There’s this video clip currently making the rounds where Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) confronts a crazy-eyed law professor from Berkely and gets called out for, among other things, saying that trans people “don’t exist.” It’s a highly partisan exchange that I’m sure will be used by both sides to rally the base, but it also gets at the fundamental incoherence of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, which I find absolutely fascinating.
First of all, it’s worth examining the accusation that Hawley doesn’t think that trans people “exist.” What exactly does that accusation mean? It can actually mean one (or both) of two things:
The category of “trans” is not (or should not be) a legitimate identity for legal and societal purposes.
People who identify as “trans” should be un-personed and deprived of all their basic human rights.
It’s extremely disingenuous of the professor to conflate those things, because it is entirely possible to believe the former without believing the latter: that is, to believe that “trans” as a category is illegitimate while also acknowledging that people who identify as “trans” are still people and deserving of basic human rights. Also, it’s disingenuous of her to argue that denying “trans” as a category causes people who identify as “trans” to commit suicide, as the suicide rate for transgender people is the same after they transition as it is before they transition. But I digress.
The thing that makes this interesting, at least to me, is that if you follow the professor’s logic to its conclusion, it actually undermines the fundamental premise of the gay rights movement: that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals didn’t choose to be gay, but in fact were “born this way.” Allow me to explain.
At first, the argument was “I didn’t choose to be gay, I was born this way.” Thus the concept of sexual identity was born, with categories for heterosexual, homosexual (gay/lesbian), and bisexual.
Then, the argument was “I’m a man/woman who was born in a woman’s/man’s body.” In other words, that gender and sex are separate things, and it is possible to identify with a gender that is different than your sex. Thus, the concept of gender identity was born, and with it the category of transgender.
At this point, it’s important to point out that the “born this way” argument still held sway. The idea wasn’t that trans people choose to change gender, but that they were, in fact, born in the wrong body. Thus the distinction between sex and gender.
But once the trans category was added to the movement, transforming it into LGBT, that created a major epistemological problem for its members: how do you know which category you belong to? That is, how do you know whether you’re actually a gay man, or really a woman in a man’s body? You can’t be both. You were either born one way, or you were born the other. So which one is it, and how do you know?
This is where the movement began to fall apart, because there is no objective way to tell the difference between gay/lesbian and trans. It’s entirely subjective. And once we allowed that, suddenly we got a bunch of people saying things like:
“What if I feel like a man today, and a woman tomorrow?”
“What if I don’t feel like a man OR a woman?”
“What if I feel like I’m actually a cat, or a wolf?”
“What if I feel like I’m a totally different gender/sexual category that none of y’all have imagined yet?”
And suddenly, just like that, the “born this way” argument was completely undermined, because if gender and sexuality are subjective, then it can be whatever you want it to be. Which is how we got personal bios like this one:
Serah Eley is a software developer and former podcaster who once produced a weekly science fiction podcast called Escape Pod. It’s since gone on to become somewhat successful. She strangely mispronounced her name as Steve Eley at the time; she’s since realized that life is much more fun as a woman, and came out as transgender last year. Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two wives, Alison and Cat.
So if there were ever any betting pools on what happened to Steve: changed sex, joined a committed lesbian love triangle is the dark horse winner. She is, obviously, still Having Fun.
So gender is something you can change on a whim because it’s “more fun”? That doesn’t sound at all like Serah was “born this way.” It sounds a lot more like “reality is whatever I want it to be.”
But if sexuality and gender are all subjective, the entire premise that the movement was originally built upon—that LGBT people are “born this way”—is completely false, and the “born this way” argument is outdated at best, and at worst was a Trojan Horse for the LGBTQ+ agenda from the very beginning.
Either way, by the standards of this Berkeley professor, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals “don’t exist.”
Just like man and woman “don’t exist.”
Just like objective reality doesn’t “exist.”
Because biological sex, “born this way” arguments, and objective reality itself are all fundamentally transphobic.
That’s where you get if you follow the LGBTQ+ logic to its ultimate conclusion. The fundamental premises on which the movement is based are totally incoherent and self-contradictory. It’s remarkable, really, because the language the movement uses is not all that different from the Orwellian doublespeak of 1984.
But hey, I’ve also been reliably informed that reason and logic are all just constructs of white supremacy, so obviously that means that professor crazy-eyes is right and there’s nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
This was a fun one to write, even if it did go a little dark at first. The idea for it came from this article about a couple in San Francisco who received an outrageously huge warning fine ($1,500) for parking their car in their own driveway. In the comments to the article, I wrote:
This is why property taxes are evil. If the government can seize your house for non-payment of taxes, was it ever really yours to begin with?
But here’s the thing: every possible answer to that question is terrifying.
If you answer “no, I guess it wasn’t ever really my house,” you’re acknowledging that Mao was right and all power (and with it, ownership) flows from the barrel of a gun.
If you answer “yes, it’s still my own house,” then you have to answer the question: does the state have the right to issue property taxes?
Answer “yes, the state is within its rights,” then congratulations, you’ve just given the Maoist approach to property ownership a veneer of legitimacy and revealed yourself for a boot-licker and a coward.
Answer “no, the state is not within its rights,” then you’ve just acknowledged that you live under a tyrannical regime. It might be a relatively benign regime, but a petty tyrant is still a tyrant, as we saw during the covid lockdowns.
But you’ve still got one more question: do you pay the property taxes, or don’t you?
Answer no, and the state seizes your property and/or throws you in prison.
Answer yes, and you’ve just put yourself in the same position as the landlord who pays protection money to the mob. The only difference is that this mob wears uniforms and has a geographic monopoly on the use of deadly force.
This is why the Roman farmers welcomed the barbarians. Perhaps we should as well.
Later, as I thought on it, I wondered if perhaps I couldn’t write a short story that gets across everything I hate about the property tax. I came up with an idea where the thing that’s being taxed isn’t your property, but your time and your body—literally.
Once a quarter, you are required to voluntarily submit your body to the state, who uses a chip in your brain to turn you into a mindless zombie and exploit you for manual labor. If you have no record and a clean social credit score, it’s typically only for a couple of days. Otherwise, you’ll be a mindless zombie slave of the state for a couple of weeks, or maybe even a couple of months. If you’re a criminal, you may spend more of your life as a zombie slave than as a free man.
To make it even more outrageous and controversial, the story is about a young woman who wakes up from the body tax and finds that she’s pregnant. She was used as a sex worker, and the birth control failed. But the twist is that she’s pro-life, and wants to keep the child. Yay for controversy!
Like I said, it was a really fun story to write. And even though it goes to some pretty dark places, it actually has a happy ending, oddly enough. But the way I’ve currently written it, I think it’s a bit too sappy, so hopefully my writing group can help to smooth that out and make it end on the right note.
This will probably be my last short story for a while. I’ve decided to turn “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter” into two stories: “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter” (which I’ve already written) and “Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter.” That will probably turn into a wild and zany series of short stories. Also, based on the feedback from my writing group, I will probably turn “The Freedom of Second Chances” into two short stories (one of which will also be very pro-life, oddly enough).
But I may have to come back and write more short stories soon. “Blight of Empire” and “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter” are both out on submission to the traditional markets, and both of them have received some surprisingly favorable responses from the editors. No contracts yet, but they are on hold for consideration. If they do get picked up, then I’ll have to write a couple more short stories (probably in the Christopher Columbus series) to fill out my publication schedule. Got to keep a solid buffer of short stories to publish.
In the meantime, I’ve resumed work on Children of the Starry Sea and hope to have it done by Thanksgiving. That should be enough time to finish the rough draft and cycle through all the necessary revisions, barring some unforeseen hangups like another major writing block or a difficult life event. But that’s the plan.
That’s all for now. I’ll leave off this post with an excerpt from “The Body Tax,” where Ellie (the protagonist) confronts the terrorist leader who has kidnapped her:
“If the state can throw you into prison—or worse, turn you into a robota—for failure to pay the body tax, was your body ever really yours to begin with? Be careful, because every possible answer to that question is terrifying.”
I sighed heavily. “All right. Suppose I say that you’re right, and it means that I don’t own my own body?”
Mav leaned forward, grinning manically from ear to ear. “Then you’ve just admitted that Mao Tsedong was right, and all power—as well as ownership—flow from the barrel of a gun. But consider the implications if your answer is no—that in spite of the body tax, you do still own your body. Then you have to ask yourself: does the state have the legitimate authority to levy such a tax, or does it not?”
“I don’t know,” I said, growing tired of these rhetorical games.
“If you answer that the state is acting within its authority to issue such a tax, then congratulations, you have just legitimized the Maoist philosophy of property and ownership. Might makes right, the strong always take what is theirs, and possession is the whole of the law. But if you answer contrarywise, that the state does not have legitimate authority to issue the body tax, then why do you pay it? Is it not simply because you fear what the state will do to you if you do not pay? In that case, your position is no different than the man who pays protection money to the mob—only this mob wears uniforms and calls itself the law. In which case, the state is simply the dominant criminal enterprise—or dare I say it, terrorist organization—in the area in which you live. Terrifying, yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed, more to get him to drop the subject than anything else. “It’s terrifying.”
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
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.
So I DNFed Timescape by Gregory Benford today. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the retro-future view of the 90s as a dystopian post-climate catastrophe wasteland was predictably bad. But this quote from the afterword got me to thinking:
Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth [sic], and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing.
For 70s science fiction, the idea of an imminent, inevitable, and nigh-apocalyptic environmental collapse was thought to be so ingrained in the genre that it was accepted as a foundational trope of the genre. As a consequence, 70s science fiction tends to age very poorly. Almost all of the “important” works of the era, like Timescape, are infused with this Malthusian nonsense, and accept as axiomatic that all of the big crises of the 70s would only get worse and worse.
In contrast, the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was all about how science could help us to overcome the crises of their time, not how those crises were fundamentally insurmountable. Small wonder, then, that authors like Heinlein and Clarke inspired us to put men on the moon and satellites into orbit. And what did the authors of the 70s inspire us to do? Certainly not to tear down the Iron Curtain, pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, or reduce global poverty at the most extraordinary rate in history. And yet, all of those things actually happened.
It makes me think of this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
So what are some of the current assumptions of the science fiction field that will make future generations of readers scratch their heads? What are the things that will make the “important” works of 2020s science fiction age rather poorly?
Racial essentialism is probably a big one. I sense a growing cultural backlash against the racism of the intersectional left, especially in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020. That’s why the term “white supremacy” is in vogue right now, because the word “racist” has lost all of its power through overuse. If Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic, then I suspect that at least a few future SF historians will draw a connection between the Hugo’s demise and N.K. Jemisin’s three consecutive Hugo wins in the 2010s.
Transgenderism is probably another. Laying childish things aside, a society that rejects the biological essentialism of gender is not even metastable, as we’re seeing right now with all of the rapes in transgender bathrooms and prison facilities, with the obvious social contagion driving LGBTQ trends in the rising generation, and with all of the ways that political correctness demands that we reject basic science, typified so perfectly by the pregnant man emoji. That doesn’t necessarily mean that gender norms will revert to what they were in the 50s—in fact, I tend to think that the norms of that era were only metastable at best—but I do think that there’s a major cultural backlash on the horizon.
There’s a lot of other low-hanging fruit: the cli-fi of our era will probably age just as poorly as the apocalyptic visions of climate catstrophe written in the 1970s, and books that are based on 20s feminism will probably age just as poorly as 20s feminism itself. But what about some of the more difficult things to predict?
One of the more subtle ways that our current science fiction may age poorly is the complete ignorance of worldviews that clash with the established narrative. I would say that there’s a refusal to engage with contrary narratives, but it actually goes much deeper, as many writers are so deep in their own echo chambers that they don’t even know that contrary viewpoints exist. This has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with all of the ways that social media has re-engineered our society. Future generations will probably see the effects of this re-engineering much more clearly, and will wonder that the science fiction writers of our age were so unaware of how it affected them—both on the political right and on the political left.
Another less obvious thing is our generation’s lackadaisical and often schizophrenic attitudes on the importance of the family. When the chaos of the 20s is finally in the rear-view mirror, I suspect that there’s going to be a major groundswell of public interest in forming, cultivating, and maintaining strong families—largely because I suspect that’s how we’re ultimately going to find our way out of all this chaos. There’s a reason why Augustus Caesar, founder of one of the greatest empires in world history, placed such an emphasis on the importance of the family. Much of today’s science fiction takes it for granted that “love makes a family,” which was never true in any age—not even our own. It also takes for granted that found family is an adequate substitute for the real thing. With mutual commitment and great personal sacrifice, it can be, but that isn’t usually expressed on the page.
Does this feel a bit too much like wishcasting? How am I wrong, or what are some of the other things that I’ve missed? It’s probably just as difficult for us to answer this question as it is for a goldfish to comprehend what water is, but it is an interesting exercise, and hopefully a useful (or at least entertaining) one.
For short stories, I typically self-publish them first as free ebooks, until I have enough of them to bundle together in a collection. I’ve found that this is a great way to give new readers a taste of my writing and engage my already existing fans. It also helps to market the collections, which is great.
Last week, I was going to publish “The New Covenant,” a post-apocalyptic short story about a theocratic republic in the post-collapse United States that is holding a public execution of four abortionists. The main character is the bishop/mayor tasked with conducting the public execution. While the story doesn’t come down morally or politically on one side or another, he is a sympathetic character, and the execution does indeed take place.
As you can imagine, this is a very politically charged story, perhaps even more than “The Promise of King Washington” which starts out with vultures flying over hundreds of gallows lining the Capitol Mall in Washington DC. Politics has really become a minefield these days, and aside from the authors like Larry Correia who have picked a side and made that a major part of their author brand, it’s very difficult to write about politics or current events without turning everyone off.
Before the war in Ukraine, I used to be able to do that. During the 2020 election, I would share my thoughts in my newsletter, and get emails from fans that said “I totally agree with you, and that’s why I’m voting for Biden!” right alongside other emails that said “I’m so glad you get it! Trump-Pence 2020!” My basic approach was to engage in regular self-reflection, sincerely listen to opposing points of view, avoid outright partisanship, and assume that the person I was writing for was a good, honest person who disagreed with me. And until the war in Ukraine, that seemed to work.
But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something has really changed. About a month ago, I wrote an email with some of my then-current thoughts on the conflict, as well as some of my predictions for what will come next, and while I got a few friendly emails, I also noticed a lot of drive-by one-stars and upvotes for one-star reviews on Amazon. I suspect that that newsletter turned off some people, and a small fraction of them decided to take it out on me by one-starring a bunch of my books.
It may also have been something I mentioned on this blog. I haven’t publicly shared my reflections on the Ukraine war, but I have been pretty open about the fact that I’m reading through all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books this year, and have reflected rather candidly on that. Since this blog is public, it’s much more likely to attract attention from potential outrage mobs than my email newsletter, and ever since the Sad Puppies, fandom has been downright toxic with outrage mobs of every stripe. So the one-star bombers may have come from there.
Of course, it may also be that the quality of my stories is declining. But I don’t think it’s primarily that, because this is a new pattern of behavior that I haven’t seen before.
My general feeling is that the war in Ukraine has been pouring gasoline on every internet flame war, and that as bad as the partisan divide was in 2021, it’s getting much worse. Which means that it is rapidly becoming impossible to talk about politics or current events without taking a side, making the approach that I’ve taken up to this point untenable. A future historical narrative is being constructed before our eyes, and the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the world.
Of course, that also means that it’s never been more important to bridge the partisan divide. But that isn’t something I can do just by posting my musings and reflections. Every battle needs to be chosen deliberately and with care, and in most cases, the winning move is probably going to be not to play.
I am not ashamed of “The New Covenant.” I think it is one of the timelier and more thoughtful things I have written. But it’s also very political, and not a very good introduction to the rest of my books. I do still plan to publish it, but as part of my fourth short story collection, Beyond World’s End, and not as a free single. And moving forward, I’m going to be more careful about which short story singles I do publish. I’m not going to self-censor what I write, but I am going to be more careful about what I publish.
My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.
So March is usually the time where people get tired of their new year’s resolutions and either give them up entirely or put them on the back burner for a while. But at this point, I’m a little more than halfway through achieving this one, so I will definitely keep pressing on since I don’t think it will take the whole year to accomplish it. In fact, I may actually expand it to include all of the short stories, novellas, and novelettes. I’ve already filled out the spreadsheet (with a huge thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which also lists all of the collections and anthologies where each story can be found).
With that said, my enthusiasm for reading all of these books is starting to flag, and I’m not pushing on as vigorously as I did back in January. There have been a lot of DNFs… a lot of DNFs. But now, I’m starting to get to the books that aren’t obvious DNFs, which is frustrating, because when you get more than halfway through a 600 page book before you realize it isn’t worth finishing, that really does take the fun out of reading, at least in the short term.
But it has been very eye-opening to see what kinds of books tend to win Hugos and Nebulas. I’ve noticed some interesting patterns that have given me real insight into the people who vote in these awards, which consists of the old guard in fandom for the Hugos, and members of SFWA (mostly professional authors) for the Nebulas.
One book in particular I found really eye-opening in this regard, and that was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Mark Clifton was a science fiction short story writer who was fairly prolific, but died tragically about ten years after They’d Rather Be Right came out in 1955. Frank Riley was a newspaper man who dabbled a little bit in mystery short stories but only ever co-wrote this one novel.
They’d Rather Be Right is a notoriously difficult book to get your hands on. An abridged version with the title The Forever Machine is on sale on Amazon somewhere north of $100, and neither version was available at either my local library or the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, and that’s unusual because the HBLL’s science fiction and fantasy collection is one of the best in the country. I eventually bought a used version of They’d Rather Be Right on Amazon from a third-party seller for $10: it was an old library copy from a small town in Arizona, and I think the seller was the actual library.
In reading about this book, I discovered that it’s been widely panned as the “worst book to win a Hugo.” However, after reading it, I can definitely say it is not the worst book. It’s not the best book either, but it is far from the worst, and I enjoyed it enough to put it on the “books worth keeping” list. So why is it considered the worst Hugo-winning book, and why has it been forgotten so thoroughly?
My working theory is that They’d Rather Be Right isn’t actually bad, it’s just heretical. Science fiction has always skewed toward the political left, and this book thoroughly ridicules some deeply held left-wing beliefs of its day. For example, it goes out of its way to ridicule scientists as a class, and makes it seem ludicrous that they have any business deciding on how the rest of society should be governed. It also pokes fun at some of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, which is notable because so many of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels of the 60s and 70s are so thoroughly Freudian.
So what happened, I believe, is that after the Hugos became a regular feature of Worldcon (They’d Rather Be Right was only the 2nd novel to ever win a Hugo), the influencers and kingmakers within fandom decided that this one won on a fluke, and did everything they could to suppress it. And perhaps it really was a fluke, since the Hugo Awards weren’t yet established, and Worldcon itself was only a little more than a decade old.
Because here’s the thing: the Hugos and the Nebulas have always been radically left-wing. Science fiction in general has always leaned hard to the left, and those of us who consider ourselves right-wingers have always been a despised minority to most of the rest of fandom. That didn’t start in the 50s either: if anything, it started with the Futurians, as Donald Wollheim himself (founder of DAW Books) said that science fiction “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.” The Futurians were the ones who founded both Worldcon and SFWA, as well as several other establishment institutions in the SF&F field.
But I think it started before the Futurians, because it makes a lot of sense that science fiction would attract left-wingers more than it would right-wingers. Left-wingers are the kind of people who think that traditions should be thrown out and new ideas should be implemented, whereas right-wingers are the kind of people who think that new ideas should be treated cautiously, and traditions should be upheld.
There’s a cycle that happens about every 50 to 100 years, and it goes like this: someone comes up with a Beautiful Idea that almost everyone on the left becomes enamored of. They pore over this idea, ponder it, debate it amongst themselves, and spill copious amounts of ink over it, mostly in the form of academic discourses and thesis papers.
Gradually, this idea matures into a General Theory, and the left constructs a whole worldview around it. But at this point, it starts to come into conflict with reality—not in a catastrophic way at first, but definitely in a way that causes some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. But because the Beautiful Idea was so beautiful, none of the theory’s proponents really want to give it up, so they start to build a bulwark of apologia to explain the theory’s inconsistencies and contradictions.
After a while, though, that isn’t enough, and reality begins to intrude in ways that simply cannot be ignored. At this point, the General Theory morphs into an Ugly Ideology, possessing all of its followers and driving them into incredible pathologies. Groupthink and doublespeak become de rigueur, and hypocrisy infects everyone. Values like diversity, curiosity, open inquiry, freedom of speech, and intellectual honesty are all thrown out, as nothing is more important than promoting the ideology. Right and wrong cease to matter as well: the only thing that matters is power.
Eventually, reality intrudes in such a way that the entire edifice comes crumbling down, completely discrediting the Beautiful Idea and everyone who ever believed in it. But if the Ugly Ideology persists for too long, it culminates in a reign of terror, with guillotines, gas chambers, firing squads, holocausts, and genocides.
Fortunately, there are people who drop out at every stage of this cycle: “That’s a Beautiful Idea, but it’s still flawed.” “I like the General Theory, but I don’t think it explains everything.” “I am a true believer in this Ugly Ideology, but I’m not going to pull the trigger on those people.” And if enough people drop out, the pendulum swings back, the left goes into retreat, and culture and politics swing back to the right again… until someone discovers (or rediscovers) a Beautiful Idea.
In the 60s and 70s, the left was in the early stages of the Ugly Ideology phase of this cycle. Not surprisingly, the science fiction of that time was pretty terrible. Then the Reagan era happened, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and left was thrown on the back foot for a generation. During this time (the 80s and 90s), the award-winning science fiction was actually pretty good.
But that was also the time when the ideas that underpin critical race theory began to take root—the “Beatiful Ideas” that gave us, among other things, Defund the Police, the George Floyd riots, the epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies, and the ongoing collapse of leftist-run cities like Chicago and San Francisco. In science fiction, this culminated in the sad and rabid puppies, at which point the Hugos and Nebulas became total garbage again, because the left-leaning fandom had become so ideologically possessed.
So anyways, that’s my take on it. I really did enjoy They’d Rather Be Right, and not just for the insights into fandom. In any case, here are all of the other Hugo and Nebula winning books I read or DNFed in March:
Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:
They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955 Hugo)
Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:
The City & The City by China Mieville (2010 Hugo)
Books that I did not finish:
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962 Hugo)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer (1972 Hugo)
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977 Hugo)
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981 Hugo)
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008 Hugo and Nebula)
In the next few days, I’m going to unpublish my short story “Payday.” It will still be available in the collection In Times Such As These, but I think it’s about time that its run as a free short story single should come to a close.
(For those of you who may not be familiar with how I do things around here, I typically publish my short stories first as free singles, then bring them down when I have enough to bundle into a collection. I’m actually going to take down a bunch of my short story singles over the next couple of weeks as I get ready to publish the second batch of stories that will appear in my fourth collection, Beyond World’s End, sometime this spring.)
I originally wrote “Payday” back in 2017, in response to an anthology call sponsored by the Economic Security Project, an NGO whose stated goal is to bring about a universal basic income. My story (which obviously did not win the contest) showcases all of the dangers of a UBI, such as inflation, supply chain shortages, and the breakdown of local businesses and communities.
I self-published the story in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was getting started. At the time, I had no idea that my warnings and predictions would soon become so prescient. The stimulus checks and unemployment benefits weren’t exactly a UBI, but they were regarded by many as a stepping stone to enacting that policy, and what did they lead to? Inflation, supply chain shortages, and the breakdown of local businesses and communities.
In January 2021, I unpublished “Payday” so as to include it in the collection In Times Such As These the following month, but then the other shoe of the pandemic began to drop. The threat of rampant inflation, which the authorities claimed would be “transitory,” convinced me that this story was too timely to take down, so I put it back up as a free short story single, where it remains until today.
At this point, however, the story is less of a prescient look at a troubling possible future than an obvious, and perhaps too “on the nose” (I tend to get that criticism a lot) extrapolation of our present situation. For that reason, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to keep it up any longer. It had a very good run, garnering more than 5,000 downloads, which isn’t enough to have a significant impact on the national discussion, but is still greater than the circulation of most science fiction magazines and podcasts (including, most likely, the original anthology call).
“Payday” will still be available in my collection In Times Such As These, and I do still plan to keep it on submission to the traditional magazines as a reprint, but the free short story single will come down in the next couple of days. If you haven’t already picked up a copy, now is the time to do it.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation today, after his sexual harrassment scandal that has seen an overwhelming number of women come forward. As tempted as I am to dive into the politics of this story, I bring it up only to provide context for this:
For the last several years—arguably, since the Ferguson riots and President Obama’s pivot toward intersectionality, this country has been progressing steadily toward the woke moral panic that we now find ourselves living through. Unlike the Red Scare, to which it is comparable in both scope and severity, the threat posed by “white supremacists” and other villains of the intersectional left is as laughable and contrived as the term “Cuomo-sexual,” and will age just as badly.
To anyone who studies history, it is obvious that there’s going to be backlash against all the gaslighting and hypocrisy of the woke moral panic that is currently gripping our nation. All around us are signs that the tide is beginning to turn.
The first indication that caught my attention was the “woka-cola” scandal over critical race theory (CRT) in Coca Cola’s employee training. Instead of giving a token response, Coca Cola reversed the policy and fired the executive responsible for implementing the policy. The only reason a major coproration would do something like that is because the scandal was hitting their bottom line in a way that they could not ignore—and yet, there were no organized boycotts on the part of the conservative right. Just a lot of disenchanted consumers quietly saying to themselves: “I think I’ll get a Pepsi instead.”
There are other indications of a growing cultural backlash all throughout our society, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to viral videos of parents standing up to CRT in their kids’ schools. All of the organizations pushing the woke moral panic are little more than establishment astro-turf backed by corporate money, while the organizations pushing back are genuine grassroots movements—and they’re winning. All of the ground gained by the left during their “long march through the institutions” is about to be lost in a single generation, perhaps even a single decade. Public trust of established institutions is plummeting, and with every glaring instance of “sophisticated” woke hypocrisy, people are rejecting the establishment narrative, just like in V for Vendetta. Bollocks!
So what does this have to do with science fiction? In the second part of this blog series, I pointed out the following:
Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.
That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.
If I’m right and a major backlash against the woke intersectional left is brewing, then many of today’s most recognized and award-winning publications and editors are going to fall, or at least become relegated to a position of cultural insignificance. Indeed, we had an indication back in 2017 that this was already starting to happen, when it came out that China Mike Glyer buys traffic from Chinese bots to artificially boost the stats for his Hugo award winning site, File 770.
I suspect that these woke institutions within the SF field will try to maintain the illusion of cultural relevance for as long as they possibly can, much as ex-Governor Cuomo did everything he could to maintain the illusion of his fitness to hold office (even publishing a book about his leadership during the pandemic—talk about gaslighting!) until his inner circle had abandoned him, the Biden administration had called on him to resign, calls had come for his arrest, and the New York state congress had a deadline in place to begin the impeachment proceedings.
When the illusions fade and the gaslighting can no longer be maintained, there is going to be a cultural götterdämmerung—a “turbulent ending of a regime or institution.” Or perhaps the götterdämmerung has already arrived, and it ends when the illusions can no longer be maintained. Either way, it seems that the smart move is to reject these woke SF markets—or, as they so arrogantly put it, to “self-reject”—in favor of going indie, going with the semi-pro markets, and otherwise building an audience that isn’t caught up in all this woke madness.
