Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th

Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th:

I see what you did there

From an otherwise slightly rambling Adam Roberts Guardian article about the two souls of science fiction:

o say that SF has more imaginative and discursive wiggle-room than “realist” art is, while true, also to say that SF has the potential to be a more heterogeneous and inclusive conceptual space. This is something that’s understood by the genre’s greatest writers: Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson.

Not actually that bad a list of writers to get your teeth in, to be honest…

Mean but accurate

Adam Roberts’ parody of Robert Jordan’s writing is mean but accurate:

Why did I fail? Oh, why did I fail to polish off wotviii this week, I thought to myself, creasing my brow and tugging my braids. Since the Age of Legends I have been reading this bu’u’ook, as the ancient bound codices were called. White streaking my beard and hair, I stroked the mindtrap upon my bedside table. I must be careful, I thought. Careful. To take care. Three different skills were in play, the ancient art of readin, the even more ancient and venerable art, of which only a few dozen in the world were true masters, of Turnian Pages, and, most difficult of all preventing the bitter, lethal brain num that inevitably pursued any man who dared to channel the antique magic of this kind of readin. It could be fatal, brain num. Fatal, it could be. I tugged my braid. The old Ar Selbow proverb came back to me: readin should be a chore, not a pleasure. I thought, oh, but I’ve read so much! To give up now would be … but I left the utterance an axe-handle short of completion. Was there room for any more? I tugged my braids. Hardly any hair left, I thought to myself. I wonder if tugging it all the time is responsible for it falling out? I wonder. I wonder.

But the parody quoted in a 1993 David Langford fanzine is more concise and just as funny, if not funnier. Which totally makes Adam’s version the more accurate, as Jordan, for all his virtues, was never adverse to use ten words when one would do, or seven sentences where two would suffice…

Adam is reading and reviewing the entire Wheel of Time series and not enjoying it much, hence the parody. He does so because, while he has read his share of epic fantasy, he’s “too ignorant of the 1990s and much of the noughties” which is why he “decided to give Jordan a whirl”. It’s been interesting to read his critiques, though not surprising that he finds Jordan hardgoing and not very good. Most honest fans of the series able to aprpeciate good writing will readily admit Jordan’s writing is not very good, workmanlike at best; much of the criticism Roberts levels at him was already talked about in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan in the mid nineties. Where Adam gets it wrong is when he attempts to understand why people despite this keep reading the Wheel of Time books:

I get that for many people the deal is escape. Leave your worries behind; you enter this better world. It’s a world in which you don’t work in the accounts department of a mid-size educational supplies firm; where, instead, you live in a palace and command servants and have magic powers and enjoy exciting sex with beautiful people and are able to vent your repressed aggression in fighty-fight. Jordan’s twist on this venerable textual strategy is, partly, giving his readers much more detail than his market rivals; and partly, more cannily, creating the illusion of psychological depth. Simple wish-fulfilment gets old too soon; so Jordan’s Alexander-the-Great-alike is troubled by the fear he’s going mad. It’s not much, but it’s enough to separate him from the bulk of competitors.

[…]

And this is the part I can’t seem to get my head around: the fans know that it’s terribly written. They know and they don’t care. Why don’t they care? I don’t know why they don’t care.

[…]

What to say to such a review other than: don’t! Please don’t! The libraries of the world are crammed with beautiful, powerful, moving, mindblowing literature! Read some of that instead!

Adam gets two things wrong. Why people read The Wheel of Time when they know it’s not that good and that it’s possible to “trade in” the WoT series for better books and get the same pleasure out of it. It isn’t wish fulfillment that made me read the first book and then kept me reading: it was the story and the way Jordan told it. And I know the writing is workmanlike at best, the plot not all that original and the padding, oy, the padding! But as I said in my own review of The Eye of the World, Jordan had me hooked from that first scene. It’s not something you can really analyse and it has little to do with literay qualities: you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, that’s no big deal; the world is full with better books, but you can’t substitute them for the story Jordan told and the world he created.

It’s always difficult to explain why you enjoy something: in the end it all comes down to “I like it because it’s fun”. What I like in epic fantasy in general and Jordan in particular is a bit of escapism, of losing myself in a story, preferably a long story. The writing doesn’t have to be good to do this, as long as it isn’t so bad it becomes noticable. This isn’t at all comparable to the pleasure I also get from a good science fiction novel or something clever and literary; much more visceral, less intellectual perhaps. It’s also the pleasure in worldbuilding I got from Jordan, the way he which took standard fantasy concepts and remade them over the course of the series. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy agrees with me on that, noting the “ingenuity with which standard plot devices, backgrounds and charachters are subjected to constant and sophisticated modification”. That’s a pleasure that for others may not be enough to struggle through the series, or the kind of pleasure somebody like Adam is looking for, which is okay. It’s just that you can’t recreate this pleasure with a different set of books; certainly not with Nabakov…

Adam vs the Hugos

It’s such a pity that whole discussion Adam Roberts kickstarted about the Hugos got derailed so quickly into the usual fannish defensiveness. While Scalzi set the tone, his readers took it up to eleven. Some extracts:

Pardon me, Mr. Roberts, for being an knuckle-dragging mouthbreather not sufficiently advanced enough to recognize True Art, but I’ll stick with books I enjoy.

[…]

I think the last person whose advice I would seek on literary merit is an English professor.

[…]

This guy’s rant is exactly why I think so many artists are leftists. They find it utterly distasteful that their financial success is dependent on fandom – the unwashed, uneducated masses who are allowed to love Transformers and hate challenging art. So much better if art were completely state-supported so “true artists” would be free of the clamorous demands of the hoi polloi.

[…]

McAuley’s The Quiet War? That’s my point with ego-flexing academics like Adam Roberts. They always go with obscure writings.

[…]

There’s something about being tenured that warps minds and turns readable prose, poetry, and non-fiction into turgid, wordy dreck. And in academia, the masses are always wrong, everything popular is to be shunned, and literary criticism is serious business even when it’s forgotten what the fuck it’s supposed to be criticizing.

[…]

I guess what I’m saying is that Mr. Roberts seems to think of himself as the wolf and the Hugo voters as the sheep. Well, just because you have a fancy education doesn’t mean you’re more intellectually enlightened.

Now here’s the rub. Adam Roberts is a professor of English literature, turned science fiction writer and critic. He’s the living evidence of how far science fiction has become an accepted part of literature, has moved out of the (self-imposed) ghetto it had been in from the thirties to the seventies or so. He’s the living embodiment of everything science fiction fans have wanted from “the literary establishment”, somebody who values science fiction for its intrisic values as well as its literary ones. Unlike earlier generations of literary champions of science fiction like Kingsley Amis, who enjoyed science fiction as a superior sort of low culture, in the same way as they enjoyed jazz but still ranked it as an inferior art form to classical music, Roberts takes science fiction seriously enough to be as critical of it as he would of any other genre. What’s more, he’s more than willing to engage both fandom and academia. So what more does he need to do before sf fans like the ones above lose their cultural cringe? Does he need to fellate the corpse of Heinlein before he’s accepted, or what?

It’s no secret that the Hugos have often been awful, rewarding writers for name recognition, sticking to the known and familiar regardless of quality. The novel category often in fact suffers the least of this: does Dave Langford really deserve the amount of best fanwriter Hugos he has won or is his just the only name the voters recognise? To get all nowty because this time it’s an English professor voicing these concerns is just silly.

It all obscures the real debate between Adam and the Hugo voters. In his original post, what Adam is arguing for is a shortlist “to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing. […] For what is the point of SF if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange?”

But what Hugo voters are looking for, setting aside the quality of the books they chose to nominate, might be something else entirely. From my point of view, what a lot of people are looking for is not innovation, but affirmation, as argued as well by a lot of the people from the Scalzi thread. They want good books that fit their own world view, not necessarily agree with them, but which have a shared set of (meta) values. This need for affirmation is often looked down upon; we tend to overvalue the new and unknown and especially for critics and other professionals this can be a danger. There can be pleasure at seeing something familiar done very well, just like the quest for “the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange” can degenerate into mindless sensawunda.

Oh John Scalzi No!

Don’t tell me you pulled the “summon science fiction fandom’s barely repressed inferiority complex spell” as a response to Adam Roberts’ criticism of this year’s Hugo shortlist?

Fandom, look at the 2009 Clarke novel shortlist. Do you know why that list is better than yours? It’s not that its every novel is a masterpiece—far from it (although it seems to me regretable that you couldn’t you vote books as good as The Quiet War, House of Sons or Song of Time onto your shortlist.) But some of the books on that list fail, no question. Martin Martin’s on the Other Side, for instance, is a mediocre novel. But (and this is the crucial thing) it’s a mediocre novel trying to do something a little new with the form of the novel. It’s an experiment in voice and tone, and ambitious in its way. The novels on the Hugo shortlist—except Anathem, as I mentioned—try nothing new: they are all old-fashioned: formally, stylistically and conceptually unadventurous.

Oh, you did…

Now, I assume Mr. Roberts didn’t intend to come across as arrogant and hectoring to his primary audience, because very few people so willfully attempt to ankle-shoot their own career, even the ones with an academic aerie such as Mr. Roberts possesses. I suspect he believed he was being stern but fair. However, I also suspect that science fiction fandom, not in fact being comprised of students who have to sit for a lecture in order to graduate, may have its own opinions on the matter. In the real world, people don’t like being told, while being gently and paternalistically patted on the head, that they’re goddamned idiots. Especially from someone who then turns around and hopes to sell them a book.

Dear. As Niall says, I know which author I want to read more based on these posts, though both in their own way are rather on the annoying side. Scalzi’s for the pandering, Roberts for the somewhat patronising form he puts his complaints in.

Which, as complaints go, aren’t all that new or interesting. That the Hugo Awards are conservative and often go to mediocre works is a complaint I’ve heard as long as I’ve been online and following sf newsgroups and blogs — which is — blimey — almost fifteen years now. Look back at the history of the Hugos and it’s always been that way, going for the Heinleins rather than the Disches. However, the awards did used to have a much better track record of getting both the popular and the criticially acclaimed works. So what changed?

My theory, which is mine, is that science fiction got too big, while the Hugo voters stayed largely the same. For a striking example, compare the 1977 and the 1992 edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and see how much the genre had expanded in less than fifteen years, how much bigger, complex and diverse it had become. Even for professional critics or reviewers it’s almost impossible to keep up, let alone for “mere readers”. Sure, you can filter to a certain extent, select for books with “buzz”, well known authors, promising newcomers undsoweiter, but you can’t really expect this from people who read for pleasure, not work. The Hugo after all is voted for by everybody who has a Worldcon membership, not a professional jury. And there’s the rub.

You see, the nominations for the 2009 Hugo Awards were voted on by just 799 voters. The People’s Choice Awards this is not, the price of a supporting membership being a high barrier to entry. What we got then with the Hugos is a self-selecting group of people, many with the same sort of tastes (which in many cases were formed some time ago…). This group simply isn’t big enough or representive enough of the sf readership as a whole to accurately represent the sf zeitgeist, nor the kind of jury that would see it as its remit to look for the sort of experimental, cutting edge works that Adam Roberts want it to be.

The Hugo Awards represent the tastes of a certain kind of sf fan, nothing more and nothing less. The novels it selected for the shortlist are exactly the kind of novel it likes and not at all that different from the kind of novel it has been rewarding from the start. Which is the biggest flaw in Roberts plea: he might find the works selected this year mediocre or want the voters to vote for better, more innovative novels, but are the Hugo voters actually looking for this? My guess would be not.

There are better ways to “improve” science fiction’s image in the wider world than to harass the Hugo voters. Ironically, Roberts himself is doing that already, through his work as a critic and author, engaging readers and potential readers of science fiction outside of its traditional venues. So in a way is Scalzi, through his blog. It’s just a pity they’re working at crosspurposes…