In the last week, the Islamic State took control of 90% of a Palestinian refugee district in Damascus, Syria, worsening an already dire situation for some 18,000 human beings trapped within. Meanwhile, 147 people were murdered by al-Shabab in Garissa University College, Kenya, while most of the Western world was busy rationalizing the killing of 149 passengers and flight staff by suicidal co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
The world is filled with so much suffering, often in the form of such swift and large-scale destruction, that I often find myself taking stock of the relative security in which I live, and which allows me to pursue a teaching profession, to spend my days as a doctoral-level scholar, and to write: all with minimal risk to my personal safety.
This level of social security, and the benefits it has granted me, comes with an immense responsibility. This responsibility does not arise from any external, “objective” source; it is simply the consequence of recognizing the extreme preferability of my situation to the alternatives too many people live with every day–in my country as well as in the world at large. I’m speaking, of course, of alternatives that put people’s lives in routine danger, as well as alternatives that grossly restrict the mobility and related life outcomes of various human beings for reasons of sex, ethnicity, or other socialized difference.
Put simply, I know it’s in my best interest to see my level of personal security maintained, if not improved–which, in purely pragmatic terms, means extending that same security to as many other people as possible, so there will be less reason for anyone else to imperil mine.
However, when I learned about the “Sad Puppies” slate and subsequent Hugo nominees, I was struck by how deeply this notion of security differs for others who share the same relative security (overall) in my culture. For people like Larry Correia, Brad R. Torgersen, Vox Day, and John C. Wright, either the idea of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) stories having sociopolitical resonance is new, forwarded by people of a leftist bent who “just” write to forward personal agendas, or else SFF stories have strongly veered from a correct set of sociopolitical positions (right-wing, religious, libertarian) into “unnatural” and immoral messaging.
Either way, for these folks, and the fans who support them, personal security is very much threatened by champions of overt gender, orientation, and ethnic diversity in the discipline. As Correia writes of this year’s Sad Puppies slate:
This is just one little battle in an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies who think they represent *real* fandom. In the long term I want writers to be free to write whatever they want without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture them about how they are having fun wrong. I want our shrinking genre to grow. I think if we can get back to where “award nominated” isn’t a synonym for “preachy crap” to the most fans, we’ll do it.
Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari similarly champions this movement as a cry for political freedom, describing the slate as
a tongue-in-cheek bid by science fiction & fantasy (SF&F) authors to draw attention to an atmosphere of political intolerance, driven by so-called “social justice warriors,” that is holding the medium back. Spearheaded by authors Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen, the campaign sought to break the stranglehold of old cliques by encouraging a more politically diverse group of fans to take part in the annual Hugo Awards.
I’m going to put aside these notions of a “shrinking genre” and the idea that female persons, queer persons, and non-white persons being nominated for and winning awards is “holding the medium back”. I certainly see no signs of anything but expansion for SFF stories–on TV, in literature, in blockbuster movies–but I can only assume that these writers are referring to something more specific: a perceived shrinking of certain kinds of SFF writing (which, again, probably isn’t the case, in the age of e-publishing especially, but might seem that way if the amount of other SFF writing is growing at such a grand scale).
No, my interest instead lies in how very much these folks–these human beings–feel as though their ability to write without fear of reprisal (especially for disseminating opinions of a condemnatory nature) has been compromised, and now requires social redress. Granted, I write this as a Canadian in full favour of our hate-speech legislation–and with it, the idea that “freedom of expression” requires checks and balances, as amply evidenced by humanity’s horrible tendency to forfeit personal moral imperative when presented with charismatic leaders (think Aldolf Eichmann and the banality of evil). Consequently, though I recognize the importance of being able to protest institutions that hold the balance of power over individual voices, the idea of freedom of expression being inviolable in a sustainably secure society holds little sway over me.
That said, the US has a markedly different climate where civil liberties discourse is concerned, with even gun ownership intrinsically tied up in notions of the right to resist government oppression (a right, in Canada, that doesn’t extend much farther in our official documents than freedom of the press and freedom of association). So the position of these deeply conservative (religious) writers remains fascinating to me, despite how absolutely repugnant I find most of the beliefs they wish to be able to forward without social challenge within the SFF community. Vox Day, for instance, is well known for his hateful rhetoric, so one brief example will suffice; as he wrote in 2013 of fantasy author N. K. Jemisin,
…it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.
Other views from this contingent are milder, but no less unsettling, and putting aside the anti-gay and related, religious-conservative social criticism that emerges on some of these writers’ blogs, there are also explicit insertions of such rhetoric in the nominated works themselves. This certainly accords with their claim that a “diverse” range of ideas is needed in the SFF community, but not with the claim that the primary aim of this movement is to return SFF’s focus from politics to good storytelling. For instance, John C. Wright’s Hugo-award-nominated Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth has this in its description, from Vox Day’s Castalia House:
In the sixteen essays that make up the collection, Wright addresses a wide spectrum of ideas. He considers the darker possibilities of transhumanism, provides a professorial lesson on the mechanics of writing fiction, explains the noble purpose underlying science fiction, and shows how the genre’s obsession with strong female characters is nothing less than an attack on human nature.
Even though the “strong female character” (reduced to being exemplary on the basis of one attribute; rarely allowed more depth than that) is an archetype I vehemently dislike, the construction of this sentence moves from the everyday to the extremely sensational, positioning its argument in a prescriptivist light that ever bends toward natural fallacy. The reasoning of the essay itself is little better; after a great deal of prescriptive discourse delineating appropriate male and female virtues, it takes as its argument that with egalitarianism there can be no romance, such that strong women require still-stronger men to spark any interest for the reader. And for those who might scoff at this romance requirement, the essay has rejoinder there, too, arguing that “girls who do not like love stories are well advised to learn to like them, because such stories deal with the essential and paramount realities on which much or most of that girl’s happiness in life will hinge.”
Who is the audience for a piece like this, if not the echo chamber of fellow conservative Christians? How does an essay like this engage in a dynamic, genre-wide discourse? I’m reminded of the works by John Eldredge I read for an Evangelical lit course in my MA year–books that suggested a restlessness with reality that compelled belief in epic adventure-quests (of an obviously religious nature, but with clear correlates to fantasy writing at large). While fascinating as cultural objects, they engage with an almost requisite insularity in their own positions, and no others; in this light, books like Wright’s don’t seem at all like a solution to the problem of sociopolitical exclusivity he and those like him claim to oppose in today’s SFF world.
And yet, the argument seems to be precisely that they shouldn’t have to be inclusive: that the ideas of people with morally conservative positions involving public proclamations of how others should and should not have sex, who is and is not entitled to full civil liberties, what major life choices other people should make, and how writers should present themselves in fiction or the world at large, must simply be accepted as equally valid. Clearly, the argument seems to go, the only reason that SFF works by such people aren’t getting more accolades is because their politics are not “in vogue”; because the genre is now filled with people who willfully ignore good storytelling in favour of political agendas.
And this argument is a damned shame, because it seems so diametrically opposed to the promise of SFF in the first place. After all, where but in the realms of SFF stories do we ever stand a better chance of testing our greatest visions–for better and for worse–of the world to come, of the world today, and of the worlds we’ve grievously forgotten?
In recent years, SFF has been exploring new possibilities, new frames of reference, new voices and settings and sociopolitical milieus. This seems to deeply upset the folks behind the Sad Puppies slate, but the rising interest, say, in Chinese science fiction or African fantasy is far, far less a threat to dominant Western narrative structures than it is an invitation–an expansion of the playing field on which we can all explore, and test, our most deeply held values and beliefs.
Rest assured, if those values and beliefs are worth their salt, they’ll survive the comparison with other narrative vocabularies. And if they aren’t, they won’t–but what good are such flimsy constructs anyway?
I read Vox Day’s Hugo-award-nominated story last year. “Opera Vita Aeterna” follows an elf with actual magical abilities who leaves his people to study scripture with an isolated monastic order, because he discovered that a member of that faith had greater magic than any he’d ever seen. After a great deal of padded theological discourse and not much else, he leaves an intricate new manuscript in his wake, preserving aspects of the community after a devastating fate befalls them. For me, the issue with this story wasn’t its clearly Christian politics; it was the poor storytelling. The problem wasn’t simply the purple prose, or how all the major plot points were pushed to the periphery; on a more fundamental, tension-building level, the elf’s decision to dedicate himself to these monks’ faith is never really questioned; nor is the supremacy of the monks’ god, even though we never see any overt sign of its superior “magic” in the text.
Recently, I read a short story in the other “camp” that fell equally flat for me, precisely because its politics were also self-evident, but the story was not. The protagonist in “Red Planet” by Caroline M. Yoachim is a two-dimensional argument for the equal-just-different value of being blind; instead of showing why undergoing surgery to pass immigration requirements to Mars wasn’t worth it, the story explicitly asks the question and then just as explicitly answers it. There are plenty of stories, though, that address topics like physical difference and societal marginalization without sacrificing character and plot development. In this vein, I know I’ve read good, clearly Christian stories, too.
Suffice it to say, then, I’d feel much more sympathy for writers who believe their religious and political viewpoints are unfairly keeping them from award recognition, if their writing could ever be apolitical. But it isn’t. It can’t be. For all the claims of simply wanting to focus on “good storytelling”, we routinely (if in often unexpected ways) reveal ourselves–our interests, our perspectives–in our fictions and essays.
By all means, then, bring religious (and political) points of view unapologetically into one’s writing: Hell, I’ve routinely got religious characters in my works, and I’m an atheist. In fact, I see no conflict between those statements, because one of my major drives is to present opposing points of view as best as I can in my writing, and I can imagine no better testing ground for my beliefs (on any subject!) than an ideological arena that a) draws from as wide an array of potential counterpoints as possible, and b) employs only the strongest possible versions of all opposition therein.
This, for me, is the tremendous potential of the SFF world, so without trying to impose this view on others, I would simply say that this stunt with the 2015 Hugos is predicated on a search for the wrong kind of security. What we need is more fearlessness about our personal convictions in the public sphere–yes, absolutely–but that fearlessness needs to start with more introspection about our own work first, and an honest examination of whether it upholds the very values of free, dynamic discourse we’ve also come to expect–lucky, lucky people that we are–should just be handed to us by the world at large.
That said, best wishes, good voting, and rigorous writing to you all!
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