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.