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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I could not possibly care less that a man dead nearly 80 years was a virulent racist while he was alive. I could not possibly care less that the WFC decided to change the award by choosing not to use the bust of HPL, replacing it with whatever else they deem desirable. Throwing what amounts to a temper tantrum over the issue and very publicly returning awards over it is a strange way for someone who is putatively a scholar and an adult to try to make a point.
The more I see of people, the better I like animals.
@ Peace:
Yep. This. Exactly. Plus everything else you said in that post.
@ Steve Wright:
Well, I certainly can’t help you out, since I am as confused about that as you.
And fantasizing about the genocidal gassing of entire sections of NYC was not typical letter material at the time. He was far from unique at the time, but it wasn’t casual background racism.
And fantasizing about the genocidal gassing of entire sections of NYC was not typical letter material at the time. He was far from unique, but it wasn’t casual background racism.
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They’d probably just say “the SJWs of his day got to him.”
That’s what strikes me about these sorts of controversies. Whenever an organization makes a change in the direction of being more inclusive of/welcoming to non-white people, women, etc., it’s always “meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors.” Never because the leaders of the organization listened to people whose perspectives hadn’t previously been given much weight, and changed their minds about what was appropriate.
I’m from Providence. In fact, I currently live across the street from the house in which Lovecraft lived 1926-33.
In Lovecraft’s time, Providence transformed from being a genteel WASP enclave into a city wherein 65% of the population — most of them non-English speakers — were foreign born (including my grandparents, btw). Elegant neighborhoods (including his own) became slums.
Not to excuse his racism — or the racism of T.S. Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, or Joseph Conrad, or whoever — but putting it into context a bit.
Well, it generally seems to boil down to “we’re okay with the way things used to be, when (class of people X) was quiet and invisible and we didn’t have to consider their opinions.”
I hesitate to call it racism, because it’s clearly not always motivated by such. But there’s usually a big load of unexamined privilege and a failure of empathy involved, at the very least. Someone hasn’t gotten around to doing the hard work of metanoia.
Jim Henley says:
The big HPL fan in my household says that Lovecraft went through a phase where he was deliberately trying to emulate a Victorian gentleman, and Victorian racial thinking was part of the package. So yeah, his racism was definitely not of his time.
My source also says Lovecraft outgrew his Victorian phase, and it’s hard to say where he might have ended up if he’d had a normal lifespan to work with.
This same person is also totally okay with the trophy being changed.
Jon F. Zeigler said:
You shouldn’t hesitate, because that is racism. Racism is also a system made of behaviors, not just an enumerable list of bad ideas.
Thanks for introducing me to the word “metanoia”, though!
I’m a fan of Lovecraft’s stories, I also think that award looks ugly and don’t see what the problem is with them updating or changing the appearance of the award. The award is meant to represent the WFA not Lovecraft, so all this focus about Lovecraft instead of the award itself seems like more of a reason to change the image to something with a more unique branding to it.
Also, we need to keep our eyes open on this. Lovecraft can still be a “product of his time” and not unusually awful, simply because the times were awful. This the three-quarters of a century between the publication of Origin of Species and the discovery of the full extent of Hitler’s atrocities were the hight point of scientific racism and eugenics. Various kinds of racial thinking were not quackery – they were espoused by some of the leading scientific lights of the day.
One of the great acts of forgetting in the United States and Western was how ubiquitous some belief in eugenics was. Outside of some pretty rare pockets, it wasn’t whether one did or didn’t; it was largely a questions of how one thought it should be done. If Lovecraft was consciously seeking a more 18th or 19th Century attitude towards race… he was just being throwback bad, as opposed to modern up to date bad.
And because of that, yes, I understand why the World Fantasy Awards don’t want the mans’ likeness as their award. We’ve decided as a society we’re at least going to pretend to move beyond this, and leave the pseudo-science to Beale and his ilk.
I will admit that I am waiting with some ghoulish curiosity to see what the usual suspects will say about this. Nothing yet…
Dear Peace is my Middle Name: In reference to your comment detailing the excellent reasons for the change; please marry me. I want to have your children.
Thank you!
MKK
Mr. Beale has apparently weighed in on his blog.
How do I know this? Apparently when Mr. Beale comments on things, it’s noteworthy enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia.
Peace
I agree anyone ‘can’ transcend their time, but sadly not everyone will, and circumstances can make it harder for some. I worry about my own failings in this regard – I am sure there are things that people being born now will fight for/accept that I should absolutely morally affirm too now, if I knew to think about them, but which I will never think of, because I’m already 51.
@Simon Bucher-Jones: Thanks much for the narrative. Do you have any recommendations for sources where I can learn more about the evolution of Lovecraft’s attitudes and beliefs over time?
On the “man of his time” business, I keep coming back to a few things:
First, the abolitionists were also men and women of their time. So were the white allies of the early NAACP. If the worse sorts of “men of their time” prevailed, it would still be that time.
Second, my touchstone is always the American modernist poets. Most of them had…issues! But the extent to which those issues present in their work varies considerably. Robert Frost was virulently anti-black and anti-gay. We know this from his letters. He had the decency to keep those attitudes completely out of his poems. Wallace Stevens was a racist jerk who enjoyed using the N-word around colleagues who disapproved of it just to watch their reaction. You can also google “Who’s the coon?” if you want to permanently disappoint yourself in Stevens as a human being. Most of his poems have nothing to do with these attitudes, but one of them is called, “Like Decorations at a N****r Cemetery.” Eliot was a terrible anti-Semite, and the problem is that Antisemitism is the point of a number of his poems and essays (“Burbank with a Baedeker, Blaustein with a Cigar” is one poem; “After Strange Gods” is the main essay). Here we can at least hive off the Antisemitic works as minor.
But then we come to Pound. It becomes almost impossible to disentangle his fascism and Antisemitism from the later Cantos. Fascism and Antisemitism become what they are about. So you end up with a sliding scale of the problematic that runs Frost – Stevens – Eliot – Pound.
Lovecraft is at the Pound end of the spectrum in terms of what we think of as his canon. You get merely sublimated racism in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (miscegenation is icky!), casual but thoroughgoing racism in “The Call of Cthulhu” (all the cultists and murderers are non-white), and eager, determined racism in things like “Red Hook.” Whatever he believed on his deathbed, these are the works by which he is known.
What Joshi is arguing in his “substantial” complaints is that if we decline to use Ezra Pound’s likeness on an award we sometimes give to Jewish writers today, we will inevitably forbid anyone to read Robert Frost tomorrow. In reality, we’re not even forbidding anyone from reading Pound! (Admittedly, the Cantos themselves do the forbidding for most readers.)
Sofia Samatar put it so well in a blog post attempting to summarize what she remembered of saying when she accepted the award:
It seems that there is significant difference to Ms. Samatar between associating a person with an award and using that person’s image as the physical instantiation of the award.
PS: My lovecraft is full of eels
Hampus Eckeman on November 11, 2015 at 2:51 am said:
I can understand his decision. I can understand his disappointment.
I can not understand his motivation.
The only way he can get the ugly things out of his house with honor?
Now he can substitute reasonably sized bookends.
Subsidiary point re Stevens is that the two anecdotes above show how simplistic the “man of his time” apologia can be. Stevens enjoyed using racial slurs that other men and women of his time disapproved of. Even by the standards of his day, he was over-indexed for racism.
Yes, some days ago. And apparently aimed his minions squarely at File 770.
That was why there were so many raging foulmouthed commenters suddenly on the November 8th post, “World Fantasy Award to Abandon Lovecraft Bust”, roaring at arguments that no one here — or possibly anywhere — ever made and savaging the character of the commenters here whom they did not bother to read or respond to.
https://file770.com/?p=25920
@Jon F. Zeigler
Ah yes, the post defining Lovecraft is right above the post discussing how letting in those not of Anglo-Saxon racial stock will destroy America. Yeah, Teddy would really have to defend Lovecraft, wouldn’t he? Shadow over Inns-mouth describes half his freaking beliefs. Good sized chunk of Call of Cthulu does as well…
Why were Lovecraft’s attitudes and images such a big deal?
@Peace
The pressures of work meant that I missed a thread with more trolls than just Brian Z? I am now sad.
Lemme guess, there was a ton of false concern about proposed new awards, with people using words like privilege and sexism in that adorable way toddlers do when they really don’t know what they are talking about?
Y’know, I grew up in fandom, and until this whole kerfluffle started, I wasn’t even aware that HPL was on the WFA trophies! I mean, I’ve probably seen pictures of them in the past, but somehow it never registered with me that those were supposed to be fantasy awards. Lovecraft, to me, is associated with horror, and with science-fictional horror in particular.
If the proposal were to change the name of the awards, I might be a lot more dubious about the whole thing. But then, I don’t think anyone would have ever proposed naming a fantasy award for Lovecraft. If you hear “Lovecraft award”, you’re going to assume it’s a horror award! Which only emphasizes how poor a fit HPL is for this award, even if you ignore the racism issues.
Anyone who thinks Lovecraft was a “typical man of his time” in his racism is simply wildly ignorant both of Lovecraft and the range of views during his lifetime.
Not to mention that the Jews and African-Americans and “mulattos” and others Lovecraft raved about were also people “of their time,” and we really weren’t going around being racist about ourselves. And yet, we, too, were actually “people of their time.”
Anyone who wants to tell me how Lovecraft was just typical of his time can start reading here and down through the further quotations in comments: https://www.facebook.com/gary.farber/posts/1077458735606146
(It’s publically readable by all; you don’t have to be a member of Facebook.)
… anyone have a contact with the WFA people? If no one else wants the awards, I’ll take them.
Heh. So Lovecraft was wrong to believe that his own cultural legacy would be wiped out?
Why’s he been unpersoned from a trophy then?
Oh that’s right. SJWs always lie. Pretty sure one of the nation’s top scholars isn’t more ignorant of the purpose of the award that he’s won twice than this peanut gallery.
@Gary
No, I’m really quite aware of many of the views of the majority in Lovecraft’s time, and there’s a great deal of awful. I know there was dissent. But much as I would like a world where that dissent represented the majority in the United States, or the views of people high up in the power structure, I am stuck with the one where Lovecraft was very much in line with what the power structure thought at the time.
Which is again why he shouldn’t be on the trophy.
Someone can look at this and think to themselves, “Well, I don’t like the way things used to be because people X were marginalized. I like it because rocket ships and competence porn are awesome.” And I have no trouble believing that.
The problem comes in when you* fail to reckon with the fact that “the way things were” was, in part, a product of the marginalization of significant numbers of people. If peoples X, Y, and Z had been truly welcomed, stories about white dudes doing heroic shit would still have existed, but they would have coexisted alongside (and competed with) many more stories written from many more perspectives about many more topics. Like the situation we have today. The classics would have been different. The norms would have been different.
If you’re mad about the kinds of stories that women, people of color, LGBT people, etc. are writing today, maybe examine how comfortable you really would have been with those same people writing the stories that spoke to them in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. If you think the kinds of stories you remember from The Good Old Days should also dominate now, realize that you’re longing for a past in which a lot of stories were filtered out.
This became more of a Puppy comment than a Lovecraft one, but oh well.
* general you.
Brian Z : “contrast this with making an announcement that the bust will no longer be used, without discussion”
There’s been several years worth of discussion. As exemplified by the quote from Nnedi Okorafor that you use. I’m not sure why you think this hasn’t been discussed.
The moment the announcement was made, I began anticipating Joshi’s inevitable rant and insults. The man’s temper tantrum did not disappoint, but my ghast was truly flabbered by his willful misrepresentation of the World Fantasy Award.
The World Fantasy Award has never, to my knowledge, been called the “H.P. Lovecraft Award.” Yes, its nickname was the Howard, for obvious reasons. But the descriptive “H.P. Lovecraft Award winning novel-story-author” has never been used to describe a World Fantasy Award winner because the award is NOT, and has never been, called the H.P. Lovecraft Award! (To my knowledge.)
Want an H.P. Lovecraft Award? One that can be the equal of the Bram Stoker, John W. Campbell, or Edgar Allan Poe awards? Then, Mr. Joshi, go out and make one. You are only embarrassing yourself.
@TooManyJens – Well put!
Sadly racism is still with us.
Why’s he been unpersoned from a trophy then?
You really should look up what the words you are using mean. It would make you look far less foolish.
An H.P. Lovecraft award for the best weird fiction or horror would, actually, be a neat-ish sort of idea. It’d come with some built-in prestige in that area, which is the stuff Lovecraft is actually remembered for.
I’ve got a three-volume set of Lovecraft within arm’s reach of me right now. I’ve read it more than once, believe me. I’m well aware of Lovecraft’s vices and virtues as a writer…. It’s interesting to think about how much his xenophobia and racism actually influenced his writing, and – bizarrely – I’m not even sure all the influence was negative. Fear and hatred of folks who are different from you… actually helps conveying the mood of terror and helplessness and alienation which runs through Lovecraft’s stories. There is no question in my mind that Lovecraft’s own fears and prejudices infused his writing. (To take a less contentious example: Lovecraft’s poikilothermism made cold a fearful thing to him, so it’s no accident that several of the stories include – naturally or otherwise – references to dreadful cold.)
And, yes, he was a man of his times, and he was affected by social changes in the place where he lived, and his attitudes (like most people’s!) altered and modified over the course of his life. But I think that it’s captious to deny that, even taking account of all that, there is an unusually high level of racial prejudice visible in Lovecraft’s writing.
This is not taking anything away from Lovecraft’s technical merits (my own opinion is that he was an adjective-strewn disaster area when it came to descriptive writing, but hell on wheels as a plotter), or from his importance to the genre. You can be all kinds of things, good or bad, and still be a good writer.
But it’s quite legitimate to look at Lovecraft, as a whole, including all his attitudes as well as his literary output, and ask, “Do we want this guy as the symbol of an award honouring contemporary fantasy writers?” And, in my opinion, it is also legitimate to answer, “No.”
And I see xdpaul provided the adorableness of people using words they don’t know the meaning of yet. Like vicious, vicious little toddlers.
Why is it, one really wonders, that it’s all the people who know they are the alpha-iest, the fittest, the ubers of us all who can barely string words together? I’m noticing a trend.
My source also says Lovecraft outgrew his Victorian phase, and it’s hard to say where he might have ended up if he’d had a normal lifespan to work with.
Maybe. And that’s one of the problems with the idea that Lovecraft was “rehabilitated” into only being as racist as was the norm for his day: We don’t have anything to go on except speculation. Lovecraft might have changed, but he might not, and the evidence is pretty thin that he was having a change of heart.
We don’t have the legacy that Lovecraft might have left if he hadn’t died in his late thirties. We have the legacy we have.
Ok, I’ve been sitting on this because I am a lurker so this is maybe not my business. But:
Number of comments on this statuette issue: 364 and counting up.
Number of comments on the very fresh results of the 2015 WFA: 6, including 2 on ethnic/gender statistic of authors and not the actual fiction.
I don’t want to question what most of you profess: that fiction is your first interest. But you do seem to like too your little polemic, here and then.
So, do anyone give a shit about the actual award? I do, even if a limited reading time keep me from exploring the laureates as thoroughly as I would like. I am especially intrigued by the Mitchell, a book I didn’t have on my radar…
Apart from everything else, the sooner Lovecraft stops being everybody’s favourite in-joke in sff, the better. I’ve had it with stories that wink wink nudge nudge to ichor and nacreous.
I’m not sure. While I read without minding particularly if any given work falls more on the SF or the F side of the spectrum, I admit that I am not as drawn to an award that seems to focus on the fantasy side especially. I am pleased when some writer I like wins it, but it’s not as I use it as a reading guide, like I do with the Hugo, Nebula and Clarke.
I’m mostly a lurker too. (It’s just too easy to fall behind.) But:
Given how much discussion of fiction there is here, that’s probably for the best. Even if that discussion takes place in, say, Pixel Scroll threads rather than in a thread about a particular award.
Seems to have gotten worse since I graduated high school in 1985 🙁
Vivien –
I do mostly because often the award goes to works that might be considered more niche, and in the past has included some of my favorite works by works ignored as SFF because they’re considered horror. Not that popular or well known books don’t get nominated or don’t win of course. While there might not have been many comments about the winner, there’s been a lot of discussion on the nominees on here. I know I’ve participated in some about Southern Reach Trilogy, The Globin Emperor and City of Stairs myself. Was really glad to see City of Stairs in the mix. Already had Bone Clocks in my TBR pile, this just moves it up a few rows.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan –
It’s not so much fantasy as in the swords/magic genre, but fantasy as in the extravagantly imaginative. There’s a lot of urban fiction if anything in the awards throughout its time, as a reading list I tend to find it one of the more useful because some of my favorite books of all time have either been nominees or winners.
So, do anyone give a shit about the actual award?
Excellent question.
The answer is no.
Well, Xdpaul, I am lurking here enough to know the extent of your “interest” for the Hugo Award… So thank you for your concern, but no thank you.
It seems reasonable to suspect that one of the nation’s top Lovecraft scholars may have an ax to grind regarding keeping Lovecraft’s image on the World Fantasy Award.
A person can be racist because they didn’t know any better / didn’t rise above their upbringing and surroundings. That may mean I’m not mad at them about being racist–it doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend they weren’t racist or say that their racism doesn’t matter or we shouldn’t mention it. People Lovecraft would have been prejudiced against shouldn’t be expected to accept an award with his image on it and smile because a scholar might throw a tantrum if we change the design.
xdpaul on November 11, 2015 at 11:48 am said:
Then changing the design shouldn’t be a problem since no one cares 🙂
What was your favorite book nominated?
I strongly recommend you read the passage about Lovecraft’s racism in Joshi’s I AM PROVIDENCE. Joshi, who is a member of one of those very Asiatic immigrant hordes Lovecraft railed about, makes it very clear that Lovecraft’s racism (and his stubborn refusal to change his views when presented with new evidence, as he did in all other areas of his thought) is the one real black mark on his character. It is however not the WHOLE of his thought or his writing. It is also absolutely untrue that in Lovecraft’s fiction all the evil cultists are non-whites or inbred rural degenerates. In “The Horror at Red Hook” (not a very good story) we meet an upper class, white gentleman cult leader. And of course there is the de la Poer family in “The Rats in the Walls” who are old English nobility, and Joseph Curwen of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” one of Lovecraft’s best realized characters, who is of the colonial gentry of Providence itself. Captain Obed Marsh who made the Faustian bargain with the Deep Ones in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was also a socially respectable New Englander. This is also true of the brain-hopping wizard in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” the leaders (if not the entire membership) of the Starry Wisdom Cult (in “The Haunter of the Dark”) and even the infamous mad scientist Herbert West. All upper class New England gentlemen gone bad.
Yes, I am interested in the award, because I find that a lot of my favourite fiction comes on the edges, and the WFA often explores the edges, both between SF and fantasy and between SFF and mainstream.
Perhaps we aren’t saying much about the books, because we either haven’t read them yet, or have discussed them already when they came out.
Personally I would have put three of the other nominees above the Mitchell (though I’m a bit puzzled by My Real Children being considered fantasy – but that’s the WFA for you). I felt that the fantasy elements in The Bone Clocks were a bit glued on (in a way that they weren’t in his previous major borderline works, Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas). Or possibly it’s the realistic elements that were glued on – but anyway, there is glue.