http://www.thehugoawards.org/?p=260
http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2009/07/hugos-2009.html
Dear Science Fiction Fandom
I wanted to have a word about the Hugos. Science Fiction Fandom, these are your awards: the shortlists chosen and voted for by you. And because I too am a fan (though without Hugo voting privileges) they are my awards. They reflect upon us all. They remain one of the most prestigious awards for SF in the world. These lists say something about SF to the world.
Science Fiction Fandom: your shortlists aren’t very good.
I'm not saying the works you have shortlisted are terrible. They're not terrible, mostly, as it goes. But they aren’t exceptionally good either. They’re in the middle. There’s a word for that. The word is mediocre.
Widely publicised shortlists of mediocre art are a bad thing. What do these lists say about SF to the multitude in the world—to the people who don’t know any better? It says that SF is old-fashioned, an aesthetically, stylistically and formally small-c conservative thing. It says that SF fans do not like works that are too challenging, or unnerving; that they prefer to stay inside their comfort zone.
This is bad because the very heart’s-blood of literature is 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. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly true of science fiction. For what is the point of SF if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange?
Take the novel shortlist. The novels on the novel shortlist are all mediocre novels, with the exception of Anathem, which isn’t so much mediocre as enormous and deranged and so boring it goes through boring into some strange condition on the far side. They are not terrible hopeless novels; and they are not outstanding, excellent, life-changing, brilliant novels. They are somewhere in the middle. Fandom, I would like the blue-riband shortlist on the genre’s most prestigious award to list some novels that are better than mediocre.
You've plumped for a list that's all YA. Nothing wrong with YA, of course; but is it really the case that all the best long fiction in our genre last year was YA? Does it seem likely to you that this could be the case? Now, I know the Stross title is a ‘late period Heinlein’ pastiche, that it’s about a sexbot, that it has oodles of sex in it. But it’s true enough to its Heinleinisch sources to be YA for all that; in the sense that its understanding of sexual desire and praxis at no point goes beyond that of a smart, randy teenager—which is as far as Heinlein’s understanding of sexual desire and praxis ever went, of course. So, I’ll call Saturn’s Children YA; and I’ll go on from there to note that everything on the novel list is YA. Here are a couple of paragraphs from blogs, one relating to this list, one not. Firstly, from Abigail Nussbaum, who has already said many of the things about the disappointing novel shortlist that I’d have liked to:
Though it might be tempting to conclude that the shoddy state of this year's shortlist is the result of the infantilization of the genre, to my mind the problem isn't that YA books are being nominated, but that the wrong YA books have been. How much stronger would this year's best novel shortlist have been if Terry Pratchett's Nation, Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, or even Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island had been on it? (This is not even to mention books that have received a great deal of critical attention … Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, Kristin Cashore's Graceling, or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.)
And this, not specifically related to the Hugos, but a suggestive quotation nevertheless: the excellent Blogographia Literaria quotes Leslie Fiedler:
There is a real sense in which our prose fiction is immediately distinguishable from that of Europe, though this is a fact that is difficult for Americans to confess. In this sense, our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. The great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children's section of the library, their level of sentimentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent. This is part of what we mean when we talk about the incapacity of the American novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writing the same book over and over again until he lapses into silence of self-parody.
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.
Let me put it this way: Fandom, when you voted Scalzi’s mediocre Zoe’s Tale onto the shortlist, did you really do so because you thought it one of the six best genre novels published in 2008? I mean—honestly? Or did you, on the contrary, think: ‘I like Scalzi; I like Scalzi’s blog; and although maybe his novel’s not, you know, Tolstoy or anything, I enjoyed it plenty, and I reckon Scalzi deserves the egoboo.’ Because I can believe the latter explanation much more readily than the former, and the problem with it is that none of those things are reasons to vote Zoe’s Tale onto a best novel shortlist. Those are corrupting reasons, because every time you vote a mediocre book onto a shortlist that exists to celebrate the very best in our genre you devalue not only the award but the genre too. Please don’t devalue my genre, fandom. I love my genre. Don’t vote mediocre books onto the Hugo novel shortlist; vote good books; and excellent books. There’s plenty of them about, you know.
Of course, there’s always the possibility, of course, that you genuinely feel Zoe’s Tale is one of the best novels published last year. If that’s what you believe—if you actually think Zoe’s Tale is the best the novel can aspire to—then you really, really, really, really, really need to broaden your aesthetic horizons. You need to read more widely, to look at a greater selection of writers and modes of writing; to stretch yourself; to venture out of your comfort zone. Not just for the health of this award, and SF; but for the sanity of your soul. Because if you can actually read the excellent The Quiet War and then read the pleasant but mediocre Zoe’s Tale, and not see that the former is a much much better novel than the latter, there must be something wrong with you.
Little Brother? Part of me feels bad saying this, since Doctorow’s novel is in the fullest sense a righteous book—it contains a whole bunch of stuff that people, especially young people, really ought to know. And it’s been really successful, and a lot of young people are reading it, which is superb. And Doctorow is a lovely, lovely human being. But as a novel Little Brother is a mediocre piece of writing: stylistically dull; too formally stilted in execution; too monologic tonally. The novel’s drama is construed in a fatally one-sided a manner, with nothing to suggest why the bad guys do what they do apart from the fact that they are bad guys. The torture sequence at the end pulls it punches. Orwell’s Big-Bro bad guys are a thousand times nastier than anything here, no punches are pulled, and yet Orwell’s villains have a comprehensible, if repellent, rationale. It’s not good enough to say ‘but this is a YA novel’. The best YA novels are more than capable of covering all this stuff; and most young adults know the world is not a 2-D cartoon. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was a teenager, for instance, like a great many people. I loved it. So Little Brother’s righteousness—and I’m not being snarky when I use that phrase—does not save it from being mediocre as a novel. Or—Gaiman’s Jungle Book retread, The Graveyard Book. This is better-made than some of Gaiman’s other novels, and it melts a little corner of my belief that Gaiman is a great writer of graphic novels but an indifferent novelist. But The Graveyard Book is too twee, too cosy, especially given that its theme is Death which is, in reality, neither twee or cosy, as some children, and all of us eventually, grievously discover. So that leaves Anathem, and it seems a strange thing to say given how little I like this book, but it’s seems to me the only title here whose presence is deserved. I think it fails, but I think it fails in heroic, mad, reader-stretching, you’ve-never-come-across-anything-like-this-before ways. Saturn’s Children is as scattershot a novel as any Stross has written, and the proportion of shot that hits the target is as it’s always been. I suppose it could be argued that Saturn’s Children’s take on late Heinlein tries something new with the form of the novel, if rattling the form to pieces with a hail of bolts and screws counts as new. But it’s pretty weak fare compared even to Anathem.
Guys, we can do better. Why not make next year’s list a thing of excellence, rather than competence and mediocrity? Why not think about listing genuinely good books? Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, Gwyneth Jones’s Spirit; Lee Konstantinou’s Pop Apocalypse, China Mieville, The City and The City;, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream, Catherynne M Valente, Palimpsest. [18 July 09: I'm wrong! Someone more clued-in than I reminds me that Lavinia won't be eligible for next year's Hugos; but adds that, with Pyr's reissue of The Quiet War, McAuley's novel will be ...] They’re not all of them completely perfect; but they all of them, in various ways, push the envelope, try new stuff, shake you up. That’s six titles right there better than the 09 shortlist, and the year’s only half over. Who knows what genius, brilliant, startling, unnerving, wonderful fiction is coming in the next six months?
Fandom, the thing is that all your 2009 shortlists are like this: one or perhaps two choices that are not embarrassing, thrown in with four or five choices that are wincingly bad. Best related book? Two titles that deserve to be there (Mendelsohn, Kincaid) and three makeweights. Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: is there any person not suffering serious imbalances in their brain chemistry who really thinks Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Iron Man and the when-I-go-to-hell-for-my-sins-this-will-be-being-played-on-continuous-loop-on-the-tannoy METAtropolis comes within a parsec of WALL-E and The Dark Knight in terms of beauty, cultural significance or quality? And given that this is so, what's the other stuff even doing on the shortlist?
Or take a look at the best professional artist shortlist. You see it, there? Daniel Dos Santos; Bob Eggleton; Donato Giancola; John Picacio; Shaun Tan. All of these artists produce work that is professional, technically accomplished, polished, brightly coloured, realist and jesus, dull, dull, dull. Dull—excepting only Shaun Tan (the only one name there that seems to me to deserve to be there). Conventional; all surface technique and no soul; artworks exactly like and in not one quarter-degree superior to pretty much every SFF novel or magazine cover printed since 1966. Remember, Fandom, my question is not: are these artists competent, because clearly they all are. But are they the best? What are they doing that is new? That stands out? That shakes or moves or inspires us? The moleskin-notebook doodlers on Skine-art produce more interesting art than this in their spare time every day. We can do better. Or—and this is the angle that worries me, Fandom: or you really think that these images are the best that visual art can be?
Here's what I'd like. If it isn't going to inconvenience you, I'd be enormously grateful, when it comes to next year's shortlists, if you could remember to come up with shortlists of excellent, brilliant and genius things; not shortlists of mediocre things. Because if you do that, it will be saying: SF is brilliant, which IT IS, instead of saying, as you are this year, with occasional exceptions SF is mediocre.
Sincerely &c.
