Two-time World Fantasy Award winner S. T. Joshi, author of numerous books on H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, and the editor of many more critical works about them, publicly announced he is returning his awards in protest against the World Fantasy Con’s decision to stop using a bust of Lovecraft as the award trophy.
He wrote on his blog November 10:
It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell. Here is my letter to him:
Mr. David G. Hartwell
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010Dear Mr. Hartwell:I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.
I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.
Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me.
I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues.
Yours,
S. T. JoshiAnd that is all I will have to say on this ridiculous matter. If anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken.
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Huh? I love Lovecraft but he was undeniably racist, even for his time, and that’s reflected in many of his stories.
So …
And keeping the award so he wouldn’t write that letter would not be to “placate the shrill whining of a handful of [opinionated people]”?
This is kind of the point: this doesn’t affect what people think of Lovecraft and his influence, the change isn’t meant to signal The End of Cthulhu, it’s about the world of fantasy going forward. Joshi is missing the point of why people wanted the change.
Sad you feel that way S.
The idea that World Fantasy should be represented by a niche US writer who did his thing forty years after the modern fantasy tradition got going was never really something that made sense. Even if said writer was as enlightened and modern as one could hope for.
I understand why some people are upset about this decision.
I can understand the feeling that this is a change aimed at belittling Lovecraft and his accomplishments; that Lovecraft’s legacy is being deliberately tarnished by re-focusing it on a human fault which was significant, but is being inflated to overshadow the many reasons to respect Lovecraft and admire him. I can also understand the feeling that the World Fantasy Award, and its physical representation, have gained weight and cachet of their own; they have significance of their own which is distinct but inseparable from their established form. I understand that saying “your award was wrong; do it differently” hurts.
I can understand all that. I also understand that many people feel very differently, and their opinions and arguments deserve consideration and respect as well. I’m very glad of the decision, and I hope future awards are fantastic.
I don’t see this rant as any different from a “world renowned scholar on the Confederacy” going on a major rant about how the Confederate flag is being taken down from government offices.
Honestly, I don’t have much patience with Lovecraft apologists, and I’m glad that the award is being changed.
I always thought Lovecraft was a pretty strange choice for a fantasy award, anyway. I mean, if you grabbed ten people randomly off the street and asked them what genre they thought of when you said “Lovecraft”, I reckon ten out of ten would say “get away from me you lunatic” but nine out of ten would say “horror”.
True, genre boundaries are fuzzy things at best. But Lovecraft is surely best known as a horror writer? His undeniable fantasy output (things like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath) is notably weaker, heavily derivative of things like Dunsany, and also damn near unreadable. (Please don’t tell S. T. Joshi I said that.)
So, anyway. Regardless of Lovecraft’s personal opinions (I was going to say “controversial” personal opinions, but really there isn’t any controversy about them any more, is there? “Just plain wrong” would suit the case better), he’s always struck me as an iffy choice for a fantasy award. I know he’s been an influence on any number of fantasy writers, but let’s face it, so’s Scotch. If I won a World Fantasy Award, would I rather get a bust of H.P. Lovecraft or a bottle of Glenlivet?… I mean, that’s not even a choice, is it?
I can understand his decision. I can understand his disappointment.
I can not understand his motivation.
Wow, that complicates the previously articulated methodology of simply taking whatever action avoids giving offense to recipients.
My reaction had been sure, retire the bust, why not, but when Lovecraft’s biographer, plus author of multiple studies of Bierce, Dunsany, Howard, etc., and editor of Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke (Basic Books) begs to differ, that’s at least food for thought.
Joshi sounds like a typical 16 year redditor a tantrum blaming the evil SJWs. Quite disappointing coming from a respected literary scholar.
For more ramblings from Joshi on this, check August 16 and 23.
http://stjoshi.org/news2014.html
He set out his case with more substance (but in roughly the same tone) on his blog, but you have to scroll way down, for example to “February 27, 2015 — Robert Dunbar on Lovecraft.”
And so on.
Hampus, thanks – I hadn’t got that far back.
See, nobody’s doing either of these two things that he’s getting hyperventilated and self-righteous about.
Mr. Joshi is missing the point.
The World Fantasy Award is not intended to honor Lovecraft.
It is intended to honor the recipients of the World Fantasy Award.
A number of WFA recipients have commented on their failure to be honored by being given an image of a man who wrote despicable things about certain groups of people.
That Lovecraft was also a fine craftsman who wrote influential things is beside the point. The award is not about *him* nor intended to honor *him*.
The issue here is a choice between honoring the people one is trying to honor and honoring the people who wish to honor the statue one has been employing instead of the people one is attempting to honor.
I have been resisting using the term “idolaters”, but given the behavior of those who protest this change, it is unavoidable.
As some of them have admitted, changing the trophy image will have little to no effect on Lovecraft’s standing.
Since it can do little harm to Lovecraft’s reputation but will stop being a slap in the face to a great number of people the World Fantasy Award is attempting to honor, changing the trophy image is a good decision.
Nigel, sorry, the bit quoted was in direct response to this, which sort of sounded that way. Joshi’s wider point – that he thinks there is selective outrage at work – was what seemed more relevant to the topic at hand.
I like the music of Wagner. I also know and recognise that the man was a pretty big anti-Semite, as was a large chunk of the European polity in the nineteenth century. I would be concerned if there were to be a “Richard Wagner Trophy” for whatever reason, and I’d be positively worried if someone thought I deserved it!
Does that make me a “social justice warrior”?
Nah, he’s just miffed that it’s his ox being gored.
Can someone help me out with the bit where “taking Lovecraft’s face off the World Fantasy Awards” is the same as “banning people from reading Lovecraft”? Because they seriously look like different things to me. And people are planning to do one of those things, but not the other thing. (It seems to me. But I’m not as clever as S.T. Joshi, so what do I know?)
Campbell, Heinlein and Card were/are “racists of a much worse stripe than Lovecraft”? Seriously, Mr. Joshi? Were they KKK members who participated in lynchings? Or Nazi party members who were part of the SS? Because that’s the kind of thing you got to be to be much more of a racist than Lovecraft in my book.
The first World Fantasy Convention was held in Providence Rhode Isand, and it was, in part, to honor HPL. No one gave any thought to the award Then, and the PC viewpoint has cropped up. My opinion is that HPL is not as rabid a racist that many have made him out to be (and I won’t be fielding questions about this) I think it is time to move forward other things.
Some reviews of S.T.Joshi’s works on HPL have been given on Amazon.com about his focus and growing ego towards HPL and his linkage to HPL’s name. It explains his current “I have issues” viewpoint.
@Hampus
Oh, wow, that’s pretty hot stuff from Joshi. Also September 18 for full-on literary fued material.
To be fair to Joshi, as the foremost Lovecraft scholar he’s quite entitled to defend attacks on Lovecraft’s prose and literary reputation; I don’t agree with Older having criticised the use of Lovecraft on those points. It’s the contemporary meaning of the use of Lovecraft for the modern award where I agree with Older and not Joshi.
There is certainly a lot of food for thought in what Joshi wrote – if, as is perhaps the case with Brian Z., this is your first encounter with racial controversy over the canon. Otherwise it’s the same special pleading you’ve read many times before and could probably write yourself on a dare.
Lovecraft lovers should defend him as a figure in the field and someone worth reading, monstrous green hairy warts and all. What they shouldn’t be doing is suggesting that his racism doesn’t have the potency or virulence to bother people now, when it clearly does. There’s apparently arbitrary line-drawing going on (apparently arbitrary because these are social norms that are shifting, which is messy and uneven and non-legally binding – what they’re not is random, because there are reasons for the line-drawing however opponents might refuse to acknowledge them) about what is tolerated in terms of the horribleness of long-gone genre stalwarts, but it’s necessary line-drawing to acknowledge that the field now pays more attention to people for whom his ugliness is more than just a cultural/historical curiosity to go wtf at.
Henley, cut it out. If you knew that the multiple WFA recipient objecting most strongly was an Indian leftist Basic Books author and scholar of American racist writings who has spent decades studying Lovecraft’s racism, fine – I didn’t know it and it was unexpected.
Nigel, but that’s not what Older said, was it?
In one of Joshi’s blog posts he says
And all I could think was “I only wish that was all you’d said, you long-winded pretentious twerp.”* The previous posts I’d read at that point have clearly worn down my nerves.
I think it’s a shame that he can’t enjoy statuettes of a writer who clearly means a great deal to him because other people find them upsetting – or rather because the people who find them upsetting were considered to be important enough for it to be worth changing the award. If only his newfound feeling that the award had been tainted had lead to empathy for those who already felt that way.
*original wording was somewhat more rude
He set out his case with more substance
with more strawmen, to be more accurate.
Interesting: this was Nnedi Okorafor in 2011.
If I’m not misunderstanding, Joshi, who has written on the subject, thinks that was a very valid point.
But contrast it with making an announcement that the bust would no longer be used, without discussion.
@Brian Z.: I was referring to the “substance” of what Joshi wrote, not his identity. But you know, self-consciously “anti-PC” liberals are not exactly a new phenomenon. If this is your first encounter I have good and/or bad news for you: there are plenty more where that came from.
….what wasn’t what Older said?
Henley: OK. If I can find his book about American racist writers, I’ll let you know if it is self-consciously anti-PC.
Nigel, this was the wording of Older’s petition – without even a fraction of the nuance of the reasonable sounding thing you just said.
I can certainly see how Joshi would be offended by that. Looks to me like, in the absence of a formal statement/discussion, some are interpreting the decision to drop the trophy as an endorsement of what Older said.
Usually it’s a case of someone Lovecraft obviously wouldn’t have been prejudiced against telling the people he *would* have been prejudiced against that they had to suck it up and deal (again.)
This time, maybe not. Okay.
I still think he’s wrong, though. The bust needed to be changed; now it will be; good. I can understand why someone so focussed on Lovecraft would be disappointed. But it was high time.
Meh, if he’s offended that someone thinks Lovecraft is a terrible writer, tough woojies. if he’s offended someone finds Lovecraft’s racism revolting… also tough woojies. Tough woojies all round. Both of those sound like perfectly valid reasons to question his bust. You may disagree with the former quite strenuously (I do, I quite like his style) but the latter? Feck that. How anyone could award a bust of HP Lovecraft person of colour and not die with shame is beyond me. Even if the POC was okay with it and the presenter oblivious, the institution presenting the award should be mortified.
Joshi’s big baby tantrum is a tossup between sad and laughable. It’s always a bit painful to see a purported adult embarrass themselves in this way.
You’d think that a professional writer would have the ability to recognize when the nonfiction arguments he’s making address invisible pretend things, instead of the actual issues.
What needs my Lovecraft to secure his place,
One Gahan Wilson’s image of his face,
He showed the prejudices of his kin,
For he was not born with such thoughts within,
But raised Dear son of Madness, heir of hate,
He still o’er aeons worked and changed his state
Saw Deep Ones’ joys as hallowed in the sea,
And Artic Old Ones worthy of his plea,
That though their forms were strange they should engage
Our sympathy, as men, of their own age.
Like us in reason, and in hope to live,
And stranger still the Yith, his words would give,
Life better yet, than ours, before and hence,
If he had lived what further recompense?
He died before the Holocaust, before the day
Of Segregation past, before the way
To pay both man and women equally saw decree
Oh from your pedestals be proud you were not he.
Who know not what the future will judge hard,
That you accept, as worthy of award.
In the 1950’s, awards were given out under the name THE INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARDS–was it just a scroll of paper or plaque or some ornate symbolic phallus on a piece of wood?
Ah, the Spirit of William McGonagal refuses to die…
Joshi is using the same kind of hyperbole that is so common; ‘If you’re going to replace racist Lovecraft, you have to replace every who is possibly racist…etc’. It’s a nonsensical argument.
There was a contingent of the fan base that felt Lovercraft’s bust wasn’t a proper representative of a World Fantasy Award. Leave out the ‘screaming hysterical’ and all that nonsense. They lobbied for change and got it successfully. Personally, I’d support it because Lovecraft doesn’t fit the modern fantasy genre even slightly. But that’s the thing that Joshi is missing. It isn’t the HP Lovercraft Award for Fantasy. It’s the World Fantasy Award that happens to use Lovecraft’s creepy bust. There’s absolutely zero issue in changing it to meet the evolving expectations of the genre.
I saw S. T. Joshi’s GOH (scholarly) speech at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts back in 2003. (Here’s a link to list of past guests of honor up through 2012).
I was less than impressed then (the creative GOH that year was Charles de Lint whose talk was marvellous!).
I don’t remember much other than thinking “apologist,” more about the literary status of fantastic literatures than anything about race, and being bored during the last half of it. He didn’t exactly inspire me to read any of his scholarship.
And the linked post is even less than impressive. He may be able to talk about Lovecraft’s work and the issue of race, but he’s certainly not able to talk about American racism in any meaningful way since his language choices place him firmly in the Sad Puppy camp.
OTOH, I can recommend Nalo Hopkinson’s fantastic GOH speech when was was the creative GOH a few years later: Reluctant Ambassador From the Planet of Midnight–My Address on Race in the Literature of the Fantastic at ICFA 2010
Somhow I don’t think Joshi’s influence/boycott is going to hurt the WFA in any meaningful way.
Lovecraft was not “a man of his time.” His racism was unusually virulent for his day, and it was also central to his literary project. This is not Frank Norris tossing an anti-Semitic portrait of a side character into McTeague.
That said, a friend of mine insists that Lovecraft repented of his noxious views toward the end of his life, and even tried to suppress republication of some earlier works. If, say, HPL grew ashamed of The Horror at Red Hook, his defenders should talk about that instead.
Wow, Joshi sounds delicate, doesn’t he? I’ve quite liked him on Lovecraft-related panels, though. Peace nailed it. The award does not honor Lovecraft. It honors the recipients. And if non-white winners of the award have started to feel hurt and not honored at all, that seems like a problem worth addressing. The “social justice warriors” he’s complaining about are RECIPIENTS OF THE AWARD, plus their friends and fans in the field, plus anybody who, once the problem is pointed out, agrees that it is a problem. It’s not some free-roving band of SJWs migrating here and there just looking for something to get outraged about. It’s people already in the field, who have just as much of a right to be there as he does.
Hmm, where have I heard a very similar attitude recently? The braying of some unhappy canines, perhaps?
Clicky.
If Lovecraft hadn’t died at 46, he’d have been expelled from the first World Science Fiction Convention for being a socialist, then written a series of 1950s spy thrillers in which nefarious Nazis use arcane mathematics to open portals to the dimension of the Old Ones.
What confuses me about this manifesto, is this part:
Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) (bolded emphasis mine)
The World Fantasy Award is not named after Lovecraft. The above statement is a basic failure of… I don’t even know what to call it. Not “fact-checking” because he himself calls it The World Fantasy Award so he presumably knows better. Um. Logic? Reality-congruence? I’m not sure, but it’s a whopper, whatever it is.
Some awards are named after people, and therefore have a strong association with those people, for better or for worse. That’s fair. But that’s not the case with this award.
I don’t mind what they do with their award : the world fantasy
awards are fully justified in making their award look like what ever they like – it’s their award. They once decided it would be nice to make it look like Lovecraft,
they’ve now decided it shouldn’t, that’s fine.
But I think some people are tacitly forgetting how racist ‘we’ (as societies, the US and the UK) used to be. It’s true lots of people weren’t racist, but those lots weren’t the majority of the population. They weren’t the majority of authors, and they weren’t even the majority of fantasy authors.
I don’t see how you can argue he wasn’t a product of his times, and in
fact of the previous century to his times. Racists aren’t that way from birth. They’re taught racism by by the institutional racism of society and those around them. The society in which Lovecraft was born in 1890 was segregated, antisemitic and hadn’t grasped that women were equal to men – women didn’t get the vote until he was 30, segregation was voted down until he’d been dead 17 years.
Perhaps if his father hadn’t died of syphillis, and his mother ended
in an asylum, and he had been able to finish school instead of working
from the 1902 Encyclopedia Brittanica for his facts about the world,
his early stories and letters wouldn’t have been full of ignorant
racist fear. I wish they hadn’t been – but they aren’t the work that
earned him my respect as a writer.
His latter writing is implicity that of a man working in his through unconsciously (and perhaps even consciously) in his writing why racism is wrong.
He died in povery and pain, before he’d finished making this obvious enough
to people who quote writing he was himself by then ashamed of.
Earlier this year the New York Review of Books published a review of Lovecraft to which Joshi took objection. He wrote a 3500 word letter (effectively an essay) which he sent to NYRB and also posted on his website. The NYRB printed it as a 350 word letter, lopping out 90%. Hmmm.
There’s also the unfortunate fact that if you pay attention to Joshi’s “scholarship” it proves increasingly disappointing. Every so often I read some old story which anticipates Lovecraftian themes or imagery. To give him his due, Joshi has often noted this entry.
Unfortunately, he usually bollocks it up badly.
The most recent incident of this for me was when I was rereading Wilde’s fairy tales. The Birthday of the Infanta features an innocent deformed person suddenly becoming horribly aware of their disfigurement in a mirror ala The Outsider. Joshi’s recension fails to identify what is happening in the story or what it means, besides misidentifying what is the blatant similiarity they share. Even more dispiriting was that that was all then repeated verbatim in his notes to his Penguin Classics edition of Lovecraft, indicating that there was no one watching that particular shop. I’ve seen this happen a previous 4 or 5 times. Interpretation is one thing, but failures of simple facts, basic literacy and comprehension that one would expect of a seven year old is another. Ho hum.
SBJ: in the course of this discussion I looked at some of his letters and then some of the things that saturated the American media between his “poem” in 1912 and his death in the thirties, struggled to put my reaction into words, and put it aside. You did a better job than I could have. Thank you.
My family lived in the exact same area and milieu as Lovecraft. At the time he was writing poems about the creation of n******, my family members were helping found the NAACP.
Anyone can transcend their time’s prejudices.