Tag: Nebula awards

The state of science fiction is as bad as Australian breakdancing

It seems like most of the internet is talking about the hilariously bad breakdancing performance given by Australia at the Paris Olympics. Apparently, the “athlete” in question is actually a university professor named Rachael Gunn who specializes in breakdancing studies, or some such nonsense, and the main reasons she got the nod to compete are 1) the Australian breakdancing scene is woefully small, 2) she’s (allegedly) an LGBTQ+ woman, with all the right political opinions, and 3) her husband was on the committe that made the decision to qualify her. Taking advantage of those three factors, she’s apparently made a name for herself in Australia, even winning some local competitions—because who would dare criticize such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? So of course, she went on to compete on the international scene… and made such a mockery of herself and her sport that the judges awarded her straight zeroes, and the Olympics committee pulled breakdancing from the 2028 Los Angelos Olympics. Wah wah.

While this story is rightly hilarious, and proves the eternal truth that wokeness ruins everything, I can’t help but notice the parallels between the state of Australian breakdancing, that someone so inept and untalented could leverage a “studies” degree to dominate it, and the current state of science fiction. Specifically, this is the comment that made me think about this, which is worth reading in full:

The relevant part is this:

Rachael represents so much of what is totally lecherous about cultural studies academics. Pick a subject area that will be under-studied in your context, so you can rise through the ranks quickly (how many break dancing academics will there be in Australia?), and wreak absolute havoc in lives of the people you want to study. There is no limit to the sheer disrespect they will dole out, purely for self-advancement.

Now, I don’t think science fiction was ruined in quite the same way, ie by being dominated and colonized by academia through “studies” degrees. Science fiction was probably too large to be overtaken that way. However, the pattern is still similar, and from what I can tell, it goes something like this:

Step 1: Take over the institutions in the field that are primarily responsible for determining and evaluating excellence.

In Australia, the breakdancing field was small enough that academia was able to dominate and (for lack of a better word) colonize it, becoming the arbiters of excellence within that art. It certainly helped that the professor who had carved out this academic niche for herself was married to one of the judges in the committee that was tasked with determining excellence. This created an incestuous (and ultimately nepotistic) relationship between academia and the judging panels.

In science fiction, something similar happened with SFWA and the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’ve written before about how SFWA ruined science fiction, so I won’t repeat all that here. But the basic gist of it is this: as science fiction became more established, the organizations and publications that talked about science fiction became more authoritative on the subject of the genre than the actual writers themselves. Because of this, achieving recognition for excellence became less about creating works of actual merit, and more about gaining the approval of the people who had built their careers talking about science fiction, rather than actually creating it. And the best way to gain their approval was to join those institutions yourself, rising up in the pecking order until everyone else was beneath you.

This basically describes the career trajectories of John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, two insanely woke authors who leveraged their tenure as SFWA president for award nominations. Both of them seem to have spent at least as much time and effort talking about science fiction as they have in actually creating it: Scalzi through his blog, which he leveraged to get his first book deal, and MRK through both her blog and the Writing Excuses podcast.

Step 2: Purge those institutions until they are ideologically pure.

This step is critical. So long as the instutitions are focused on merit, the only way to climb the ranks is by creating something of merit. But once the institution has become ideologically possessed, with all of those who reject the dominant ideology being purged from positions of power, then merit no longer matters, and the way to the top becomes clear. Those who are the most ideologically pure, as demonstrated by their virtue signalling, will rise to the top. This has the added benefit of quelling all merit-based criticism, since those beneath you fear having their own ideological purity called into question.

From what I can tell, this is how Rachael Gunn rose to prominence in the Australian breakdancing scene. After all, once academia had colonized the field, who would dare question the merits of such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? In a similar manner, Scalzi and MRK rose to the top of SFWA by virtue signaling their own ideological purity and intersectional victimhood status, squelching any criticism by labeling their critics racist, sexist, bigots, homophobic, etc.

Step 3: Redefine excellence in your own image.

In the Australian breakdancing scene, this was accomplished through the combination of Rachael Gunn’s academic work and her husband’s position in the committee that qualified the Olympic competitors. And while it probably isn’t quite so blatantly nepotistic in the science fiction world, the pattern still holds true when you look at what the Hugos and Nebulas have become. This was what the Sad Puppies controversy was actually about, and because the Puppies lost, the Hugo and Nebula awards have been insufferably woke ever since:

Step 4: Use the captured institutions to purge the field of potential rivals.

The final step in this projection is to squash all of those people who represent a threat to your domination, because they have merit and you do not. Ignoring her perhaps overly generous assessment of Australian breakdancing, this is what Hannah Berrelli is talking about when she mentions all the “hundreds of Australian athletes who will have dedicated their entire lives to athletic excellence” whose blood, sweat, and tears were overshadowed and rendered irrelevant by Rachael Gunn’s Olympic stunt.

In science fiction, we see this in the fact that David Weber has never been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, or that Jim Butcher’s sole Hugo nomination lost to No Award. Both of these men are far better writers than the majority of award-winning authors, especially in our current era. You could make a solid argument that Dan Simmons or Orson Scott Card were superior, but Scalzi? Jemisin? Kingfisher?

And what about all of the new and relatively unknown authors? At least Weber and Butcher already have large followings, which they have rightfully earned through their merit. But when merit is no longer the determining factor in recognizing excellence within the field, what chance do talented up-and-coming authors have if they aren’t willing to play the ideological purity games? Answer: not a hell of a lot.

So while you laugh at how ridiculous Australia’s breakdancing performance was at the Olympics, understand that the same dynamic has been playing out in modern science fiction for years. And honestly, the results are no less ridiculous.

A Crippling Realization

I have come to realize something that is, in some ways, making it very difficult for me to keep writing. Not in the short or the medium term—I’m actually making quite good progress on my current novel WIP, and am optimistic about finishing my three unfinished trilogies in the next couple of years. But when I look on the horizon, this thing that I’ve come to realize is looming like a storm cloud, and I worry that if something doesn’t change, and change soon, that storm is going to wipe me out.

When Orson Scott Card spoke at the BYU Library in 2007, he made a profound statement that had a great influence on my writing, and my decision to write. He said that stories and fiction are how the culture talks to itself. In other words, if you want to understand a particular culture, look at the stories that it produces.

The problem is that unfortunately, I have come to despise almost everything about our current culture.

I hate all the hypocrisy and virtue signalling that we see online. I hate how that virtue signalling has poisoned almost every major franchise, from Star Wars and Marvel to the commercials and advertisements that we consume on a daily basis. I hate how the virtue signalling of our gatekeepers has allowed our cultural vandals to erase our history and destroy our cultural icons.

I hate how our education system has become corrupted. I hate how it has been transformed into an indoctrination system that brainwashes everyone who goes through it, producing nothing but legions of woke fanatical footsoldiers and hordes of incompetent midwits. I hate how it holds our children hostage for the benefit of the unions, and how it utterly exterminates our children’s natural creativity and curiosity in order to turn them into nothing but cogs in society’s grand machine.

Above all else, I hate and hold in utter contempt how our culture has become anti-life, and promotes the unrestricted wholesale slaughter of our unborn children as a moral good. I hate how this rejection of the value of life has trickled down into every facet of our society, poisoning how we see each other and how we treat our fellow men. I sincerely believe that our ongoing genocide of the unborn exceeds the evil of the Nazi holocaust in every moral and ethical dimension. I also hope that future generations have the moral clarity to hold us in greater contempt than the Nazis, and plan to do everything within my power to make that a reality.

I hate the sexual revolution, and how it eviscerated the traditional family while also producing the most prudish and sex-negative society that this nation has ever seen. I hate how our sexually “liberated” culture celebrates our worst perversions and teaches us to define ourselves by our basest urges, instead of urging us to strive for something higher and better. I despise the transgender movement that is butchering our children and annihilating their innocence, all for the carnal gratification of the worst sexual predators among us.

I hate how our culture rejects the things of God. I hate how that even most self-described Christians have never read the Bible cover to cover. I hate how our churches are led by moral cowards who fear to offend their followers more than they fear to offend the Almighty. I hate how many of our priests and pastors have come to serve Mammon more than they serve God.

I hate almost every book and story that has won a major literary award within my lifetime. When I survey the field of science fiction and fantasy, I see hordes of talented writers willfully prostituting themselves to the spirit of the age, and pleasuring the whore of Babylon for the praise and glory of the world. When I read the books that our culture holds up as the greatest contemporary works, I am disgusted by the sexual depravity and nihilistic materialism that pervades them. Aside from Brandon Sanderson and a few obscure authors whose works the culture is actively working to suppress, I find nothing redeemable or even genuinely thought-provoking in any of these contemptible works.

Most of my readers are over the age of 55, probably because of just how much I hold our contemporary culture in such contempt. And yet, I cannot help but despise the Boomers for robbing me of my birthright and leaving me buried in a mountain of debts that neither I, nor my children, nor my grandchildren will ever be able to repay. Every generation before the Baby Boomers aspired to give their children lives that were better than their own, but the Boomers squandered everything that the previous generations gave them, and left their children sicker, poorer, and more unloved. In fact, the Boomers cared so little for their children that they locked down the entire country, deprived them of the crucial years of their education, and forcefully injected them with an experimental jab, all out of fear that the virus would shave off a few of their rapidly waning years. The Boomers are the ones who gave us our totally dysfunctional education system, Roe v. Wade, the sexual revolution, and the genocide of the unborn. They are the ones who pushed God and religion out of public life, and corrupted our churches to the point where they would not recognize the Lord if He came down and preached a sermon to them Himself. If our country falls into a second civil war, it will be because of the Boomers more than any other generation.

And now we hear of wars and rumors of war in the east, and people tell me that we are closer to nuclear annihilation than at any other point in my lifetime. And yet, when I look at how corrupt and utterly depraved our society has become, I cannot help but wonder if that would be such a bad thing. We read that the sword of the wrath of the Almighty is bathed in heaven, and that the angels are pleading with the Lord to let it fall, so that it will purge our iniquity from the face of this Earth. Sometimes, I find myself raising my voice with the same plea.

I recognize that “the culture” is not monolithic, and that there are many people who hold similar opinions and think and feel the same way that I do. And I hope you don’t take the wrong idea from this rant: I’m not about to throw my life away, or do something terrible. I have a loving wife and family, and friends in my life who are genuinely good people. It’s funny how that even as things seem to get worse and worse as far as the country is concerned, the people immediately around me don’t seem nearly as bad, and my own personal life actually seems to be getting better.

But as a writer, it’s my duty and responsibility to be a part of the wider cultural conversation, in order to write stories that resonate properly with my readers. To do that, I need to keep my finger on the pulse of a culture that I have come to hold in utter contempt.

How long can this situation stand? Either the culture needs to change, or I need to change something about what I’m doing, which means that I should probably change myself. Should I change my view of the culture, or should I channel that contempt into my writing somehow?

One of the reasons I started writing the Zedekiah Wight stories under my J.M. Wight pen name is to help maintain my sanity in the face of this dilemma. I just finished writing a short story where Zedekiah basically instigates the nuclear annihilation of the galaxy, because of the reasons I outlined above. I was planning to release that story in April, but I may move it up a couple of months. Zedekiah Wight is the character who fascinates me the most right now, even though almost half of my writing group despises him. Is he a madman, or is he the last sane man in a galaxy that has gone absolutely insane? I honestly do not know.

And what about me? Is my utter contempt of the culture a sign that I’ve gone crazy, or that the world has gone crazy all around me? And what does that mean for my writing?

Reading Resolution Update: After Action Report

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

Earlier this month, I finished my last Hugo/Nebula book and ordered the last two ones that I hadn’t yet acquired. The first of those (Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin) arrived just this morning, and the other one (Way Station by Clifford D. Simak) is supposed to arrive next week, so I think that now is a good time to do a retrospective and share some of my thoughts.

There were 104 books in total, including the most recent award winners (I decided not to count the retro-Hugos midway through the year). Of those, I’ve read 35 through from start to finish, and decided that 24 were worth keeping. The rest of them (69, or almost exactly two thirds) I DNFed.

Finishing one in three books is actually about on par for me. I’ve found that if I don’t allow myself to DNF books early and often, I just don’t read. Also, it doesn’t really surprise me that nearly one third of the books I read all the way through didn’t really impress me. What can I say—I’ve a very opinionated man.

Of the 28 books that have won both a Hugo and a Nebula, I finished 12 (or about two-fifths) and found that eight (or a little over a quarter) were worth keeping. So not much different than the overall totals.

Of the 45 books that won only a Hugo, I finished 18 (exactly two-fifths) and found that 14 (about a third) were worth keeping. So my personal taste seems to be tilted more toward the Hugo than the Nebula. The difference becomes even more stark when you take out the 20 books that were nominated for (but did not win) a Nebula, a whopping 16 of which I DNFed. Excluding those, we’re left with 25 books, 14 (or more than half) of which I finished, and 11 (or just under half) I thought were worth keeping.

The contrast becomes even sharper when we look at the Nebula-only winners. Out of the 31 books that didn’t win a Hugo but did win the Nebula, I finished only five (less than one-sixth) and found that only two were worth keeping. Both of those were books that weren’t even nominated for the Hugo. When we look at the 16 Nebula-winners that were nominated for a Hugo but didn’t win, I finished only two of them (one-eight) and didn’t think that any of them were worth keeping.

So the best predictor that I wouldn’t like a book is if it won a Nebula and was nominated for a Hugo, but didn’t win. In other words, if the SFWA crowd (which is mostly authors) said “this is the best novel published this year!” and the denizens of Worldcon said “yeah… no,” that almost guaranteed I would hate it. In fact, just getting nominated for a Nebula is enough to make a book suspect.

This is why, earlier in the year, I posited the theory that SFWA has done more to ruin science fiction than any other organization. I saw this trend coming all the way back in the spring, when I was only halfway through the reading list. In the early years, SFWA was all about politicizing science fiction, and in the last few years, it’s basically turned into a nasty bunch of mean girls all trying to get a Nebula for themselves.

I tracked a few other awards just to see if there were any correlations. For the 18 books that placed in any category in the Goodreads Awards, there were only four books that I finished and two that I thought were worth keeping. Network Effect by Martha Wells received 22,971 votes in the Science Fiction category in 2020, which came to 9.69%. Blackout by Connie Willis gained only 337 votes in 2010, but that was 9.19% back then. Both of those books were keepers. The only other book that got a higher percentage for its year was Redshirts by John Scalzi, with 4,618 votes at 10.82%, but I DNFed that one. Most Hugo/Nebula winning books didn’t even clear the 5% threshold in the Goodreads Choice Awards, and in my experience anything under 10% that doesn’t immediately jump out to me probably isn’t worth reading.

Of the six Hugo/Nebula books that were nominated for a Dragon Award, the only one I even really finished was Network Effect by Martha Wells. But that makes sense, since it’s no great secret that the Hugo/Nebula crowd is trying to sabotage the Dragons by pulling exactly the same shenanigans that they accused the Sad Puppies of doing. Accusation is projection is confession, after all. As of 2022, there has never been a Hugo/Nebula winning book that has also won a Dragon, and while part of me hopes that it stays that way, another part of me is very curious to read the first book that does.

Almost all of the 104 Hugo/Nebula winning books placed somewhere in the various Locus recommended reading lists, which isn’t surprising since those lists are generally regarded as feeders for the Hugos and Nebulas (and used to get more people voting in them, too). Of the seven books that weren’t on a Locus list, the only one I finished was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, which also has the distinction of being the most difficult book to find.

(A lot of people think They’d Rather Be Right was the worst book to ever win a Hugo, but I actually enjoyed it. Unlike most Hugo/Nebula books, it was remarkably anti-Malthusian, which is probably why it’s so hated. As for the worst book to ever win a Hugo, I personally grant that distinction to Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre.)

There were only ten Hugo/Nebula books that won or were nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and I only finished two of them (and didn’t think either were worth keeping). Perhaps that means that makes it the actual best predictor that I’ll hate a book, but ten is a pretty small sample size, so I’m holding off judgment for now.

The best two decades for me were the 50s (7 books, 4 keepers) and the 00s (16 books, 6 keepers), though the 80s came in close with five keepers out of sixteen books—and let’s be honest, Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis are basically two halves of the same book. In contrast, the worst two decades were the 70s (only one keeper out of 13 total books) and the most recent decade, the 10s (15 books, 2 keepers).

So far, the 20s aren’t shaping up to be much better. In fact, I think it’s entirely fair to say that given the state of fandom since the election of President Trump (and the general state of insanity in this post-Trump era), a Hugo or a Nebula should count as a mark against a book, rather than for it. That is, the primary value of these awards is to tell you which books to avoid. Perhaps this will change at some point in the future, like it did after the madness of the 70s or the malaise of the 90s (not a good decade for science fiction, apart from books published by Baen), but I’m not holding my breath.

So that was my reading resolution for 2022. If I hadn’t allowed myself to DNF, I can guarantee that I never would have accomplished it. As it stands, though, I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

What sort of reading resolution should I set for 2023?

Did the internet ruin fandom?

Ever since I made a spreadsheet to track all the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books, I’ve noticed some interesting patterns. I’ve already blogged about how the genre seemed to transform after the creation of SFWA and the introduction of the Nebula Awards. That seems to mark the point where the left’s long march through the institutions began in our genre, though it may be coincidental as that is also when the New Wave began. Or the two events may be connected, which wouldn’t surprise me.

In any case, I’ve expanded that spreadsheet to include the Dragon Awards and the Goodreads Choice Awards for the fantasy and science fiction categories, and I’m now in the process of adding all the books from the Locus magazine’s readers’ poll, at least for science fiction and fantasy. From what I can tell, Locus basically sets which books will be considered for nomination with most of the older awards, creating what a cynical person might call a “master slate.” And since Locus has been insufferably woke for a very long time (I still read my local university library’s copy every month, though articles like this one make me question why), that goes a long way to explaining how the Hugos and Nebulas became so woke—though I’m still not sure if Locus is woke because its core readership (and primary revenue source), the New York publishing establishment, is woke, or if the organization was captured during the left’s long march through the institutions. Or if Locus has simply been woke from its inception.

But I’ve noticed other patterns, including some with the Goodread’s Choice Awards (which include a very public vote tally) that seem to indicate that the Hugos, the Nebulas, and the Locus readers’ poll are now of minimal cultural significance: a sideshow, if you will, or a very small clique that represents the genre’s past, not its future. Which is actually pretty obvious—you don’t need to assemble a spreadsheet of thousands of books to see that. But it’s an interesting pattern nonetheless, and it’s made me wonder if perhaps the rise of the internet—in particular, social media—killed fandom, at least as we traditionally understand it.

From what I can tell, SF&F fandom began in the 20s during the era of Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” and the pulps. During the Golden Age of the 30s and 40s, fandom began to organize things Worldcon and the Hugos, but the genre was still very monolothic, with so few books and magazines being published each year that it was possible for a devoted fan to read all of them. In fact, the culture generally was very monolithic, with ABC, NBC, and CBS dominating television, the New York Times dominating the newspapers, and Life and the Saturday Evening Post dominating the magazines.

Because of the monolithic nature of the culture during this time, it was possible for a single figure to dominate and shape the field, like Walter Cronkite in journalism, or John W. Campbell Jr. in science fiction. But fandom was still mostly a localized affair, with geographical distance and the limitations of communications technology keeping fannish controversies from becoming too fractious or toxic—though not for lack of effort. But in a world without internet, where arguments happened either in person at conventions or the local club, or else evolved gradually in the pages of the various fanzines, none of the factions ever tried to split or go their own way. Granted, part of that was due to the monolithic nature of the genre—if they did split off, where would they go?—but there was still a sense that everyone in their small corner of fandom was a part of a far greater whole, even with all of their passionate and sometimes fractious opinions.

But as science fiction grew, it became less monolithic, if for no other reason than that it was no longer possible to read all of the books and magazines that were coming out. From what I can tell, the genre crossed that threshold sometime in the 60s. This was also when the New Wave pushed back against the standards set by Campbell and began producing some very experimental (and also more left-wing) work. But fandom didn’t totally fracture at this time. Instead, from what I can tell, the Locus reader’s poll emerged in order to filter out everything but the very best work for consideration for the awards.

In a world where everyone considers themselves to be part of the larger community of fandom, awards—even the relatively minor ones—carry a lot of weight. This remained true through the 70s and 80s as science fiction grew to the point where it truly went mainstream. In fact, the awards became even more important, because there was no longer any way for even the most devoted fan to read (or watch, or play) all of the new books and magazines (or movies, or shows, or games) that were coming out. New subgenres and subcultures of fandom began to emerge, but everyone still looked to the awards—particularly the Hugos and the Nebulas—as the standard of excellence.

But the publishers placed even more weight on the awards, because winning a Hugo, or getting on a New York Times bestseller list, often were key to propelling sales. So over time, the publishers gradually took over the awards, as well as the organizations and infrastructure that had been built around them. With the Nebulas, it isn’t hard to see how this happened, as SFWA allows publishers to be members (creating a very obvious conflict of interest that the leadership of that organization has chosen to ignore). With the Hugos, it probably happened through Locus, since the magazine depends so much on advertising for its financials. This became even more true as the subscriber base declined in the 90s, as it did for all of the major magazines in the field.

What caused the decline in subscribers? The internet, of course. Fans no longer depended on the ‘zines to stay in touch with the broader community, but began to organize into listservs, email chains, and message board forums instead. Later, blogs and social media continued this trend. Geographic distance became increasingly irrelevant, and fandom became less of something that you connected with through your local group of friends and more something that you connected with online as an atomized individual.

But ironically, the more interconnected fandom became via the internet, the more it began to fracture. All of those passionate opinions were no longer tempered by the boundaries of time and distance, and the snarkiest and most vitriolic or self-righteous opinions were often the ones that garnered the largest audience. This became even more true with the advent of social media, which relies on amplifying outrage to addict its users and maximize profits. Social media also encouraged the formation of echo chambers, where the various corners of fandom spent so much time talking to each other than they soon had little in common with the wider fandom. Geographical distance counted much less, but ideological distance counted for more—much more.

But did the internet ruin fandom, or save it? Or in other words, was this transformation a net loss or a net gain for fans of the genre? Because, on the creation side of things, I think the internet was very much a positive development. No longer did a creator have to rely on a small clique of ossified New York gatekeepers for their work to see the light of day, and the nature of online distribution meant that a quirky book written for a tiny but underserved subculture could find and grow an audience quite effectively, even without any mainstream appeal. Of course, this only accelerated the division of fandom, but it also meant that those subcultures—many of which had been underserved for decades—now had much more content tailored specifically for them.

In the 10s, the deepening divisions within fandom manifested in a fight for control of the major awards—specifically, the Hugos. That was whate the puppies were all about. But the fight became so toxic that the awards themselves became discredited, and the victory of the wrongfun brigade proved to be a Pyrrhic one. And because the culture is no longer monolithic, and fandom is no longer a single community united by a love for the same thing, the fall of the awards has given us a world where it matters much less that you’re a fan of science fiction and fantasy generally, and much more that you’re a fan of X author, or X game, or X thing.

Gone are the days when a single author, or editor, or influencer can reshape the culture in their own image. The wrongfun brigade is still trying to do that, but all they will ultimately accomplish is to destroy everything that they touch, including all of the legacy institutions that they now control. But this also means that we’ve lost that sense of being part of a larger, broader community. Of course, it’s fair to argue that that was always just an illusion, and that we’re all much better off now that there’s something literally for everybody. But I do think that’s come at a cost of increasing social isolation.

The pandemic has no doubt accelerated this. I wasn’t at Chicon or Dragoncon this past weekend, but I have friends that were, and I plan to meet up with them at FanX Salt Lake later this month. It will be interesting to get their take on all this. In the meantime, I will continue to fill out my book awards spreadsheet and look for interesting patterns.

Reading Resolution Update: June

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

This is the last one of these resolution updates that I’m going to post here on this blog. I’ve only got three books left now: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (1989 Nebula), A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1993 Hugo), and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (1993 Hugo and Nebula). Since I already own all of those, I’ll probably finish reading them by the end of July, and the only other books I need to acquire to finish the resolution are Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo), Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo), and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin (2009 Nebula).

I will, however, do an in-depth study of the final results and post them here. There should be some interesting trends, and hopefully my own reading preferences will provide some useful insights, though really those preferences say more about me than they do about these books. Reading tastes are very subjective, so I’m sure there are a lot of good and brilliant people who love some of these books that I’ve passed on, and vice versa. But maybe sharing my own reading preferences will help others to develop their own, and if that helps to encourage more reading, that would be great.

One of the major insights that I’ve already discovered is that the best predictor that I will not like a book is if it won a Nebula without winning a Hugo. In a post last month, I speculated as to why that may be. I’ve already expanded my Hugo/Nebula award spreadsheet to include all of the nominated books as well, but I’ve blacked out the Nebula nominated books and will probably skip most of them. After all, if there’s something about the Nebula books that rubs me the wrong way, maybe I can get more use from that award by using it as a “do not read” list rather than a recommended reading list.

I’m also branching out to the Dragons and Goodreads Choice award-winning books, starting with the most recent ones and working my way back. The really neat thing about Goodreads Choice is that they post how many votes each top-20 book got in each category, and how many votes were cast in each category overall, so it’s very easy to quantify and rank each book. For example, in the science fiction category, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir won first place in 2021 with 92,831 votes out of 281,584, or a 32.97% plurality. That is the largest plurality that any book has ever won in that category, so either Project Hail Mary is a damned good book, or all the other books really sucked—and I tend to think it’s the former, which is why I’m reading it now.

The Dragons are very different, but I haven’t read enough of them to notice any trends or form any opinions. However, there are some indications that the Dragons are the anti-Hugos/Nebulas, and to some lesser extent the anti-Goodreads Choice Awards, which seem to swing more toward the Hugo/Nebula crowd, even if most of the Hugo and Nebula nominated books only typically get between 5% and <1% of the vote. To gather more data, I’ve decided not to skip any of the Hugo/Nebula books that placed in the Goodreads Choice Award, especially since 2015 when the Sad Puppies schism really shook things up in the science fiction book world. So it will be interesting to see which of these books I think are worth reading and owning, and which ones I think aren’t.

So in short, now that I’ve (just about) read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning books, I’m going to move on to the Hugo (but not Nebula) nominated books, the Dragons, and the Goodreads Choice winners and nominees. But I’m not going to set a deadline, or hold myself to reading all of them. Rather, I’m just going to take it as a starting point, and instead set a goal of 100 pages per day, reading whatever strikes my fancy.

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired

  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1990 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish

  • Startide Rising by David Brin (1984 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Uplift War by David Brin (1988 Hugo)
  • To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (1999 Hugo)
  • A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2000 Hugo)
  • Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear (2001 Nebula)
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke (2005 Hugo)
  • A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark (2022 Nebula)

How SFWA ruined science fiction (and why it needs to die)

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.

Reading Resolution Update: May

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

When I first got the idea for this new year’s resolution six months ago, I was reading maybe 30-60 pages every other day, with no real goal or direction. My wife and I had already decided to change our routine so we could read in bed for an hour before going to sleep, but we weren’t very good at keeping to that routine.

I set this goal because I knew that I needed to read more books—specifically, books in my genre. So I decided: why not set my sights high and aim for the best of the best? Not that I still believe that the Hugos and Nebulas represent the best of SF&F, but at one point I did genuinely believe that, or acted as if I did, which amounts to the same thing. So why not aim to read them all?

I thought it would take a lot longer to get this far, but here it is, June already, and I’ve almost read them all. When I started, I’d read only 36 out of 110 books. I did find a few new-to-me books that were really fantastic, but most of them were books I didn’t like. However, in a weird sort of way that actually helped me to read more, because it helped me to better understand my own tastes. So when I hit a small reading slump in March-April, I was able to branch out and read some books that I did enjoy, which helped to keep the momentum strong.

Several things have helped me to read a lot more over the course of this challenge:

First, having a reading list really helped. It provided me with a long-term, measurable goal that I could use to keep track of my progress. For me, that was highly motivational.

Second, DNFing early and often, and skipping to the last chapter before marking it as DNF. Often, I would find confirmation in the last chapter that I had indeed made the right choice not to read the rest of it. This taught me to trust my own judgment and to better understand my own tastes, which reaped dividends later.

Third, learning how to read in a way that worked with my own ADHD, not against it. This helped me to turn a great weakness, which had foiled my previous resolutions to read more books, into an advantage. But it required developing a better accountability system, which brings us to…

Fourth, using a reading log to track my progress. I got this idea from my wife, who is very good with spreadsheets. I know it doesn’t work for everyone to track everything down to how many pages per day you need to read of each book you’re currently reading, but for me, it really worked. Finally…

Fifth, starting a reading journal to track my own progress and record my own thoughts and impressions about what I’m reading. This is a topic that deserves its own blog post, but I’ve been doing it for a couple of months now, and I find that it really helps me to get a lot more out of what I read, as well as motivating me to read more. Among other things, I keep track of which books I read and DNF each month, my impressions of each book after reading or DNFing it, and any quotes from what I’m reading that stand out as being particularly memorable.

At the rate that I’m going, I will probably achieve this resolution (or at least the reading part of it) before the end of June. It might take a little more time to finish the Uplift Trilogy if I don’t DNF it, but I’ll certainly have finished before the end of the year. Consequently, I’m already drawing up other reading lists for awards like the Dragons and Goodread’s Choice, but I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I want to proceed. Most likely, I will expand those lists to include nominees, but also pick and choose which ones to read.

In any case, here are all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books I read or DNFed in May:

Books that I read and plan to or have already aquired

  • The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (2004 Nebula)
  • Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin (2009 Nebula)
  • All Clear by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (Technically I read this one in April and listed it under “Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire,” but after giving the sequel a chance I’ve decided to move it up here. Really, they should all be one book.)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire

  • The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer (1996 Nebula)

Books that I did not finish

  • Timescape by Gregory Benford (1981 Nebula)
  • No Enemy but Time by Michael Bishop (1983 Nebula)
  • The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy (1988 Nebula)
  • Slow River by Nicola Griffith (1997 Nebula)
  • The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro (2002 Nebula)
  • Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (2003 Hugo)
  • Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004 Hugo and 2005 Nebula)
  • Seeker by Jack McDevitt (2007 Nebula)
  • The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2009 Hugo)
  • Among Others by Jo Walton (2012 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Uprooted by Naomi Novik (2016 Nebula)

Total books remaining: 11 out of 111 (currently reading 5 and listening to 1).

Why books written by mothers are better than books written by childless women

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.

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).