Technically, the entire Wheel of Time series was also on the ballot this year, but there is no other year in which a complete series (as opposed to the latest book in the series) was ever on the ballot. It seems really weird that they would do that just for Wheel of Time, so I’m going to act as if it never happened. Otherwise, The Wheel of Time would probably get my #2 slot, just above No Award.
I haven’t read Warbound, but I have read enough of Hard Magic, the first book in Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, to know that I’m going to read the rest. The magic system is a lot more explicitly rules-based than much of his other stuff, but the characters are great, the story is great, the world is fascinating… it’s definitely up there with the rest of his work. Good stuff. Great writer.
Ann Leckie holds the record for the author I’ve DNFed the fastest. Ancillary Justice is the book that put her on the map. The main character is a sentient spaceship, which sounds like a pretty cool starting concept… until you realize that the most exciting thing about this spaceship is that it’s transgender, and views every other human as a “she.” Derp. The whole book is obsessed with leftist gender politics, which is why I believe that No Award is more deserving than this garbage. I predict it will not age well.
I forget why I DNFed Neptune’s Brood. I think it had to do with sex, violence, and drug use that was just too explicit for me. When I was in my 20s, I was willing to do dark and gritty, but these days I have little patience for it. I think this may have been the book that made me decide to skip Charles Stross as an author, so there must have been a lot of it.
As for Parasite, I think the main thing for that one was that I just felt no interest or connection with any of the characters. Glancing over the book, it doesn’t appear that it had any explicitly terrible content, and I vaguely remember getting bored with the story and deciding that it wasn’t worth continuing. But having read and DNFed several other works by this author, I know she has a tendency to veer into crossing my lines (such as building sexual tension between a brother and sister, or throwing in weird occult stuff, or making her main character a transgender child). And running the book through ChatGPT, it appears that the book has an undercurrent of nihilism, which I absolutely cannot stand in any fiction. Perhaps I picked up on that soon enough to DNF it early.
Of the three books from this year that I DNFed, I’d be most willing to give Parasite another try, then maybe Neptune’s Brood. But I wouldn’t be willing to read Ancillary Justice (or anything else by Ann Leckie, for that matter) unless you paid me damn well for it. And even then…
What sort of books are fantasy readers looking for today? What are the expectations that readers have for the genre?
Overall, the fantasy genre is growing. Sales are up, both in traditional and indie publishing, and the big names in the field (like Brandon Sanderson) are doing quite well. It’s clear that the fantasy genre as a whole is robust and healthy.
When you break it down by publishers and subgenres, however, things start to look a little different. Romantasy is dominating the traditional publishing world, but most of it is little more than pornography for women, dressed up with fantasy trappings. And because of how traditional publishing now relies on a few big blockbusters to make most of their earnings, romantasy is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, making it much more difficult for debut and midlist authors in the other fantasy subgenres.
In the world of indie publishing, litRPG has begun to demonstrate some staying power. It was the new hot thing back in the early 2020s, but it’s attracted enough attention and developed enough of a following that it has become a major subgenre that is likely to endure for some time. I could be wrong about that, but from what I see, that’s where most of the innovative authors and whale readers (ie >1 book per week) are focusing their attention these days.
But because of the way that the algorithms tend to govern the indie publishing cycle (and the way that indie publishing has unfortunately turned into a zero-sum, pay-to-play game with online advertising), the rise of litRPG in the indie publishing world may very well be sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in the same way that romantasy is sucking it out of the traditional publishing world.
Both subgenres are also very gender-biased, with women gravitating toward romantasy and men gravitating toward litRPG. This reflects the broader social and political trend of men and women going separate ways, across a whole host of different metrics. So as the gender divide continues to widen in society generally, that will probably reinforce the divide between romantasy and litRPG, creating a positive feedback loop (or death spiral, depending on how you look at it).
Sword and sorcery continues to do okay, and has probably been given a boost by the recent release of Conan the Barbarian into the public domain. But most of sword and sorcery got siphoned off into grimdark back in the 00s—in fact, you could say that sword and sorcery reinvented itself as grimdark. And while grimdark has resisted the feminization of literature, standing as one of the few remaining bastions where male readers continue to feel at home, I think grimdark has already passed its peak. In a post-pandemic, post-Trump world, I think most readers are hungry for books that are less nihilistic and more uplifting.
Which brings us to epic fantasy. While Brandon Sanderson continues to dominate this subgenre, with his massive kickstarters and huge book releases, it’s debatable whether his readers are hungry for more epic fantasy, or just for more Brandon Sanderson. He’s kind of a subgenre all to himself. Recent streaming adaptations like Wheel of Time and Rings of Power have failed miserably, and Game of Thrones has fallen almost totally out of cultural significance, with George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish the last book (and Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to finish his own series) becoming something of a meme.
In fact, the failure of these two big-name authors to finish writing their books may have struck epic fantasy a mortal wound. Because of how they have been burned, a large number of epic fantasy readers are now unwilling to commit to a series until after it is complete. But very few authors can afford to write a truly epic series and release the whole thing at once. It takes several years to write a series like that—and what are authors supposed to do if the first one flops?
In other words, debut epic fantasy authors are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they release the first book by itself, it will probably sink into obscurity before they can write and release the next book. And if by some measure of hard work and tenacity they manage to write a whole series and hold back from publishing until they’re ready to release it all at once, if the first book still fails to sell, they’re SOL and all that hard work was for nothing.
This is also why traditional publishers are so unwilling to publish a new epic fantasy series from a debut or a midlist author. A bestseller like Larry Correia might be able to dip his feet in that pond (and do quite well—I highly recommend his Sons of the Black Sword series), they won’t do that for anyone else. Which is fine, except that indie publishing epic fantasy is just as hard—arguably more so.
For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin have done more to kill epic fantasy than they have to grow it.
But this may actually have created an opportunity for those authors who are willing to drive into the smoke. After all, there’s much less competition if you can manage to break in and build a decent following. But how much hunger is there for epic fantasy, compared to other fantasy subgenres? And how can a newer/midlist author reach them, without a big push from a publisher or the algorithms?
Races are to fantasy what aliens are to science fiction. This is especially true of traditional epic fantasy, which often features elves, dwarves, and other mythical beings living alongside humans. Every author has a slightly different take on each fantasy race, and many authors get creative and invent their own, but there are some common tropes and archetypes.
Almost all fantasy books include humans in some capacity, usually portrayed as somewhat more medieval than we currently are (to capture that yearning sense of nostalgia for a lost world or time that is a defining characteristic of the fantasy genre). They are almost always the default, meaning that if there are no other fantasy races, then the characters will all be humans.
Elves are typically forest people who live closer to nature than the humans, and as such they are usually more mystical and more magical. They are often immortal, and stand out visually by their pointy ears. There are, of course, many other takes on fantasy elves, ranging from Santa Claus’s primary labor force to the nasty little gremlins who like to steal babies, but most elves in modern fantasy are derivative of Tolkien’s elves, who are immortal, ethereal beings of glory more akin to angels than to humans.
My favorite take on the elves is probably from Tolkien himself. Perhaps I need to read a little more, but I haven’t yet encountered any other take on elves that seemed to do it better. Though I did appreciate Larry Correia’s trailer park elves from his Monster Hunter International series. That was hilarious.
Dwarves are much more industrious and mechanical than elves, and tend to live deep underground, where they mine for ore and treasure. They are short but stubborn and ferocious warriors, who tend to drink a lot and grow long beards (even the lady dwarves, in some accounts). Their preferred weapon is usually an axe.
My personal favorite take on dwarves is the game Dwarf Fortress, which has so many ways in which your adorable little dwarf colony can die, including the “catpocalypse” where the cats adopt your dwarves as pets, then start to breed faster than your CPU’s cycles can keep up with them, so to keep your game from crashing you have to cull a few of them, resulting in their pet dwarves losing their minds and going berserk, causing other dwarves to lose their minds and go berserk, and the next thing you know everyone in your adorable little fortress is dead. Dwarf fortress is… a quirky game.
Most traditional fantasy books will also feature a race like the orcs, who are inherently and irredeemably evil. I’ve dedicated a whole other blog post to orcs, so I won’t recount it here, except to point out that in some iterations, they aren’t inherently evil so much as inherently savage. Basically, the orcs are the barbarians of the fantasy world, providing your aspiring Dark Lord with plenty of mooks and cannon fodder. Occasionally, you’ll get a story from the point of view of an orc, or more commonly a half-orc. Expect lots of graphic violence from these stories.
Hobbits or halflings are another common fantasy race, especially for fantasy that is derivative of Tolkien. As far as I can tell, this is a race that Tolkien made up on his own, and his books were so influential that the hobbits soon became a standard fantasy archetype in themselves. The original hobbits were basically little furry-footed British people who prefer to stay at home and eat lots of food rather than go on adventures. Perhaps this is why they became so archetypal: they’re the perfect kind of hero to refuse the call of adventure, a key step on the hero’s journey.
Those are the standard races. You’ve also got things like vampires and werewolves, the fey, and various other monsters like trolls, ogres, and dragons (though many of these are portrayed as beasts and not as people, even when they can talk). There are also various hybrids, such as half-elves and half-orcs, usually interbred with humans. Shapeshifters are also quite common, and can make for some very interesting story.
Why so many races? For many of the same reasons why science fiction has aliens. It gives us a chance to look at strange and foreign cultures without carrying any of the baggage that can come from using a real-world foreign culture. As with most aliens, most fantasy races aren’t truly any more foreign to us western readers than the Japanese. But it can go deeper than this, giving us a chance to play around with things like immortality or magic so that we can ask ourselves “how would we be different if we had that characteristic?” Because ultimately, no matter the race (with the possible exception of orcs), all of the characters who belong to these races are still people.
Part of it has to do with the genre’s nostalgic yearning for a distant past. One way of understanding the modern era is to see it as an unending series of political revolutions that have spread like a slow-moving contagion from one part of the world to another.
It started with the English Civil War, then died down for a while until it manifested in the American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the creation of the United States. After that, it spread to France, leading to the French Revolution and a very messy tug-of-war between the Republicans and the Monarchists, ultimately leading to the permanent end of the French monarchy.
Then we had the aborted revolutions of 1848, which ultimately gave us Karl Marx and Socialism, the Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America, the American Civil War, which culturally was something of an echo of the old English Civil War (with the Cavaliers in the south and the Puritan Roundheads in the north), and ultimately the Bolshevik Revolution which gave us global communism, etc etc.
I won’t belabor the point (though if you want to hear a good podcast that covers all this stuff, check out Revolutions by Mike Duncan). The point is that the modern era has basically been one long series of very messy wars to depose the old medieval kings and emperors. Today, the only monarchies that survive are either constitutional monarchies that no longer exercise direct political power (for example, King Charles of the United Kingdom), or else they are strange aberrations that only exist because of unique regional history and economic circumstances (for example, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose dynasty depends almost entirely on the country’s oil reserves).
Fantasy is all about hearkening back to a romantic view of the premodern past, even if that past never existed. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most fantasy—especially classic fantasy—tends to feature kings and kingdoms. Never mind that historically, many medieval kings were almost totally beholden to their dukes, especially in the time before gunpowder, when the dukes could just hole up in their castles and openly defy their kings. That’s why Europe has so many medieval castles.
Of course, some fantasy like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire does a really good job of capturing the complex dynamics of feudal politics. A lot of the old sword & sorcery also plays around with those kinds of medieval political tensions, balancing the nostalgic aspect of fantasy with the savagery of backstabbing courtiers and brutal hand-to-hand combat. Robert E. Howard’s classic Conan the Barbarian stories are a great example of this, with Conan ultimately rising to become King of Aquilonia.
Both grimdark and sword & sorcery embrace the medieval savagery—indeed, it’s a large part of the nostalgic yearning. Other subgenres play down the savagery, either by making the king a distant power, or by making the world out to be a lightly-populated wilderness. Lord of the Rings is a good example of both, though it still defaults to feudal monarchy as the majority political system.
Is there a subconscious yearning for old-fashioned monarchy that fantasy quietly fulfills? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. If kings and kingdoms are the default system of government in most fantasy novels, I think that’s because it was the default for much of the medieval era. In books like Game of Thrones where the political intrigue is a key aspect of the story, you get into the more complicated aspects of feudal politics, but that’s not necessarily a requirement.
Personally, I enjoy fantasy with a little bit of medieval-style political intrigue, though most grimdark tends to overdo it. I did really enjoy Larry Correia’s Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, though (no spoilers please—I haven’t yet read the last book!) Robert E. Howard hits the sweet spot, I think, with a world so wild and savage that no king has managed to subdue it, and even a barbarian can rise to become a king.
For the last month, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the fantasy genre, rereading all of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and a bunch of the other ones too, by authors like L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, Robert Jordan, etc. I’ve also been reading a lot of epic fantasy, like the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. And I’ve also read some essays on the genre, most notably “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre” by David Hartwell. Oh, and opening a bunch of chats with ChatGPT, though those are of limited usefulness (for some reason, ChatGPT hallucinates like crazy when you ask it to recommend any noblebright fantasy that isn’t more than two or three decades old).
From what I’ve gathered, there are basically two camps or schools within secondary-world fantasy: the heroic / sword & sorcery camp, based off of Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and the epic fantasy camp, based off of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. According to David Hartwell, those are the only two franchises to achieve breakout success: everything else has either achieved only moderate commercial success in its time before petering out, or gained only a niche audience. Apart from Conan, the fantasy genre as a whole didn’t really take off until Terry Brooks immitated Tolkien with his Shannara series, thus launching a wave of Tolkienesque epic fantasy in the 70s and 80s that morphed into Grimdark in the 90s, 00s, and 10s.
So for a while, I was looking into all the various tropes and archetypes that make Conan and LOTR tick, and trying to use those to differentiate the two. But lately, I’ve been wondering if maybe I’ve been overthinking all of this, and the real difference between the two is that Tolkien mastered long-form fantasy, and Howard mastered short-form fantasy. In other words, what if the defining difference between the two camps doesn’t have to do with tropes so much as with the length of the actual story?
I suspect that short-form fantasy is poised to make a resurgence, especially with all of the challenges associated with writing and selling long-form fantasy in the 2020s. Larry Correia is right: Rothfuss and Martin have ruined the epic fantasy field for new authors by failing to finish their series in a reasonable timeframe. Unless you are independently wealthy or already have a large and loyal following of readers, it just doesn’t make commercial sense to write a lengthy series of +200k-word fantasy epics. Better to write shortier, punchier 40k-word novels instead, especially if you can churn them out every other month or so. That seems to be the model that works best for indies, at least in adjacent genres like urban fantasy and paranormal.
Anyway, that’s my current thinking on the subject. What’s your take on it?
So I’m reading The Expanse, and I recently finished the third book in the series, Abaddon’s Gate. Really great book! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of action, lots of adventure, and a very optimistic ending, which is not something you see a lot of in science fiction and fantasy these days.
However, there was one small thing that bugged me about one of the major viewpoint characters: Anna, the Christian pastor. To be fair, they played her religious devotion straight, and didn’t just make her a hypocrite or the bad guy—which is another thing we don’t see a lot of in SF&F these days (more on that later). But they also made her a lesbian, and to be honest, yeah, that bugged me.
Why did that bug me? Because most conservative Christians (and most Muslims, by the way) believe that homosexuality is a sin. Not that being attracted to the opposite sex is inherently sinful, but that acting out on those sexual desires is. Of course, there are plenty of liberal churches that do not believe this, but their theology is in conflict with all of mainstream Christian teaching from the time of Christ himself. So by making Anna a lesbian, the authors were basically saying “yeah, she’s a Christian, but she’s not that kind of Christian.”
Not that I blame the authors for doing that. I totally get that they were writing for a mainstream SF&F audience and wanted to be able to bring up theological topics in the story without turning off any non-religious or LGBT readers. By making the religious character a lesbian, they signalled that the character was “safe,” even if she was a Christian.
But it got me to thinking: when was the last time that a mainstream, bestselling book, movie, or series had a devoutly religious Christian main character who 1) is not a villain or anti-hero, 2) is not a hypocrite, and 3) is not LGBT? Kind of like the Bechdel test, except for Christians.
Firefly comes to mind, though that was twenty years ago. Monster Hunter International has a devoutly religious side character—does he get his own book? I haven’t read far enough in the series yet to know. Looking at my bookshelf, I can see A Canticle for Leibowitz,The Speed of Dark,Hyperion, and Folk of the Fringe, but all of those books are old now. The most recent award-winning example I can think of is Eric James Stone’s novelette “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made” (2010).
I’m having a very hard time thinking of anything published in the last ten years that passes the test. Even with authors like Larry Correia and John C. Wright, those guys have faced tremendous pushback from the left. It really does seem like there is an effort, at least from some quarters to erase good, faithful, conservative Christian characters from SF&F, and to ostracize or marginalize any authors who dare to buck that trend.
It reminds me of a family history podcast from NPR that I checked out once, only to find that the very first episode was about someone finding that two of their ancestors were gay. Laying aside the rather obvious (and hilarious) biological problems with that—adopted family is still family, after all—the implication here was that by making family history LGBT, NPR was making it “safe,” probably for their liberal listeners who have come to associate family history with the Latter-day Saints.
At the same time, we’ve heard a lot in recent years about how important it is to include underrepresented groups in fiction—to make sure that every reader can find characters who “look like them,” or “love like them.” And yet, none of the people championing this cause seem to care whether I can read about characters who “look like me” when it comes to religion. In fact, it seems that the people screaming the loudest about how we need “more diverse books” and more “own voices” are also the loudest in trying to erase and marginalize Christians like me.
So was it really ever about “representation” or “diversity” at all, or was all of that lip service about tolerance and diversity just a Trojan horse from the very beginning? Because here’s the thing: if I as an author don’t include any LGBT, BIPOC, or LMNOP characters in my books, I’ll get slammed by the woke activists for not having enough representation in my books… but if I do include any “marginalized” characters, then I’ll be accused of cultural appropriation. Unless, of course, my book promotes the woke activists’ agenda visavis things like climate change, ESG, gay pride, etc.
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” said Lavrentiy Beria, one of the most psychopathically evil agents of the Soviet Union. That is exactly the same principle that the woke movement operates on, and unfortunately, that movement has come to dominate the SF&F field (just look at what they did to Mercedes Lackey). So really, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that they don’t apply the same principles of tolerance, diversity, and equal representation to conservative Christians—which are rapidly becoming the most marginalized and underrepresented minority in science fiction and fantasy.
So what is the solution? Honestly, it may just be to smile and turn the other cheek. If we give these people enough rope, they will hang themselves with it. Get woke, go broke. Granted, there are reasons to be worried about ESG, Big Tech, and Amazon’s dominance, but it is still possible to build a resilient author career where you aren’t beholden to all that. The more of us accomplish that, the less power these woke crazies will have over us.
Lash out in kind, bend the knee, or smile and turn the other cheek… definitely the third option is best. It’s what Christians have been doing since the time of the Savior Himself, and is the unique genius of the religion that has allowed it to thrive in the face of so much persecution. But it’s important to keep in mind that turning the other cheek is not the same as bending the knee.
There was a time when science fiction was bigger than fantasy. More people read it, more authors wrote it, and more editors demanded it. Would-be fantasy authors were steered toward writing science fiction, because they knew that it would sell better than the stuff they actually wanted to write.
Now, the roles are reversed. More people read fantasy, more authors write it, and more editors are demanding it (except in the short story world, but none of them are in it for the money, which proves my point). For every year of the Goodreads Choice Awards, the fantasy section has gotten more total votes than the science fiction section. And authors like me, who often prefer to write science fiction, are instead veering more toward fantasy, because we can see that it sells better.
I’m not decrying this shift. I enjoy fantasy differently than I enjoy science fiction, but I genuinely enjoy them both. And as science fiction writers have pivoted to writing fantasy, I think it’s improved fantasy considerably, with magic systems that actually have rules and fantasy worlds that are actually realistic, given our understanding of physics, geography, etc. So just to be clear, I’m not complaining about this.
But I have wondered more than once how it got to be this way. What caused science fiction to fall out of favor? What made readers turn toward fantasy instead? Why has science fiction been on a general decline for the better part of half a century?
There was a time when science fiction was fun and inspiring. When scientists, engineers, inventors, and pioneers cited their favorite science fiction stories as major inspiration for their work. These were the people who put satellites in orbit, who put a man on the moon, who invented computers and the internet and in many ways built our modern world. And it worked both ways: not only did the fiction writers inspire the scientists and pioneers, but the new discoveries and inventions inspired the next generation of science fiction writers to write fun and inspiring stories about that.
What broke the cycle? What got us to the point where today’s kids no longer dream about becoming astronauts or paleontologists, but about being YouTube stars and “influencers,” whatever the hell that means? Why is there such a dearth of truly inspiring science fiction nowadays?
To be sure, there are a lot of factors at play, and no one single person or organization bears all of the responsibility. But if I had to point to just one thing as the primary cause, it would be SFWA.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association, formerly known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, formerly known as the Science Fiction Writers of America, was started in 1965 by noted author and Futurian member Damon Knight. (Who were the Futurians? We’ll come to that later.) It is a professional organization for writers with a membership requirement of making at least 3 professional short story sales (only from SFWA-approved markets, of course), or a professional novel sale (also only from SFWA-approved markets), or to make something like $5,000 in sales on a single title if you’re self-published (which involves opening the kimono to these sleazeballs), or… frankly, I don’t know what the membership requirements are these days, and I don’t think SFWA does either, because their membership requirements page currently says that they have “a plan to create a comprehensive market matrix or scorecard to better guide creators toward professional publishers,” and that they are just now “starting with short fiction markets on this rollout.” Whatever the hell that means.
In practice, SFWA is a very snobbish club of “important” science fiction (and fantasy?) writers, or rather, a club of snobbish people who consider themselves to be important. Every year, they give us the Nebula Awards, which are supposed to represent the “best of the best” that science fiction (and fantasy?) has to offer.
The reason I’m keeping “fantasy” in parentheses is because the organization was very clearly founded with a focus on science fiction, and to the extent that it later expanded to include fantasy, it did so as a means to stay relevant in a world where fantasy had come to dominate science fiction. At least, that’s what I gather. But even if I’m wrong about that, I’m not wrong that the SF in SFWA originally standed for “science fiction,” and that the addition of fantasy came much later—and not without a ridiculous amount of controversy typical of this toxic and disfunctional organization.
Those of you who have been following the devolution of the genre since the dumpster fire that was the response to the Sad Puppies will no doubt agree that SFWA is a major part of the problem. But the thing that may (or may not) surprise you is that SFWA was toxic from the moment of its inception, and was always the primary factor in science fiction’s decline.
To see why, let’s go back to the Futurians. This was a small but tight-knit community of superfans, kind of like the Inklings, whose members went on to found Worldcon, the Hugos, DAW books, the Nebulas—and yes, SFWA itself. These were all people who grew up with the pulps, were active during the golden age, and became the movers and shakers in the field in the latter half of the 20th century: people like Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and others.
The key thing to know about the Futurians is that they were left-wing radicals. In the 1930s, when communism was a very dirty word, Pohl was literally a communist. Wollheim was also a believer in communism, and stated that science fiction writers and fans “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.” (Carr, Terry (1979). Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age p430) According to Asimov, the Futurians broke off from the Greater New York Science Fiction Club precisely because of their political and ideological differences. In short, the Futurians were all true blue, dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard Marxists of one stripe or another, and they were very overt about bringing their politics into their fiction.
When I first started to get involved in fandom, I heard an apocryphal story that at the very first Worlcon, there was a schism between the group of fans who wanted science fiction to advance the cause of global communism—basically, the Futurians’ view—and the majority of fans, who just wanted to read and talk about fun science fiction stories. That first major schism (or so the story goes) became the root cause of every fannish conflict and controversy that has ever happened since.
Now, if we had to sum up the chaos and insanity of the last ten years in just three words, most of us would probably agree that “politics ruins everything” is a fair assessment. For science fiction, it was no different. The science fiction of the golden age, for all its flaws, was fun, adventurous, inspiring—and not overtly political (for the most part). Then, in the 60s and 70s, science fiction took a strong turn to the political left, glorifying sexual liberation and Marxist utopias, and pounding the idea that the world was going to end very soon in some sort of climate catastrophe, or a nuclear holocaust brought on by politicians like Goldwater and Reagan.
I used to think that science fiction was an inherently political genre, but why should it be? After all, there is nothing inherently political about science. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the moment science becomes politicized into “The Science,” it becomes toxic and unreliable. And the more I read, the more I’m convinced that this is true of science fiction as well. The difference between art and propaganda, truth and narrative, is the same difference between science and “The Science.”
What happened in the 60s and 70s was science fiction’s version of the long march through the institutions, as the Futurians and their ideological allies came to dominate the professional side of the field. Even though they were outnumbered and their political views put them solidly in the minority, they took their love of science fiction way more seriously than everyone else, and so while a lot of those early fans of the 40s and 50s either grew out of science fiction or moved on to other things, the Futurians and their allies stayed. Science fiction was their life. Science fiction was their passion. And thus they became the next generation of authors, editors, and publishers.
Through SFWA, they were able to leverage their position and influence into real power. With Worldcon and the Hugos, anyone who was willing to shell out the money could vote or join the convention, and a lot of people did. It was much more democratic that way. But with SFWA, you had to sell enough stories to the qualifying markets—and increasingly, all of those qualifying markets came to be run by left-wing political ideologues.
In a recent Project Veritas expose, an engineer at Twitter explained that one of the reasons why Twitter has such a left-wing bias is because the left-wing extremists refuse to compromise on any of their views. According to the engineer, right-wingers tend to say “I disagree with what the other side is saying, but I don’t think they should be silenced for it,” whereas left-wingers tend to say “that’s violence and hate speech, and if you don’t censor it, I won’t use your platform.” Because the left-wingers are the super-users, Twitter is more likely to cater to them, and thus rewards their extremism instead of limiting it.
A similar dynamic emerged in science fiction, where the left-wing editors and publishers—many of whom had always viewed science fiction as a means to achieving their ideological ends—rewarded politically like-minded authors with story sales, publishing contracts, favorable reviews, and the Nebula Award. These left-wing authors went on to join SFWA and vote for other left-wing authors in the Nebulas, feeding the cycle.
Meanwhile, all the other authors and fans—the ones who cared more about telling good stories than conveying a political message—only stuck around so long as the quality of the stories hit a certain minimum threshold. And I’ll be the first to point out that there were many left-wing authors who wrote genuinely good stories: Ursula K. Le Guin, for example. But there were also some real hacks who were awarded the Nebula mainly because of their politics. Since the minimum threshold was different for every reader, as the stories got more political, more and more readers abandoned science fiction.
In other words, the reason why science fiction became so political was because the institutions—most notably, SFWA—rewarded political purity more than they rewarded telling a good story. From the beginning, SFWA had this toxic dynamic, because it was founded by political ideologues who wanted to use science fiction to achieve their ideological ends. And because politics ruins everything, SFWA ruined science fiction.
How does all of this end? With an insanely toxic purity spiral and a collapse into cultural irrelevance. That is what we are witnessing right now, with the recent brouhaha over Mercedes Lackey accidentally saying “colored people” instead of “people of color.” (Both terms are equally racist, by the way: it’s just that the one flavor of racism is more fashionable right now.) The purity spiral has been ongoing for years, perhaps since SFWA’s inception, and the collapse into cultural irrelevance is well underway. The only questions left are 1) how much damage will be done before SFWA fades into much-deserved obscurity, and 2) if science fiction has a comeback from its long decline, who or what will turn it around?
As to the second question, it’s possible that the damage is permanent and nothing will stem the genre’s decline. That’s what ultimately happened to the western, after all. Or maybe it will follow the same path that horror did, with some authors adapting to the changing market and rebranding as something else (ie urban fantasy, paranormal romance), while the genre purists languish, at least in terms of commercial viability.
Or maybe, if SFWA just dies, science fiction will begin to experience a renaissance. Same thing at this point if Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic (or gets totally captured by the Chinese, which honestly would be an improvement). With the advent of indie publishing, the field is very different right now, and we’ve already seen some amazing indie authors like Andy Weir and Hugh Howey take the field by storm. Without the toxicity of SFWA holding us back, I think we will see some very good things come out of the genre in the coming years.
But for that to happen, SFWA really does need to die, or at least fade into cultural irrelevance like the Author’s Guild and the Libertarian Party. Starve the beast. Don’t let them have any of your money. Mock the organization relentlessly, both online and offline, or else ignore them entirely. And if a book or a story wins a Nebula, take that as a mark against it. I’ve read all but five of the Hugo and Nebula award winning novels, and now I can say with certainty that the best predictor that I will personally hate a book is if it won a Nebula but not a Hugo. Test that out for yourself. If you haven’t been red-pilled yet, you’ll probably be surprised.
Also, check out this podcast if you haven’t already. Good stuff as always from Steve Diamond and Larry Correia.
I never know which posts of mine China Mike Glyer is going to pick up for his pixel scroll, or whatever he calls the daily bucket of chum that he feeds the folks over at File 770 (the ones who aren’t Chinese bots, anyway). I’ve written at much greater length about my 2022 reading resolution here, and my insights and impressions gained through the experience here and here, but for some reason the post he decided to pick up was the last one. Perhaps he thought that it would be better at ginning up outrage than the other posts? But if that were the case, surely he would have picked up the one before that instead. It was practically written for ginning up outrage among the File 770 crowd (or at least the ones who aren’t Chinese bots).
So when I got the pingback last night, I glanced over the post over at File 770 and saw this comment from Cora Buhlert:
I have to admit that whether or not writers have children is not a characteristic I pay the slightest bit of attention to. Never mind that it is difficult to tell, because even today, not every writer chooses to talk about their family or private life.
But I guess that Joe Vasicek is the sort of person for whom people without children, particularly women without children, are by definition evil.
Cora is an indie writer from Germany that I used to interact with a lot on the KBoards Writer’s Cafe, and some other indie author hangouts. She’s earned the ire of Larry Correia a couple of times, and she has a bad tendency to straw man any opinions or perspectives that challenge her worldview. On one thread, we went back and forth over whether Hitler was a creation of the political right or the political left. I tried to explain that “left” and “right” mean different things in the US than they do in Europe, but it was like trying to have a discussion with a brick wall.
So it doesn’t surprise me in the least that she’s completely mischaracterized me in the comment above. I do not believe that childless women are evil—if I did, I would not have served in the bishopric of a mid-singles ward (a mid-singles ward is a Latter-day Saints congregation of unmarried and divorced people in their 30s and 40s. I was the ward clerk—basically, the guy who handled all the finances and other paperwork for the congregation). My faith teaches me that people are not evil, but are all children of God, no matter who they are born to or what their life choices may be.
In fact, my interest in the parental status of the Hugo and Nebula winning authors has nothing to do with religion or morality, and everything to do with life experience. I didn’t get married until almost a decade after I had started to write professionally, and the experience of becoming a father was so completely lifechanging that it’s transformed my writing as well: what I choose (and don’t choose) to write about, who I choose (and don’t choose) to write for, as well as the themes and ideas that I explore in my books.
You can see this transformation if you read my Genesis Earth Trilogy. Genesis Earth was my first novel, but it wasn’t until almost nine years later—after I’d met my wife and was engaged to be married—that I felt I had the life experience necessary to write the sequel, Edenfall. And the final book, The Stars of Redemption, was not the sort of thing I was capable of writing until after I had become a father and knew what it was like to help bring a child into the world.
When my daughter was born, the very first thought that came into my mind was “this is her story now, not yours.” We all like to say that we’re the hero of our own story, and in a very basic way, that’s true. But when you become a parent (assuming that you’re a responsible parent, and not a scumbag), you’re no longer living just for yourself, but for your children. “He who findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”
Having a child changes your perspective on everything. Among other things, you have a much deeper and more personal investment in the future, since you know that your child will inherit that world. Your perspective on your own family history changes too, as you have become a link in the generations, not merely a byproduct of it. Life becomes a lot harder, but it also becomes more meaningful. Things that took up a great deal of your time and attention when you were single suddenly become trivial, and other things that didn’t make much sense to you about people before suddenly click into place.
So that was why, when I decided to read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels, I was curious about the parental status of the authors. I wanted to know if the experience of being a parent had affected the quality of their writing, since I know it’s affected mine. And honestly, it’s not that hard to look up: almost all of these authors have Wikipedia pages with a section about their personal lives. Obviously, the details about their children are sparse, but the only thing I cared about was whether or not they had any.
(As a side note, there were other stats that I decided to track, such as the age of the author when they won the award. That hasn’t seemed to have impacted my taste, except that I have not enjoyed a single award-winning novel by an author who was in their 20s at the time that they won. The only exception was Isaac Asimov with the retro-Hugo for The Mule (Foundation and Empire), but that wasn’t awarded until after he was dead. There are also three authors whose age I was unable to determine from a quick internet search: Michael Swanwick, Sarah Pinsker, and Charlie Jane Anders.)
(As another side note, I’ll be the first to admit that I may have made some errors in my research. For example, if a five-minute internet search on an author didn’t tell me anything about their kids, I assumed they didn’t have any. It’s entirely possible that they just prefer to keep that information private. Also, I didn’t bother to look up when they had their children, so it’s possible that they were still childless at the time they won the award.)
Why should I be interested in this sort of thing? Why look at things like an author’s age, gender, or parental status?
Two reasons. The first is that I wanted to do a deep dive on the Hugos and the Nebulas, the two awards which represent themselves as representing the very best of the science fiction genre. Since that is the genre that I write, I want to understand not just the kind of books that win these awards, but the kind of authors who win them. The goal is to have a deeper understanding of the genre, and to look for trends and movements within it.
Second, and more importantly, I want to have a better understanding of my own reading tastes. All of this is subjective, of course, since the act of reading is always a collaboration between the reader and the writer. I’m sure that some of the books I think are terrible are considered by others to be the best in the world, and vice versa. My goal is to look for patterns that will tell me whether I’m likely to enjoy a book (or an author), so that I can find the best books more efficiently. I don’t do this for all of the books that I read, but since the Hugo and Nebula winning books are supposed to be the very best, I figured it was worth it to do a deeper analysis—especially since my goal is to read all of them.
The thing that surprises me is that it isn’t parental status that matters, but gender + parental status. I can think of a couple of reasons why this would be the case. The most obvious is that it’s easier for me to empathize with a childless man, since that was me for such a long time. And I do think that’s a major part of it.
But I also think that there’s something specifically about being a mother—or deliberately choosing not to be one—that’s also a factor. And yes, I’m talking about biological essentialism. I mean, I’m not a biologist, but I know that I will never be able to be a mother—that’s a life experience that I will never be able to have. Conversely, I will never be able to deny my potential motherhood, an equally major life decision. Both of those experiences are bound to have a major impact on an author’s writing, either way.
I also think this factor is what lies at the heart of Roe v. Wade, the worst decided Supreme Court case since Dred Scott v. Sanford. Certainly the cultural impact of that decision has profoundly influenced how our society views children and motherhood. It’s also why I am sooo looking forward to Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is a Woman? coming out in two weeks:
With all of this in mind, I find it fascinating that every Hugo Award for best novel after 2015 (the year that the Sad Puppies had their high water mark) was won, as far as I can tell, by a childless woman. It would be interesting to see if that trend extends to nominees, or to the other categories like best short story, best novelette, and best novella. Maybe I’ll look that up sometime.
And now that I’ve referenced Roe v. Wade, I’m sure that Cora Buhlert (if she’s reading this) is saying to herself: “yup, he just thinks that all childless women are evil.” And to the extent that File 770 is read by humans and not bots, they’re no doubt picking and choosing those parts of this post that confirm their prejudices (if China Mike Glyer even has the balls to cross link to a post that includes that trailer—do it, China Mike! I dare you!)
But I don’t really care either way, because now I have a much better understanding of my own personal reading tastes, and how they contrast with the Hugo/Nebula crowd. For me, the best books are those that are written by authors who have had the life experience of being a mother, and the worst books are by those who have chosen to deny themselves that path. Apparently, the Hugo/Nebula crowd takes the opposite view. Good to know.
Larry Correia just came out with another highly entertaining rant, this time on sensitivity readers. In case you don’t know, “sensitivity readers” are people that publishers hire to go through an unpublished manuscript to make sure that there’s nothing that could offend any marginalized groups. Larry sums it up quite well:
A Sensitivity Reader is usually some expert on Intersectional Feminism or Cismale Gendernormative Fascism or other made up goofiness who a publisher brings in to look for anything “problematic” in a manuscript. And since basically everything is problematic to somebody they won’t be happy until they suck all the joy out of the universe. It is basically a new con-job racket some worthless scumbags have come up with to extort money from gullible writers, because there aren’t a lot of good ways to make a living with a Gender Studies Degree.
It only gets better from there. And I have to say, I completely agree with him, not only from a political angle (in fact, politics has almost nothing to do with it) but from an artistic angle as well.
You can’t tell a good story without taking the risk of offending somebody. That’s because being offended is always a choice.Always. My favorite Brigham Young quote, which has gotten me banned from multiple forums, is this:
A good story stimulates the mind and excites the emotions. Anytime that happens, people will inevitably be offended. It doesn’t matter the reason. Humans are weird.
Here’s another way of looking at it: in order to create truly great art, you have to pour a significant part of yourself into it. That’s scary, because it makes you vulnerable.
The perpetually outraged crowd loves this, because it’s a weakness that they can exploit. They don’t care about your art. They only care about power. If you give them that power, they will suck all the greatness out of your art and leave you bleeding and broken on the floor.
That doesn’t mean you should always necessarily go out of your way to offend people, of course. But relying on sensitivity readers is a bad, bad idea. Why?
Because fuck your sensitivity.
Seriously, that’s my favorite part of Larry’s rant. If your skin isn’t thick enough to tell these moral busybodies to fuck off—or to simply ignore them, which is probably the better choice—they’re going to walk all over you.
Which gets to the last part of his post:
To further illustrate how Sensitivity Readers stifle creativity and suck all the fun out of books, at a recent writing convention I attended there was a panel on Intersectional Feminism or something like that. I didn’t attend it (I’m not a glutton for punishment) but several of my friends went because they were curious to see how much of a train wreck it would be.
The panel was a bunch of feminists and the whole thing turned into a big competition of who could be more offended, and who could speak for more “marginalized” people. At one point a certain author (who is an upper class white lady) had to establish her street cred, so she actually called her professional Sensitivity Reader and put her on speaker phone.
Seriously, this shit is like the victim Olympics. It has fuck all to do with creating books that readers will actually enjoy.
I went to a party that night where a bunch of people who’d attended that clusterfuck of a panel were talking about it. Apparently the only panels at this event which were more dreary was the one about the evils of capitalism (I shit you not), and the one about writing comedy which degenerated into authors who’d drank the social justice Kool Aid telling everybody what not to write because it might be “offensive”.
I’m pretty sure I was at that convention. I didn’t attend the panel, but I did run into an aspiring professional creator who told me “I just found the solution to my problem! Sensitivity readers!”
Even at the time, I wanted to put my arm around this guy and tell him to have confidence in himself and in his art. I still feel that way. We talked a bit about the outrage crowd, and about the difference between trusted alpha readers who have your best interests at heart, and sensitivity readers who may or may not. But I felt really horrible about it, because I could tell that this guy was getting pushed and pulled and tossed back and forth in all the wrong ways.
If sensitivity readers provide any value at all, it’s basically as overpriced alpha readers. But even there, the value proposition is dubious because the feedback is so toxic. Larry is right: these people create nothing. They can only destroy.
I’m a creator, not a destroyer. Because fuck your sensitivity.
This was a damn good book. One of the best epic fantasy books I’ve read. I started listening to it on the Baen Free Radio Hour, where it’s currently being serialized, and decided to pick up a copy. It did not disappoint.
This book reminds me of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, in the sense that it takes place in a dystopian fantasy world where things didn’t turn out all that well after the hero of prophecy saved the world. It’s not difficult to imagine that after hearing Brandon pitch his book, Larry turned to the guy next to him and said “hold my beer.”
That said, Son of the Black Sword is very different from Mistborn. For one, it’s brutal and violent in a way that Mistborn never was. I wouldn’t exactly call it grimdark, since there is still an underlying sense of honor, and even a fair bit of optimism if you dig deeply enough.
However, you really can tell that Larry gets the kind of person who does terrible, violent things for a living. He knows how those people think, he knows how they see the world, and he knows how they interact with each other. He also knows what world dominated by those people looks like, which is definitely the world of Son of the Black Sword.
More than that, Larry understands and respects the relationship that exists between a warrior and his weapon. My favorite character was the sword Angruvadal, and I didn’t even realize it until the end. Angruvadal is a magic sword with a mind of its own, but it never really speaks or has any independent thought, other than whether its bearer is worthy and how best to serve its bearer if he is.
For me, the thing that makes or breaks a good fantasy book is whether the story is meaningful. I don’t really care for books that preach, but I don’t like books that are nihilistic and cynical either, which is why I never really got into George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.Son of the Black Sword scratches that same itch for dark and gritty fantasy, but there’s still a sense of meaning beneath it all. Good doesn’t always triumph over evil, but the author still acknowledges that good and evil exist within the hearts of the characters.
