Friday, August 28, 2015

Challenging Comfortable Fictions, Part II: The Question of Quality

For those who might have missed it, here is the link to Part I, in which I question the "privilege" narrative.

I'm back!

I apologize for the unplanned four month hiatus. Life - and then a bout of depression - intervened, making it very difficult for me to sit down and convert my thoughts to pixels.

While I was away, of course, the Great Hugo Controversy of 2015 reached its climax at an awards ceremony in which the assorted Puppies were not-so-subtly mocked and five categories were burned to the ground. This result, I feel, was all too inevitable; pockets of niceness aside, modern-day Fandom can be a very unpleasant place for folks of my philosophical bent. I've been an "active," con-going fan since the early oughts, and if I had a nickel for every occasion in which other fans unthinkingly "hit" me simply because they presumed everyone present thought the same way, I'd be a millionaire. "Christians are douchenozzles!" is not an appropriate utterance when discussing the merits of, say, Harry Potter, but that has never stopped anyone from airing their personal prejudices against me and mine. (And yes, while the Puppy lists included authors with many different political persuasions, I'm pretty confident the Puppy voters tend to be rightist in their sentiments.)

But let me turn now to the main purpose of this post, which is to pick up where I left off months ago in my take down of the Dominant Spin. I promised back then that I would next tackle the question of "quality," and now seems as good a time as any, especially since several anti-Puppy commentators, in the process of running their victory laps, have chided us for voting for works that "sucked." "Learn to write better," they say, "and maybe you'll have better luck next time."

In order to respond to this charge, we have to understand what the AP's consider to be "good" science fiction, and I don't think it simply boils down to politics. To be sure, much of their rhetoric emphasizes the goals of so-called "social justice" when it, for example, demands an end to "the binary gender default" or insists that we refrain from reading works by "straight, white, cis-male" authors. But based on my analysis of the stories that have captivated the AP's over the past few years - not to mention their complaints regarding some of the works that we SP's consider meritorious - I would also argue for the importance of innovation and poetic prose in their critical mind-space.

An AP respondent on Larry Correia's blog once stated, quite tellingly, that in a race between a work by a widely popular author (like, for example, Larry himself) and a work by, say, China Miéville, he would always put aside his personal feelings regarding which work was more enjoyable and vote for Miéville because the latter stretches boundaries that the former does not. Similarly, I have seen at least one AP remark that Jim Butcher's Skin Game is the literary equivalent of a box of chicken nuggets. To paraphrase: "It's fun, but in the end, it's not exactly "good for you" -- and just as no one would consider giving Mickey D's a Michelin Star, no one should consider giving Butcher a Hugo." Underlying both of these sentiments is the assumption that "ground-breaking" automatically means "better." It doesn't.

When we SP's read comments like those described above, we make a sound roughly equivalent to someone barfing up three feet of intestine -- and to be quite frank, we have just cause for doing so. Number one, science fiction is genre fiction. It is meant to be written for and consumed by popular audiences, not approached like an hor d'ouvres at the Inn at Little Washington. Does this mean science fiction can't absorb new ideas, new modes of expression, or new points of view? Of course not -- but it does mean that, past a certain point, innovation for the sake of innovation will alienate your likely audience, who will pick up your story or your novel expecting that the few basic rules of the genre will be followed. Number two, we have seen how, in its quest to be "new and exciting," the avant-garde in other creative fields has overwhelmingly succeeded in making a pretentious mess of "high culture." Case in point: Tracey Emin. Emin snookered a bunch of cultural elites into proclaiming a pile of bed linens and refuse "art" precisely because those fools are so desperate to be "challenging" and "transgressive." Forgive us for being hesitant to go down that same road with our SF.

I have also seen AP posts that compare the plain prose of SP-favored authors with the literary prose of AP-favored authors and then confidently declare that the latter is superior. And indeed, when it comes to being evocative, authors like Thomas Heuvelt and Ken Liu do have Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen beat. But it also matters what the pretty words actually say. Style does not necessarily indicate substance. Style can, in fact, be used to cover up an author's complete failure to imagine the Big Idea that is supposed to be one of science fiction's hallmarks. I decided to jump in and become a Hugo voter around Sad Puppies I; since then, I have seen a number of stories - particularly in the short fiction categories - that use fantastic elements as superficial glosses over what, in truth, are extended ruminations over characters' emotional states in which nothing of any consequence actually happens. In many of these cases, the emotion is very well-rendered, but digging deep reveals a foundation of sand. The textbook example of this phenomenon is "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love," in which the event that inspires the "content" of the story is based on an improbability and the point-of-view character is left powerless to do anything but rage at her plight.

Bottom line, in leaning so heavily on originality and style, the AP's fail to grasp other ways in which "quality" can and should be defined. Writing a tight plot that grabs a reader on page one and sustains that reader's attention until the very end is itself a very difficult skill to master. So to is writing characters who, while simple, are also funny and appealing. So to is inspiring interest in a scientific concept that is not well understood by the general public. So to is inspiring wonder or fear at the universe as a whole. It might behoove our detractors to expand their viewpoint a little and entertain the notion that our recommendations were and are based on honest appreciation for talents that have so far remained beneath their notice.

ETA: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

34 comments:

  1. I had a FB discussion with one AP who insisted the Puppy nominated works were inferior. Later in the conversation, however, she admitted she felt "physically ill" at the thought of voting for anything supported by the Puppies. Despite her protestations about quality, she never really gave them a chance because she expected she would not vote for them anyway. Not only annoying, but really dishonest, self-delusional even.

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    1. Oh, I plan to address the refusal of many to give Puppy nominees a fair shot in a future post entitled "SLATE! SLAAAAATE!" :)

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  2. I think part of the problem is that really good writers, like really good figure skaters, make it look easy. Just because it looks easy doesn't mean it is. If it were "easy" to be Jim Butcher we'd all have his number of works out and his sales numbers.

    Sometimes I read a sample by an aspiring writer and I think, "This person's English teachers ruined them for life by teaching them that pomposity is good writing." It's not--it's a distraction technique for camouflaging poor communication. I think some people "learned" from their grade school English teachers that for something to have literary merit it had to be actively painful to read.

    It's easy to write painful, self-involved whining. It is not easy to write compelling plots with engaging characters and well-paced conflict. It is not easy to write a book the reader can't put down. The real pros just make all that look easy.

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    1. Agreed. In fact, as an educator myself, I can go on for HOURS about how the standard approach to teaching English and literature in K-12 (and beyond) is profoundly misguided and dysfunctional.

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    2. Somehow Hemingway managed to be well thought of, writing at a fifth-grade level.

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  3. This reminds me quite a bit of Eric S. Raymond's essay on the norms of science fiction, which if you haven't read it, you absolutely should.

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    1. I HAVE read that. It was in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing this post. Mind you, I'm not sure I agree with Raymond on every particular. I don't think, for example, that science fiction must avoid faith and stick to a materialistic understanding of the cosmos. But in many respects, that post was right on.

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    2. Yeah, like _Lord of Light_, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", _Canticle for Liebowitz_, and Jim Blish's books like _The Day After Judgement_.

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  4. They won't. They feel no need to simply because they believe they are in the right. No, actually, they "know" they are right whether or not anyone actually disagrees with that viewpoint, which I very strongly do. The problem is their own viewpoint and desire to be fight blinds them from consideration of any view that differs from their own. Some people just cannot be reached.

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    1. They feel no need to simply because they believe they are in the right. No, actually, they "know" they are right whether or not anyone actually disagrees with that viewpoint, which I very strongly do.

      Which is, really, about what one should expect from a group where, in another context, they talk about being on the "right side" of history, as if there was only one way things could happen and anyone who acted against that was only prolonging the "inevitable".

      (Never mind the nearly universal result of actions by people who talk about "right" and "wrong" sides of history is tyranny.)

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    2. I agree that many AP's use their taste in science fiction as a virtue-signalling device. And yes: If you believe such tastes make you one of the "good people," it's going to be VERY difficult for you to accept the idea that you're wrong.

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  5. Isn't the SFWA and their estimable Nebula award the place for "quality"? Isn't the SFWA a "professional" organization, where such matters should be and are considered?

    The Hugo has always been, up till recently, a popularity contest. Why did that have to change?

    The answer is: it didn't, except that centers of power over cultural matters draw social justice warriors like poop draws flies. And so it is here.

    The Hugos as a popularity contest are gone; say goodbye to them. As long as pernicious forces are willing to spend big bucks to buy the Hugo award, or no-award, just-your-average-fan does not have a chance.

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    1. I'm not sure I'm ready to cede the Hugos just yet. I do, however, understand your pessimism.

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  6. Literary awards all have this problem. The Hugo was an exception until about twenty years ago, because it was fan-awarded. Fans come to a genre to be entertained and won't stand for anything that fails that test. SF / Fantasy fans are entertained principally by imaginative plotting and world-building. By implication, those who dominate the Hugo balloting are not representative of SF / Fantasy fandom. Their agenda diverges noticeably from ours.

    Awards and prizes determined by writers are notorious for favoring "innovative" stylistic approaches over all else. Notably, the juries that award such tokens tend to be populated by previous winners of the award. From that, all else necessarily follows.

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    1. Regarding writing prizes going to the self-consciously "innovative": Yes. Actually, I think that tendency is the culprit behind the destruction of ALL of our creative arts. And that's why, personally, I got tangentially involved in the SP effort: I've seen the decline elsewhere and would rather not have it infect something that's supposed to be FUN mass literature.

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    2. SF / Fantasy fans are entertained principally by imaginative plotting and world-building. By implication, those who dominate the Hugo balloting are not representative of SF / Fantasy fandom. Their agenda diverges noticeably from ours.

      Or they find different things imaginative in their world-building and plotting. Example: Ancillary Justice, which, to me, provided fascinating plotting and worldbuilding, but apparently has caused many people quite a bit of upset for, essentially, grammatical reasons.

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    3. imnotandrei: If you liked Ancillary Justice, that's your prerogative. I will say, though, that the people who DON'T like it aren't simply exercised by the pronoun thing. The principal complaint that my compatriots have deals with the book's PACING. That may not bother you, but it evidently bothers many others.

      (By the way: I'm in the "neither love nor hate" camp when it comes to Leckie's work. I see both the merits and the flaws.)

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    4. . I will say, though, that the people who DON'T like it aren't simply exercised by the pronoun thing.

      How shall we put this -- I'm glad to hear that other people have different issues; what gets heard outside of the Puppysphere most often, I think, is a complaint about gender issues.

      A question: It seems to me that you think innovation/etc and fun are, if not contradictory, at least inversely correlated; while I know for me, the two are well-correlated, and in my sense of quality (as opposed to fun) they are even more strongly correlated. I had to explain to someone elseblog that I could easily go "I liked A better than B, but found B to be a better book" -- does this seem easy/logical to you?

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    5. imnotandrei: I don't think innovation and fun are necessarily inversely correlated. I think certain ATTITUDES regarding innovation, however, can be. Attitudes that discount the importance of entertainment and audience engagement are attitudes that I find worrying.

      To give you a good sense of my own feelings on this issue, allow me to point you to Suzannah Rowntree's post on the subject:

      http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/04/01/superversive-blog-when-originality-is-a-bad-thing/

      If you disagree with her points, fair enough. But that's about where I stand.

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    6. I see: indeed, we come from very different viewpoints, because while I appreciate the importance of grounding, the idea of such a strong binary as Rowntree presents -- "but the evil is always evil, not misunderstood, and the good is always heroic, not tragically naïve" feels a long distance away from the "truth" presented later; it is literature as moral exemplar, rather than literature as exploration of the human condition.

      For me, there's a somewhat nebulous double layer, as I see it, in most artistic worlds (even in microcosm) -- a small group that is trying to push the oundaries of the world, whatever that is -- and a larger group that takes what that small group does, internalizes it, and popularizes it. Unfortunately, awards and the like don't track this model, and so the difference between "best" and "most avant-garde" and "most popular" become matters of contention.

      It's rather like the old line about the Velvet Underground -- "Only a few thousand people heard them, but every single one went and formed a band" -- and now they're recognized as influential out of all proportion to their record sales. Some people think that puts them in the "Best" discussion -- or at least the "Hall of Fame" discussion -- while others do not.

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    7. imnotandrei: On the subject of "evil is always evil and good is always good," that's why I said the post in question was "about" where I stand. Rowntree captures my feelings regarding the legitimacy of formulae and tropes, but you're right: You DO have to perform a delicate balancing act between respecting those tropes and OVER-simplifying reality. Black-and-white moralizing from either the right OR the left has a very limited reach.

      And as for the eternal tension between the avant-garde and the popularizers: Yep. That fight we will always have with us. The only constructive thing we can do, in my opinion, is keep the lines of communication open -- which, to your credit, you have done. I thank you. ;)

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    8. Rowntree captures my feelings regarding the legitimacy of formulae and tropes,

      And here's the thing; I think much of the best *innovative* work relies on the existence of those tropes, and new ways of looking at them. For example, one of my favorite artists is Anselm Kiefer -- and his ways of hearkening back to historical or religious traditions grounds his works and allows people ways to follow him into them, even when they seem forbidding at first. I'll never forget singing "Maikäfer flieg/dein Vater ist im Krieg" with a group of art fans in front of one of his massive canvases at the MOMA.

      Or, to use another example -- one of the greatest works on innovation and change, and one of the most challenging of the tropes of its time, to my lights, was Thomas M. Disch's "Camp Concentration" -- which has Faust and Rilke running through every paragraph.

      Black-and-white moralizing from either the right OR the left has a very limited reach.

      We are in definite agreement.

      While a non-genre example, one of my favorite books dealing with some of this is "Not The End Of The World", by Chris Brookmyre. Brookmyre has a satirist's eye for most everyone -- but he does a *brilliant* job, IMHO, of explaining how his Pat-Robertson-In-The-80-s analogue got to *be* that way, showing sympathy -- while still painting him as a villain, just one you can understand how he got there.

      And as for the eternal tension between the avant-garde and the popularizers: Yep. That fight we will always have with us.

      And, to me, it's a fight...how shall we put this? It's a fight that we need to keep having, because if either side wins, the genre (any genre) is effectively dead, either due to lack of audience or lack of innovation.

      And you're most welcome; thank you for holding up the other tin-can-on-a-wire. :)

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  7. Interesting that you mentioned Tracey Emin and by extension the YBA's. Were you aware that there is an entire counter movement within the arts? (Mostly Painting) It all started with an argument between Emin and her then boyfriend Billy Childish. It's called Stuckism which was founded by Childish and Charles Thomson. Chidish made some sort of sarcastic remark about her winning such a huge $ reward for her bed, and she screamed that he and his painting were "Stuck, Stuck, Stuck!" (I've been a member since 2008 or so.) My only relevant point is that there is a counter elitists BS cultural movement sprouting up here and there.

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    1. I became aware of Stuckism a few weeks ago and was immediately delighted. If you're a member, please continue what you're doing. We need people fighting on ALL fronts.

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  8. Let's talk seriously about the avant garde in the arts and how it died and became po-mo. First, it's important to understand that the avant garde artists of the world originally aimed not to created elitist works but to overturn the then current norms. An artist like Manet, for instance, ignored conventional standards of perspective when he painted Luncheon on the Grass, and Courbet also overturned conventional academic standards of painting with his realist works. The aim was not merely to shock the bourgeois but to create a new set of rules, ones that were based on a fidelity to their own artistic visions and the lived realities of modernity.
    In the 20th century, however, what happened was the idea of creating a new set of rules and standards was put aside in favor of pluralism itself.
    A good example of the difference between the avant garde art practices of the late 19th and early 20th century and the postmodern works of today can be seen by comparing neo-expressionism to abstract expressionism. The first was an art movement without rules or aims, it was celebrity driven and mostly about marketing, about navigating the art world, the second (whether you like it or hate it) was a movement that held true to a common principle (the abandonment of representation and the emphasis on the painterly gesture) and whether you like or hate abstract expressionism this difference is important.
    So, when it comes to genre work (finally) we on the left (I count myself there) have to ask ourselves what our aim is and what we want to create that will change the terms of the popular. Too often, however, what is done is something more like neo-expressionism.

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    1. Thank you for your interesting perspective! I may be a woman of the center right, but I love to hear from folks from the other side who are thinking seriously about the growing gulf between the public and the creative world.

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  9. Back from Worldcon by Sasquan. My role required me be studiously neutral. Even now, in some of the fora, debate rages on whether a particular official forum is the place for this or that side to crow over the bons mots of some media wag. Those are mostly AP. I, a fan for 59 years, sometime con attendee and volunteer, find the exercise much like discussing Justin Bieber with a 16 y-o, with as much near-shrieking as Ghostbusters Day in the Other World. Bloc voting, nominating, and organizing we will have with us always, like the poor. To me the difference seems in APs anathematizing SPs as evil for their preferences. I would like to believe that SPs simply disagree with respect to content. Regards, Ted

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    1. Thank you for your missive, Ted. I think I can assure you that we SP's are most assuredly NOT evil and DO simply disagree with respect to content. ;)

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  10. I, too, feel that there are lots of other ways to create quality rather than style for style's sake. Were I a billionaire, I'd be happy to fund "lost works of Mozart/ Beethoven; Van Gogh/ Rembrandt; Bernini /Rodin" contests to award prizes for quality work in a no-longer-original but still beautiful style.

    (So to is inspiring wonder << So, too, is inspiring wonder / beauty)

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    1. If you started such an award, I would happily support it.

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  11. I had a discussion once with a professional songwriter who said, in effect, that just because the song sounded simple didn't mean it wasn't the result of an expert at work. With that in mind, the fact that Scalzi's pop art has won multiple awards should indicate Butcher's "Skin Game" was passed over exclusively due to petulance. The consumer in me knows that the only method to combat such idiocy is to let my wallet speak loudest.

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    1. With that in mind, the fact that Scalzi's pop art has won multiple awards should indicate Butcher's "Skin Game" was passed over exclusively due to petulance.

      Why? There were at least 4 novels on the ballot that were, at least, utterly workable pieces of commercial fiction -- and three which aimed somewhat higher. In light of this, why was Butcher "passed over" because people preferred 3BP, TGE, or Ancillary Sword?

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  12. Thanks for sharing a link to my article on con artist Tracey Emin and her enablers. The artistic movements of Stuckism/Remodernism have been confronting the decadent establishment for a long time now. The culture war has many fronts, but the unifying factor is elitists have corrupted the arts with their dysfunctional cronyism and agendas. They've lost all credibility and their influence must be eliminated. This is just the beginning, it is going to be a glorious process.

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    1. You're welcome! And hopefully, you will start to make some serious headway when it comes to making the high arts relevant to the common audience.

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