The Hugo Awards Kerfuffle...

[Brian G Turner]

Firstly, can we not make members a topic of discussion in this thread, please? Unless anyone here on chronicles is centrally involved in the campaigning then they shouldn't be the subject of discussion.

Secondly, I think everyone is being misdirected. The central discussion issue shouldn't be whether a particular campaign to rig the Hugos has merit or not - but whether it should even be possible to happen in the first place.

Surely I'm not the only one who thinks the Hugos need to be reformed? IMO there are two huge problems with the voting:

1. the limiting user choice to only five nominations,
2. the overwhelming focus on magazine fiction - best short story, best novella, best novelette, best editor, best magazine, best fanzine. One award for best novel.

The focus on short fiction does absolutely nothing to represent the wider SFF genre.

Especially as I would suggest that the publication of Dune changed the publishing model for SFF for ever - that one best selling novel, still in print after 50 years, that no SFF imprint would publish because they didn't publish novels. Since then, the novel has dominated SFF fiction. The midlist writers have since been culled. And now self-publishing is accepted.

But the Hugo voting system has not evolved to reflect changes to publishing that have taken place over the past 50 years.

By focusing on short fiction, the Hugos are also elitist and exclusionary.

I have shelves and shelves full of SFF novels - but no magazines. I have attended two Worldcons, so technically I was able to vote in four - but I have been unable to because my single voting option was to vote for one of just five novels that had been prepared as nominations for me.

Yet now that the nominations are being openly rigged, the discussion is all about the merit of that?

I say reform the voting system, and the Hugos themselves - if they are to be regarded as relevant.

For decades they have failed to represent the interests of the wider field of readers and writers and the SFF genre. If the Hugos are to be taken seriously, and not be the standing joke that they have become, then they need to stop representing a minority of American magazine readers.

And if that isn't going to happen, I really don't care about any discussions about whether the voting is being rigged appropriately - because the Hugos don't represent me.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Other than mail order, SFF magazines are also rarely available outside USA for any of last 80 years. Yes, there has been the odd UK publication, but I've never seen a single issue of ANY SF magazine, except on archive.org
I've only been able to read shorts republished in Anthologies, or re-written as Novels. I've been reading SF for about 50 years.

Brian makes excellent points.

Even 60 years ago the Hugo emphasis was probably outdated.

 

[Ursa major]

A couple of points, Brian. First of all, I believe you were eligible to nominate as well as to vote: the nominations are not handed down from on high (which is why the Sad Puppies -- and to a greater extent, the Rabid Puppies** -- have been able to affect the nominations). Second, it's probably true that most of that which is published by known imprints consists of novels (as opposed to anthologies), but that's a function of the publishing industry needing to turn a profit and reducing the risk of making losses. I find it hard to believe that novels are the main output of those writing SFF, as writing a novel is a much bigger task to take on***. We haven't see much of it, because it wasn't being published. (Self-publishing, and ebooks, probably mean that more will become available; all we'll have to do will be to look for it.)


As an aside, I'm a big fan of the Charles Stross Laundry series. The first novel in that series (The Atrocity Archives) was rather short, and so could not find a book publisher. Luckily for Mr Stross (and I, as a reader), his second work in that universe, The Concrete Jungle, won the Hugo for best novella (in 2005). That novella was bundled with The Atrocity Archives, allowing the novel to be published. Without that Hugo, I expect Stross would not be still writing Laundry novels (and associated shorter works).


** - The two lists are not the same and their aims and motives should not be confused.

*** - Having said that, I've never been attracted to writing shorter pieces, but I don't think I'm typical.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I've never been attracted to writing shorter pieces, but I don't think I'm typical.

I think it's a completely different skill. I wouldn't be convinced that you are not typical.
Also even in same genre, rarely simply a shorter length, excepting the Novella. The actual short story, as often in a magazine, is often best with a wry punchline or twist at the end. The distinction of Novella and Novel can simply be length and certainly in past years such a distinction didn't exist.

In older times there were Essays and Novels.

So where is dividing line?
Perhaps if it's short enough to be read without a break (by an average reader) or in a Magazine in a single part, it's a short story. If it's not either of those then it's an Novella or Novel, depending on the fashion of the times.

 

[Nerds_feather]

Two things here.

Where I can't get on-board with modern leftist ideology is their belief that race and gender are the paramount qualities of identity. That the most important thing to note in someone who is: a woman, a writer, a mother of two boys, an amateur historian, a potter, someone with a dry sense of humor, an analytic thinker, alienated by modern technology, a lapsed Catholic is... a woman. Why, when we look at five people, should we see: a white hetero male, a white lesbian woman, a black heterosexual woman, an Asian heterosexual male, a white hetero female? Why can't we see: a humorous gadfly, a poetic nurturer, a skeptical scientist, a stubborn pedant, a brilliant recluse? I know I'm repeating myself, but when people champion the fact that a successful writer is an Asian woman, they are inviting people to regard her foremost as an Asian woman. Is that really what we want?

I agree with you in one sense--most scholars of social categorization see "identity" as fluid and socially constructed anyways, and as something that can be (and frequently is) mobilized by "entrepreneurs" for strategic purposes. I also dislike approaches to diversity like this one, which reifies social categories and (along the lines I suggested in my last point) just inverts the power hierarchy. I'm also often frustrated by how, in certain discourses on diversity, the loudest advocates are often super quick to dismiss class privilege as somehow less insidious than gender, race, sexuality, etc. This is just empirically wrong.

On the other hand, modern societies have institutionalized certain cleavages over long periods of time. As a consequence, there are some pretty deeply embedded imbalances--for example: variation in salary by gender with everything else held constant; variation in access to housing by race with everything else held constant; etc. You don't have to accept race as "real" to see that a social system that categorizes and structures inequality by race is very real in its effects. (And, to link to the above point, one of the ways it is most real in its consequences centers on how it structures class.)

Second, when I look at where lack of diversity draws criticism and where it's ignored, I have my doubts that diversity itself is really the goal of many of its purported advocates. Why does the 60/40 gender split (I have not idea if this is the real number) in SFF authors spark such passion and activism, while the 95/5 gender split in Romance remains wholly unchallenged?

Quite possibly because we are talking about SF/F readers who don't care about romance fiction? I know I don't (not that there's anything wrong with romance fiction, I just have no interest in it and know nothing about it).

Or let's pull back the curtain all the way: Why do I hear almost nothing in social media acknowledging the fact women outnumber men as readers of fiction by two one. Two to one. If those figures were reversed, I'm confident that it would be attributed to the smothering oppression of the patriarchy, and be met with passionate and popular efforts to reform book publishing to be inclusive of women. Yet there is very little movement to address the very real and massive shortfall in male readers. Where are the activists striving to make reading more appealing to boys, or trying to change genres that traditionally cater to girls into something more appealing to boys? Not their problem, I guess.

Think it might be worthwhile to reiterate the main thrust of pro-diversity arguments on gender. The argument is that women write a lot of books, but are reviewed much less often, receive smaller marketing budgets, are given male-reader-repelling "feminine" book covers rather than stuff that might have a broader appeal outside a specifically female readership, are nominated for fewer awards and--as a result of all these things--consequently have proportionately less visibility in the genre (SF/F). I don't think you need to see gender as necessarily the most important imbalance in SF/F to recognize that there is an imbalance and that most fixes wouldn't actually negatively impact anyone else (e.g. de-gendering certain male-reader-repelling book covers).

(Note: the reviews imbalance is true of literature writ large, and well as more narrowly in SF/F. The gendered cover thing is fascinating to examine.)

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Sorry, this will be a longer one with numbers...

Second, when I look at where lack of diversity draws criticism and where it's ignored, I have my doubts that diversity itself is really the goal of many of its purported advocates. Why does the 60/40 gender split (I have not idea if this is the real number) in SFF authors spark such passion and activism, while the 95/5 gender split in Romance remains wholly unchallenged?

Because a fairly large chunk of SF stories actively promote equality, justice, and acceptance of diversity. So the fanbase is more attuned to that dynamic. Also, there's not a 95/5 gender split in romance. That's a myth. It is lopsided, but it's not that bad, closer to 75-80/20-25. Most males writers in the genre use their initials or female pen names because the audience will largely only accept women writers. Basically exactly the opposite of what JK Rowling did when she was published in the States. Because US SFF fans are less accepting of women writers. Go figure.

Or let's pull back the curtain all the way: Why do I hear almost nothing in social media acknowledging the fact women outnumber men as readers of fiction by two one. Two to one. If those figures were reversed, I'm confident that it would be attributed to the smothering oppression of the patriarchy, and be met with passionate and popular efforts to reform book publishing to be inclusive of women. Yet there is very little movement to address the very real and massive shortfall in male readers. Where are the activists striving to make reading more appealing to boys, or trying to change genres that traditionally cater to girls into something more appealing to boys? Not their problem, I guess.

They're out there, you just have to look.

http://www.boysread.org/
http://www.guysread.com/

Writers, editors, and publishers are quite aware of this and there's a push for more male-centric children's books and YA materials. Google "boys read" and you'll see there's a bunch of stuff out there. It needs to improve, but it's there.

Some background. I'm a guy and I'm a librarian. I went into librarianship because I'm a big reader. Even at a young age I noticed this was something of an aberration. As part of my master's degree I did research on the gender differences you're talking about. They're real. They're pronounced. And they're not going away anytime soon. It's largely a cultural thing that's been in place since the beginning of human history, not the reading divide per se, but the culture that lead to the disparity. Male hunter, female carer. Male sports, female too delicate. Male breadwinner, female homemaker. There's a bunch of research on this, it's out there, you just have to look.

But, what it comes down to here is: women dominate book-related professions and teaching combined with the fact that, as groups, boys and girls have vastly different genre interests. You could argue chicken or the egg, but it's the culture that's caused this disparity, the book-related professions and the reading divide are simply modern reflections of that.

So, fair warning. Research geek incoming... *pushes up glasses*

According to the last census, the percentage of males in the total population of the United States is 49% (Smith & Spraggins, 2009), or very nearly half of the US population. Despite women being 51% of the population, and only 46.7% of the active workforce over the age of 16, women hold 63.5% of retail bookstore jobs, 81.5% of all library and archives jobs, 75.6% of all elementary and secondary school jobs (Bureau of Labor, 2009), as well as 81.9% of all elementary and middle school teaching jobs (Women’s Bureau, 2009). Book publishing is also recognized as a female dominated profession, with some estimates placing the ratio of women in editorial positions as high as 74% (Milliot, 2007).

This is compounded by the fact that as groups, boys and girls have vastly different tastes in books...

Gender preferences are widely examined in the literature. Support of gender preferences in genre selection is examined in Woolcott (2001), specifically that boys’ reading preferences tend toward Science Fiction / Fantasy, outstripping girls’ preference for the genre by 10% (these two genres are split in other studies, including one cited below); action adventure, surpassing girls’ interest by nearly 20%; non-fiction, with boys’ interest 5% higher than girls’ interest; and comic books, with boys’ interest above 40% but girls’ interest near 15%; while girls’ preferences tend toward books about real people, with more than 20% higher interest; mysteries / thrillers, with 10% more interest than boys; and romances, with boys’ interest around 10% though girls’ interest is nearly 40% (Woolcott, 2001). These gender preferences for genre selection are also examined, with slightly differing labels, in Alloway et al (2002), and Schultheis (1990).

Further, many of boys’ preferences are examined by Schultheis, including boys’ preference for male protagonists, the desire to pick their own books as opposed to having material assigned, a desire for humor in reading material, and a preference for action (Schultheis, 1990). According to Schultheis, “the most frequently chosen categories by males were adventure, 81%; humor, 64%; horror and science fiction with 57% each” (Schultheis, 1990, p. 15).

One interesting note is the use of science fiction and fantasy as a single genre category choice by some studies, as in Woolcott. Schultheis split these genres and yielded a surprising result: boys chose science fiction 57% of the time, while girls chose it only 10%; and both genders chose fantasy 43% of the time (Schultheis, 1990).

While the percentages are slightly different between these studies, the conclusion is clear: there are distinct gender based preferences in reading material based on genre categories. Elementary and middle school boys prefer action-adventure, humor, horror, comics, and science fiction by a significant margin when compared to girls of the same age range.

And that as boys and girls have distinct tastes, but women dominate the book-related and teaching professions...

Keeping the interests of the children in mind when selecting a book to publish or add to a curriculum can be complicated by the gender of the target reader when the selector shares neither the gender, nor the reading interests of the target audience. These and other aspects of gender bias were examined by Narahara (1998). Among her findings were that female children’s picture book authors outnumbered men by nearly 2-to-1 and that despite this disparity, males characters appeared more than twice as often as female characters (Narahara, 1998).

Then there's the fact that boys almost universally refuse to read books with girl protagonists. Though this is changing... slowly...

Examination of gender preferences in reading material revealed that boys largely prefer male protagonists (Schultheis, 1990), and are far more interested in specific genres than girls, with boys being predominantly interested in action-adventure, science fiction, humor, and horror (Alloway et al, 2002; Woolcott, 2001; Schultheis, 1990).

And for completeness' sake:

REFERENCES

Alloway, N., Freebody, P., Gilbert, P., & Muspratt, S. (2002). Boys, literacy and schooling: Expanding the repertoires of practice. Full report Curriculum Corporation, James Cook University, and Griffith University. Retrieved from http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/637/1/BoysLiteracySchooling.pdf

Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor. (2009). Labor force statistics from the current population survey. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlftable14.htm

Carrington, B., Tymms, P., & Merrell, C. (2008). Role models, school improvement and the ‘gender gap’--do men bring out the best in boys and women the best in girls? British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 315-327.

Dee, T. (2007). Teachers and the gender gaps in student achievement. Journal of Human Resources, 62(3), 528-554.

Farris, P., Werderich, D., Nelson P., & Fuhler C. (year). Male call: fifth-grade boys’ reading preferences. The Reading Teacher, 63(3), pp. 180-188. doi:10.1598/RT.63.3.1

Kohn, T. (2002). An Investigation into the awareness among high school teachers of boys’ reading preferences and an analysis of the required reading of boys in the lower track. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from ERIC.

Marks, G. (2008). Accounting for the gender gaps in student performance in reading and mathematics: evidence from 31 countries. Oxford Review of Education, 34(1), 89-109. doi:10.1080/03054980701565279

McKeon, H. (1975). Book selection criteria of children’s book editors and elementary classroom teachers. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from ERIC.

Milliot, J. (2007). Measuring the salary divide. Publisher’s weekly, 254(29), 24-27.

Narahara, M. (1998). Gender Bias in Children's Picture Books: A Look at Teachers’s Choice of Literature. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Long Beach, United States.

Schultheis, C. (1990). Study of the relationship between gender and reading preferences in adolescents. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from ERIC.

Smith, D., & Spraggins, R. (2009). Gender in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html

Woolcott Research Pty. Ltd. (2001). Young Australians Reading: From keen to reluctant readers. Retrieved from http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/33902/Young_Australians_Reading.pdf

Women’s Bureau, United States Department of Labor. (2009). Quick stats on women workers, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.htm

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Actually I read sf magazines quite a lot. I also write shorts and longs pretty much interchangeably, though rarely novella length (although I have one...)

The problem is - how widely would you need to read to know what to nominate? Every issue...? That would be too much for me.

 

[J-Sun]

He uses another name. I can't remember which one (and I'm unable to find it now--wonder if it was deleted). Hmmm. It was definitely a finger wagging type of thing.

Well, I can't address that then. It does seem unusual - as a professional writer, he's naturally not going to be shy about putting his name out and I've never seen him use another but, if it was someone trolling on his behalf then I'd expect it to be inflammatory where you say it was relatively mild. So that's odd all around, but I don't know what to say about it.

"Lack of quality" is a very common approach in arguments against nonwhite people, homosexuals and women. It's not okay to speak out against these groups anymore in an overt way--in most places. So, what do you do? You make it about "quality."

Then we can't talk because there is no trust at all and no agreement on language, the very basis of conversation. If anything the one side says is a pile of lies to the other and nothing of what they say is what they mean, then... there's just no possibility of communication and this thread and the whole wider debate is a waste of time for people who feel that way.

I have no confidence that the SP group is capable of considering diversity when they've really outed themselves as the types who speak out against things like same-sex marriage for example. They're not MY representatives. They might get overlap with some of what I do consider "Quality" and "worthy," but it's extremely shitty and entitled for them to think they have their finger on MY pulse and the pulse of SFF community. In short--it might be within the rules, but it's a dick thing to do. And nobody in their camp seems to be acknowledging that.

I don't see what you're saying here. I don't get the idea the SPs would ever think they were representing you.

While "colorblindness" and related concepts are pipe dreams, I'm frustrated by those advocating (again, by design or accident) the trading of one set of inequalities for another. The goal IMO--and I believe this is the goal of most pro-diversity advocates--is equality of opportunity and a field that is as broadly accepting of individuals with non-normative social circumstances as it is of the majority, however defined.

Careful - I assume your left credentials are impeccable but if you start talking reasonably like that, people will decide what you really mean is that you're against equality, too. The idea that you even can trade one set of equalities for another is code for being racist.

But I like your point, anyway, personally.

2. the overwhelming focus on magazine fiction - best short story, best novella, best novelette, best editor, best magazine, best fanzine. One award for best novel.

The focus on short fiction does absolutely nothing to represent the wider SFF genre.
...
But the Hugo voting system has not evolved to reflect changes to publishing that have taken place over the past 50 years.

By focusing on short fiction, the Hugos are also elitist and exclusionary.

You're kidding right? You're just posting this to get a rise out of me? Forget the race, religion, and creed stuff - you're dissing short fiction?!?! Now that's important!

There's four categories of fiction and, hey, guess what, four categories of print Hugo awards. Three of them short. On the other hand, there's eleven other categories including long and short media, editors, fans, and weird little things. And this genre only exists because of short fiction and will probably die shortly after the short fiction does as it was the field's lifeblood, the roots of the tree. How can there be more than one award for best novel anyway? "This is the best novel. And this one is also the best novel." (?) Sure, they could be split into Fantasy and SF and YA and 1st like Locus does but then so should the short fiction be and then you still have the 3-1 ratio. You could collapse all "less than novel length" awards into a single "short-fiction" award but how does that help? People don't make any money writing short fiction but they do it anyway - the only recompense is the occasional weird short SF reader saying "I liked your story" and the award. And you want to take that away? And saying, "I don't read short SF" like you should be compensated for that is like me saying, "I don't read novels" and wanting that award abolished. That would be an omission of mine I'd feel I ought to correct rather than something I'd enforce on others. If it wasn't for Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories and the magazine that bears his name and Analog, then who knows if I'd ever have had my life changed in the way it was. Now that people proudly ignore that branch of the field, how many such people have we lost?

And I'm really disappointed. I thought a power figure like Martin might have calmed the waters and changed some minds on some or all aspects of this but he seems to have done nothing. He explicitly says not to change the awards. And all his Hugo wins are for SHORT FICTION (including the transcendentally brilliant "A Song for Lya") and I know it never even crossed his mind that that's how someone would want to "fix" this "problem". Run that by him in on his site, please - I want to see what he says.

 

[Ursa major]

The problem is - how widely would you need to read to know what to nominate? Every issue...? That would be too much for me.

I think the idea is that you nominate works you think might be worthy of a Hugo. That doesn't require you to compare what you nominate with all other stories, merely that you have some sense of what might be a worthy story (for whatever reason).

Voting is somewhat different, in that the options are limited and you're (meant to be?) choosing the best from those on offer, which rather presupposes that you've at least made an attempt to read all the nominees in a category (although I expect most voters haven't done so).

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I just have no interest in it and know nothing about it

Try some easy ones first ... start with adventure stuff like Mary Stewart (who wrote fantasy too). Or a writer like Daphne du Maurier.
Also try Jill Tattershall, "The High Hunt", Georgette Hayer, maybe some Josephine Tay (varies from Detective Mystery to Romance Element). Tame stuff perhaps compared to some modern and not at level of Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austin.

 

[MWagner]

I'm also often frustrated by how, in certain discourses on diversity, the loudest advocates are often super quick to dismiss class privilege as somehow less insidious than gender, race, sexuality, etc. This is just empirically wrong.

We live in society where being seen to be treated unfairly comes with a certain social cachet. That social cachet is as appealing to the wealthiest five per cent as it is to anyone else.

This is compounded by the fact that as groups, boys and girls have vastly different tastes in books...

This being the case, and the imbalance in reading so pronounced, shouldn't we maybe cut boys and young men some slack when it comes to the kind of fiction they enjoy? Maybe they need sub-genres they can call their own. If young men can't find stories aimed deliberately at them, they may give up on reading altogether.

 

[Nerds_feather]

Try some easy ones first ... start with adventure stuff like Mary Stewart (who wrote fantasy too). Or a writer like Daphne du Maurier.
Also try Jill Tattershall, "The High Hunt", Georgette Hayer, maybe some Josephine Tay (varies from Detective Mystery to Romance Element). Tame stuff perhaps compared to some modern and not at level of Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austin.

Well, I do love Wuthering Heights, though I've approached it as a gothic novel. But it's just so insanely over the top.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

you're dissing short fiction?

Apart from what is republished in Anthologies or like Foundation and some C.J. Cherryh, printed short fiction is almost inaccessible outside USA. Yes, there are loads of self published blogs and some online magazines today but signal to noise on those is horrifically poor.

Unless something is REALLY short it's too tiring to read on tablet or Laptop screen on a website. I have to go to the bother of converting it into an eBook for the kindle (before that, I'd print stuff). So many websites too seem to know ZERO about presentation.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

though I've approached it as a gothic novel

I think a lot of "gothic" novels are plot devices to justify the romance?

Wuthering heights is one of my least favourite Bronte novels. It's Emily Brontë anyway, not Charlotte. Quite different.

 

[Randy M.]

You're kidding right? You're just posting this to get a rise out of me? Forget the race, religion, and creed stuff - you're dissing short fiction?!?! Now that's important!

Attaboy! You tell him, J-Sun.

Short fiction rules!


Randy M.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Short fiction rules!

Well, it's a different enjoyment to novels. But I only get much of it via Anthologies.
Short Fiction = Starters.
Novels = Main course.

I'm not shy about ONLY ordering a selection of starters and no main course if there is nothing I feel like on the menu.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

This being the case, and the imbalance in reading so pronounced, shouldn't we maybe cut boys and young men some slack when it comes to the kind of fiction they enjoy?

Maybe they need sub-genres they can call their own. If young men can't find stories aimed deliberately at them, they may give up on reading altogether.

It's a question of leg-work, or lack thereof, rather than the non-existence of such works. There's no genre that's guaranteed to please any given reader all the time. Even in the most write-by-numbers genres there's still variation because of the quality of the writing and the choices of the writer.

Just like everyone else, guys need to find the stuff they like. I agree there needs to be more done to bring boys into reading as a thing to do, but any hint of boys only or no girls is the opposite of helpful. The point isn't to isolate and build walls around the stuff boys might like, rather to expand what's there that boys gravitate towards and get them to also try more kinds of books.

You get them hooked on reading as a thing by catering to their childhood tastes while they're children then expand on those tastes over time, you don't force them to only read stuff they hate, but you also don't lock them into the same tastes they had as children through adolescence and into adulthood.

It's the same as your parents making you try different foods as a kid. You suckled at your mother's breast as a baby, but you moved on to baby food. You maybe only liked hotdogs as a kid, but you moved on to steak as an adult. You refused veggies, but you'll ****ing die without them. Tastes change, that's okay, let them.

You give them what they want to get them to eat/read when they're too young to know better, but as they get older, their tastes naturally change. So let them change, but in no way does that mean enforce some kind of "this is what I liked at 13 so it's all that I'll ever read forever" mentality.

But some of it's just childish. Boys tend not to read books with a girl protagonist? Grow the f*ck up.

 

[J-Sun]

I'm merely pointing out that the USA allows extremes that would be illegal in at least the UK, and probably much of Europe.

And street violence, which US rightist groups don't really engage in. So from our perspective, Europe's far-right seems like something out of a history book on the 1920s and 1930s.

Digression here, but I was struck by the late breaking thought that these may well be related. The US is reputed to be an armed-to-the-teeth violent society and we do have the bits of random stuff but we basically just yell at each other a lot and do not use political violence as a strategy. In an (IMO completely misguided) attempt to avoid the errors of the past, Europe has a radically different notion of free speech than we do. And this suppression comes out as violence as well as speech, perhaps because (a) you're a boiling kettle with the lid on tight and (b) once you've broken a piddly speech rule, you might as well kick someone's head in since both are illegal.

No evidence for any of this at all - just a theory that popped into my head.

I'm also often frustrated by how, in certain discourses on diversity, the loudest advocates are often super quick to dismiss class privilege as somehow less insidious than gender, race, sexuality, etc. This is just empirically wrong.

Amen.

the reviews imbalance

There's an interesting bit on Correia where he talks about how some site did a comparison of him and a "left" author and how he got no reviews (good or bad[1]) and the other guy got millions. Short fiction reviews are hard to find; reviews of Analog, harder. SF book reviews are hard to find; Baen, harder. There are all kinds of imbalances.

Edit: [1]: I should say the unreviewed book sold a zillion copies and got something like a 4.8 on Amazon. So it's not like no one was reading it or they all thought it sucked. (I probably would but I'm just saying it seems perfectly reviewable.)

Book publishing is also recognized as a female dominated profession, with some estimates placing the ratio of women in editorial positions as high as 74% (Milliot, 2007).

Wait. The teachers educating children are women. The librarians guiding children to books are women. The publishers in the position of deciding what books even exist and how they're marketed are women. And there is some vast male conspiracy that causes women not to write or read or be represented or win awards and it will all be fixed if men just just quit reading straight white male stuff? (BTW, I see again the diversity crowd is pure and sweet and all the wingnuts are on the SP side.) I'm confused. Why the hell aren't these female teachers, librarians, publishers, and readers doing their jobs? How is this an example of patriarchal injustice?

 

[Randy M.]

Then we can't talk because there is no trust at all and no agreement on language, the very basis of conversation. If anything the one side says is a pile of lies to the other and nothing of what they say is what they mean, then... there's just no possibility of communication and this thread and the whole wider debate is a waste of time for people who feel that way.

I'd like to address this: I thought early on part of what Fishbowl Helmet was addressing without quite identifying it this way, was the rhetoric of exclusion. I'm not an expert and I don't study it, but all of my lifetime in the U.S. I've watched certain words initially meant one way taken by opponents and twisted to mean something else. FH's example was "Affirmative Action." Similarly, when I was a kid "liberal" had become an epithet with the implied meaning of Communist and/or fellow traveler. From the other side, "reactionary" was often accompanied by foam and droplets of saliva.

I thought MWagner made a valid point about class, but in the U.S. class is largely dictated by money and/or profession (exceptions to a degree being families like the Kennedys who have acquired cache beyond wealth, though they have enough of that, too): Contrast the public interest and sympathy expressed for the accused in the O.J. Simpson murder trial vs. the Mike Tyson rape trial. There is a fairly secure African-American middle class, but certainly recent recorded incidents show they are not excluded from bad behavior by the authorities.

Largely, I think J-Sun has made a broader point than he meant to: We can't talk because both sides have usurped for purposes of propaganda the vocabulary we might have used. It is possible that real communication is only taking place outside the major public arenas because the spotlight forces the taking of sides: How much can I pack into this 140 characters? What can I say in a sound bite? Outside the spotlight people have less reason to be rabid and may work toward a shared vocabulary. Until that is shared broadly, only extremists are likely to hog the spotlight.

It's a good discussion so far. But as the discussion has shown, it's a complex subject and decades of not-good-will make it harder to temper our responses. Note that this forum is one of those quieter places and the discussion so far has been remarkably civil with little prodding from Brian. Congratulations, folks; we may not reach conclusions but in the current climate keeping civil discourse civil is a small victory.


Randy M.

 

[Randy M.]

Well, it's a different enjoyment to novels. But I only get much of it via Anthologies.
Short Fiction = Starters.
Novels = Main course.

I'm not shy about ONLY ordering a selection of starters and no main course if there is nothing I feel like on the menu.

Honestly, I enjoy novels, but it's a rare few I get invested in so deeply that I get lost in them -- LOTR, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Land of Laughs, a few others. Short stories fill the need to read imaginative work, and often show twice the imagination of some of the lumbering novels I've tried to plow through. And if I don't like it, I haven't invested that much time.

I can't keep up with magazine fiction, but I have enough anthologies and author collections to keep me going for years.


Randy M.