didn’t enjoy. His books have had as much influence on me as Ursula K. Le Guin, and largely scratch the same itch.

So that’s how the 2006 Hugos shape up for me: three books that I didn’t like, and two that I did—and one of those books is one of my all-time favorites.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years