Science Fiction, Gatekeeping, And Why Awards Are Useless

Posted on | June 26, 2023 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho

First, let me give a shoutout to Son of Silvercon‘s Guest of Honor, Maggie Hogarth, who has a new book dropping at the end of July, An Exile Aboard Ship. It’s the start of a new series set in her Peltedverse, which has a lot of cool aliens in it, and if you want some background to this new adventure, you should start with Earthrise, which is available (along with its two sequels) through Kindle Unlimited. Also, one of our other guests, Jon Del Arroz, has the sixth book in his Baron von Monocle steampunk series, The Crystal Conspiracy, out today. It’s been a while since I read For Steam & Country, the first in this series, but it’s good stuff, and I regret not having the time/money to pick up the other four books when they came out. 

And speaking of buying books from authors that don’t hate you, The Big Based Book Sale continues on through tomorrow. 

I saw on the Twitter last night that the execrable John Scalzi has won the LOCUS readers award*, apparently for his recent work of lameness Kaiju Preservation Society, which judging from his earlier work is probably a “transgressive” riff on Pacific Rim, and no, I’m not reading it to find out. Someone posted a couple of embarrassing extracts from the book, which inspired a lot of mockery at Scalzi’s expense.** Anyhow, I grumped about how this was a good example of why nobody should be using awards like that to pick reading material, and this got me into an argument about gatekeeping.

Which, as I noted in this tweet, is silly because unlike gaming, where you can refuse to play with idiots, you can’t do that with SF. Anyone can go down to the library or the B&N, or log onto Amazon, and get them some skiffy. Or they can stream some Star Trek, or The Expanse, or Black Mirror, or Neon Genesis Evangelion…you see where I’m going with this. SF fandom is equally wide open thanks to social media. It’s a lot harder to blackball somebody from the Internet than it was to keep people out of your conventions – and as the old school literary fans found out in the 60s after Star Trek, they’ll just go off and start their own conventions with Fizzbin and Orion slave girls. As a result of this mass influx of fans into the SF ghetto, which I sometimes refer to as the geek victory in the culture war, and the subsequent capture of SF fandom’s organizations by the woketards and other leftists, the awards given by those organizations became warning signs rather than recommendations as to what was good. The fact that (relative to the huge numbers of people who read or otherwise consume SF) most of these awards (except for the Dragon Awards) are handed out by a tiny community of fans makes them even more worthless, because most of these people suffer from a bad case of groupthink and don’t dare express Wrongthink for fear of not being part of the In Crowd any more.  So instead of gatekeeping either science fiction in general or even fandom, I see my role as more of a native guide who’s been wandering around this part of town for 50+ years who advises the new folks not to read that stuff because it’ll make you barf, or at least make you regret spending $15 or three hours on Fuzzy Nation.

Now, on the other hand, there’s Ralts Bloodthorne. The Wordborg is up to ten books in the Behold, Humanity! series, of which I have just finished the tenth, Victory or Death. These are conversions from his long-running series of posts on r/HFY, and in some places duplicate material found in the Tales of the Terran Confederacy series because the shorter series focuses on individuals and their stories while Behold, Humanity! covers the wider war between the Terran Confederacy and its neosapient allies (Telkans, Hamaroosans, Tuknarn, etc.) against the Lanaktallan Unified Council Worlds and the Precursor Autonomous War Machines. Unlike a lot of the current Pink Goo authors, who like to pretend that nothing happened in SF before they were born (and if it did it was all written by Racist Male Wypipo so it doesn’t count), Ralts has clearly read a lot of the classics of SF, thought through the implications of the technologies, and had a lot of fun mixing it all together into a tasty stew of not just combat SF but a look at how humanity itself will adapt and change to technologies developed across 8,000 years of war with occasional brief periods of peace. Highly recommended.

*This says a lot about the kind of people who read LOCUS, who are mostly the kind of people that ante up the money to join Worldcons.
**Tor is paying him an insane amount of money to poop out crappy books, so what does he care?

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Comments