aka Altered Slates
Today’s roundup comes courtesy of Adam-Troy Castro, Matt Forney, Vox Day, A. G. Carpenter, Nicholas Whyte, Brandon Kempner, Eric Flint, Melina D, Patrick May, Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, and Lis Carey. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Will Reichard and Glenn Hauman.)
Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – June 23
Evidence, to me, that this is an aesthetic issue and not just a political one. (Though of course it’s that as well).
Brad Torgersen pronouncing what kinds of stories he sees as worthy.
“Downbeat endings suck. They are ‘literary’ and some critics and aesthetes love them. But they suck. If you’re going to roast your characters in hell, at least give them a little silver lining at the end? Some kind of hope for a more positive outcome? Your readers will thank you.”
I…can’t even begin.
I love a happy ending as much as the next guy. But not all stories need to be geared to the “rah-rah us.” And if I started naming great works in and out of science fiction where “readers thanked” the author for going black, I’d be here all day. I do this without being a critic or aesthete. I loved the despairing endings of Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands,” of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” of John W. Campbell’s “Night,” of Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” of any number of TWILIGHT ZONEs and of George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, before I was ten — all before I discovered film noir or got into horror or watched Von Stroheim’s GREED or even knew that stories could be *about* the things in life that aren’t fair. Downbeat endings do *not* suck. Who would dare to say that the ending of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE sucked? Or that the ending of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME sucked? Or that the ending of DOUBLE INDEMNITY sucked? Or that the ending of MILDRED PIERCE — the novel, not the much-altered Joan Crawford movie — sucked?
Downbeat endings don’t suck. Pointless endings suck. There’s a difference.
Just speaking as a writer, alone: Gad, am I happy I am not shackled to that criterion. I go downbeat about half the time, because different stories go different places, and I have gone dark with some of my most popular work. HER HUSBAND’S HANDS AND OTHER STORIES is not exactly a collection of uppers.
***
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Brad has communicated with me about this post, and wants to make clear that in context he was speaking, specifically, of space opera, and no other genre or subgenre. I think he’s likely wrong even when talking about that limited context — I can think of a number of cases where intrepid space heroes came to grief, and have indeed written a book of them — but you know what? In the context of that clarification it is not exactly fair to paint him as being unaware of the depth and breadth of the use of the downbeat ending in literature. I want this known and recognized.
Matt Forney on Return of Kings
“Backlash Against The Boycott Of Sci-Fi Publisher Tor Books Shows The Hypocrisy of SJWs” – June 23
In the past couple of decades, publishing in general—and sci-fi and fantasy publishing especially—has become increasingly dominated by leftists, who have jettisoned the genres’ focus on adventure and exploration in favor of heavy-handed social justice narratives blaming cishetwhitemales for all the world’s ills.
Any writer who dissented from the SJW line was effectively blacklisted from Tor and other major publishing houses, as well as denied nominations in the industry’s prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards.
As you would expect, sales of newer sci-fi and fantasy books have flatlined as SJWs such as Nielsen Hayden and N.K. Jemisin have become dominant voices. As it turns out, nobody wants to read “socially aware” dreck like If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love and other works that cast straight white men as the devil incarnate.
Sales figures show this: of the top ten best-selling sci-fi books in 2012, all but two of them were either Star Wars/Halo tie-ins or published decades ago. The number one best-selling book was Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, published in 1985.
Last April, SJWs threw conniption fits when the Sad and Rabid Puppies, two campaigns spearheaded by sci-fi authors Larry Correia and Vox Day, respectively, successfully nominated several non-SJW works for this year’s Hugo Awards. Beyond showing how petty SJWs are, the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ campaign showed that SJWs are a vocal-but-tiny minority, since it only took a handful of votes to swing the nomination results.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“Let reason be silent” – June 23
When experience gainsays its conclusions. Ed Trimnell argues against fighting fire with fire:….
How did Brandon Eich fail to out-argue his opponents? How did the Nobel Laureates Tim Hunt and James Watson fail to make their cases? The fact is that one cannot out-argue anyone in debates that do not take place, debates that Mr. Trimnell knows very well, from personal experience, will never take place. He can attempt to out-argue me because I am willing to engage with him, debate him, and discuss our differences in a civil manner rather than pointing, shrieking, and summoning an Internet mob to shout him down, disqualify, and disemploy him. He simply cannot do the same with the people at TOR Books, among others. He knows that.
Furthermore, Mr. Trimnell is ignoring the wise advice of Aristotle. He is appealing to dialectic in a rhetorical battle where the greater part of those on the other side are not even capable of understanding that dialectic. That is why following his advice is a surefire way to ensure defeat.
I am offering a proven way to win, one that is both historically and logically sound. Mr. Trimnell is offering nothing but certain defeat because feels. He doesn’t like not feeling morally superior to the other side, so much so that he would rather lose than give up that feeling of superiority in order to meet the enemy head-on. I dislike boycotts too, much as General Ferguson disliked poison gas. But I dislike being methodically mobbed, disqualified, and disemployed even more, I dislike being falsely accused and blatantly lied about even more, so I am utilizing certain SJW tactics even more efficiently and more effectively than the SJWs can. Everyone else of influence on the Right should be doing the same.
Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – June 23
Vox Day’s contribution is to the daily File 770 roundup what FAMILY CIRCUS is to the Sunday comics section — a guaranteed bummer often marked by the requirement that you follow the most torturously convoluted of dotted lines.
A.G. Carpenter
“Silence is Support” – June 23
….But, Torgersen and Correia maintain that they themselves are not racist, sexist, or homophobic. They just, don’t say anything about Beale’s ongoing rants. Maybe they laugh at his jokes or hit like on the comment window. They can argue all they want that they are not be bigots themselves, but their actions say otherwise.
Correia reached out to Beale last year. This year he reached out to GamerGate (with admittedly uncertain results when it comes to the ballot stuffing) – a group known for its sexist attitudes towards women and a radical and violent fringe. And Torgersen got in deeper with Beale by coordinating their slates under the Sad and Rabid Puppies flags. This isn’t just silent support.
This isn’t just silence that is interpreted as support. This is a deliberate alliance with those who do not hide their racist, sexist, homophobic agendas.
But I will not be silent. And I will not support the ideologies that led a young man to murder nine men and women in a church in Charleston. i will not shrug and say “That Vox Day. He’s an asshat but what can you do? It’s just one man ranting on the internet.” I do not want the others like Dylan Roof looking at the world of SF/F and thinking “See? They agree with me.”
Because I don’t.
Because we don’t.
Because silence only leads to regression.
Nicholas Whyte on From The Heart of Europe
“E Pluribus Hugo, revisited” – June 23
I’ve spent more spare time than is healthy over the last few days musing on the proposed new system for counting Hugo nominations, designated E Pluribus Hugo (henceforth EPH) by its designers (to whom detailed observations should be directed here). I am in sympathy with its intent, which is to prevent any group – whoever that group may be – from absolutely excluding nominees from having the chance to be considered for the Hugo Award. I think that the proposal as it currently sits achieves that aim, but at a cost of making it too easy for a group which is otherwise utterly unconnected with Hugo voters to get a single work onto the ballot by “bullet votes” (ie votes for their candidate[s] and no other). I explore this problem below, using data from the 1984 Hugo nomination ballots, and propose a partial solution, which is to use square roots as divisors when weighting nomination votes.
Detail
I’m tremendously grateful to Paul Evans for providing me with the 1984 data he described here. Having spent a couple of evenings crunching figures, I now feel huge sympathy and admiration for the Hugo administrators trying to make sense of the variant titles and spelling submitted by voters. Administering what are essentially thousands of write-in ballots is not exactly straightforward, and I am not sure that I would have the patience to do so in an RL setting myself. Not surprisingly, my tallies vary a bit from Paul’s. He has taken more time over it, so his numbers are probably right.
I’ve picked three different ballot categories from 1984 to analyse mainly because they were relatively easy to process, with less name and category confusion than some of the other options would have presented.
Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon
“Modelling a Best Saga Hugo Award, Part 1” – June 22
I find it difficult to imagine an award in the abstract, so in this post and the next I’m going to model what a hypothetical Best Saga Hugo would look like for the past 4 years (2011-2014), using two different techniques to generate my model. First up, I’ll use the Locus Awards to model what the Best Saga would look like if voted on by SFF-insiders. Then, I’ll use the Goodreads Choice Awards to model what the Best Saga would look like if the Best Saga became an internet popularity contest. Looking at those two possible models should give us a better idea of how a Best Saga Hugo would actually play out. I bet an actual award would play out somewhere in the middle of the two models.
Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon
“Modelling a Best Saga Hugo Award, Part 2” – June 23
…. Methodology: The same as last time. Goodreads publishes Top 20 lists of the most popular SF and F novels; I combed through the list and chose the most popular that were part of a series. The Goodreads lists actually publishes vote totals, so I used those to determine overall popularity. Here’s the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards; note that these would be the books elgible for the 2014 Hugo. The Goodreads categories are a little wonky at times. Keep that in mind. They also separated out Paranormal Fantasy until 2014, so no Dresden Files or Sookie Sackhouse in the model…..
This model looks less encouraging than the Locus Awards model. I think this is what many Hugo voters are afraid of: legacy series like Ender’s Game, Sword of Truth, or even Wheel of Time, showing up long after their critical peak has worn off (if Goodkind ever had a critical peak). Series can maintain their popularity and sales long after their innovation has vanished; readers love those worlds so much that they’ll return no matter how tired and predictable the books are. A 10 or 15 year series also has 10 or 15 years to pick up fans, and it might be harder for newer series by less-established authors to compete.
Still, even the Goodreads awards were not swamped by dead-man walking series, and the Hugo audience would probably trim some of these inappropriate works in their voting. It would be interesting to see someone like King win a Hugo for The Dark Tower; that’s certainly a very different feel than the current Hugos have.
Eric Flint
“A DISCUSSION WITH JOHN SCALZI ABOUT THE PROPOSED ‘SAGA’ AWARD” – June 23
….But my biggest difference with John’s approach has to do with something very general—about as general as it gets, in fact.
What are the goals of literary awards in the first place? And what’s the best way to achieve those goals?
There are two ways to look at this. The first is the way John is looking at it, which runs throughout his entire argument, not just in the two paragraphs I quoted above. For John, awards should not only be a recognition for excellence, they should be designed to encourage the development of new talent by being concentrated in those areas where new talent is most likely to emerge.
Hence, he champions short fiction awards. Please note that John is not disagreeing with a point I made in my first essay and have repeated many times since—to wit, that short fiction represents only a very small slice of F&SF whether you measure that either in terms of readers or (especially) the income of authors. He simply feels that’s not very relevant because what he sees as most important is the following:
It [a “Best Saga” award] privileges the established writer over the newer writer. Almost by definition, the authors who are eligible for the “Best Saga” award are very likely be writers who are already successful enough to have a long-running series and the ability to publish in those series on a recurring basis. It’s theoretically possible to have someone toiling away on a series in utter obscurity and suddenly emerge with a knockout installment that would pop that writer up into “Best Saga” consideration, but as a practical matter, it’s almost certainly more likely than not that the nominees in the category would be those authors with perennially popular series — people, to be blunt, like me and a relatively few other folks, who are already more likely to have won the “genre success” lottery than others.
I don’t disagree with the point John makes when he says that “the authors who are eligible for the ‘Best Saga’ award are very likely to be writers who are already successful enough to have a long-running series and the ability to publish in those series on a recurring basis.”
He’s absolutely right about that. But where he sees that as a problem, I see it as an essential feature of any award structure that’s designed to attract the attention of its (supposed) audience. In fact, it was exactly the way the Hugo awards looked in their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s…..
At the moment, and for some time now, the “pendulum” of the Hugo awards has swung too far away from the mass audience. Where I differ from John is that I don’t see any way to reverse the increasing irrelevance of the Hugo awards to most F&SF readers unless the Hugos adopt one or another version of an award for series (i.e., the “Saga” award that’s being proposed). When most popular authors are working exclusively or almost exclusively in series and most of the awards are given for short fiction you will inevitably have a situation where the major awards in F&SF become irrelevant to most of the reading audience. Which, in turn, means that winning an award becomes less and less valuable in any terms beyond personal satisfaction.
If the idea of modifying an award structure to better match the interests of the mass audience really bothers you, grit your teeth and call it Danegeld. But it works.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“Hugo Recommendations: Best Related Work” – June 23
This is how I am voting in the Best Related Work category. Of course, I merely offer this information regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 383 Vile Faceless Minions or anyone else.
- “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”
- Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
- “Why Science is Never Settled”
- Letters from Gardner
- Wisdom from My Internet
Melina D on Subversive Reader
“Hugos 2015: Thoughts on Editing” – June 23
I’m not going to talk about individual nominees here, but I did want to talk about the editing awards, particularly short form editing. I’ve heard people talking about these award before and how you can’t really judge editing unless you are either the author or the editor (or someone who works with them) – usually implying that ‘regular fans’ shouldn’t be voting for these awards.
I have to disagree. When we look at the nominees for the short form editing, we’re essentially looking at editors who have put together anthologies or collections (or in one case a magazine, similar to the anthologies/collections, but with more of them over the course of a year). And I strongly believe that you can see good editing when it comes to these forms – as well as bad editing.
Melina D on Subversive Reader
“Hugos 2015 Reading: Best Fan Writer” – June 23
I’m not actually going to talk about the nominees individually. There’s a few reasons for this. Firstly, I think some of the nominees thrive on notoriety and get a buzz from someone talking about them. It feeds into their over-inflated sense of self-importance and I don’t feel like adding to that. Secondly, I don’t think any of the provided submissions were at an award level – in content or writing, so there’s no benefit in discussing them individually. Finally, the tone of a few of the pieces left me concerned that I would become a target for abusive behaviour if I was publicly critical of the authors. There’s probably a very slim chance of it, but events of the last couple of years has shown me that it does happen, and I’d prefer not to deal with that at the moment. So, my discussion here is going to be a more general look at what was submitted and what made me so ranty about it.
One thing that really struck me while I was reading, was that many of the pieces had little to do with speculative fiction or media or the community as fans. When we’re celebrating fan writers, I’m looking for people who are passionately engaged as fans. I want to know about the books and stories and media they love and why they love it. I want to know about the spec fic they find find problematic and why. I want to know why media inspires them and why. I want to know what kind of fan community they aspire to belong to and why.
Patrick May
“2015 Hugo Awards Graphic Story Category” – June 23
[Reviews all nominees in category.]
The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate
This is the only nominee not included in the Hugo packet. I asked the author on his website and on Twitter if there is an excerpt available, but got no response. Since it’s a webcomic I read a few months worth online to get a feel for the work.
This is less a graphic story than a series of loosely connected gags. Some are amusing, most are not. The artwork is decent, but neither it nor the writing make it a Hugo contender.
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
Lightspeed Magazine is a 2015 Best Semiprozine Hugo nominee.
Lightspeed publishes a wide range of science fiction and fantasy fiction, as well as interviews, Q&As with their authors, and fiction podcasts. What I did not find is an archive allowing me to look at their 2014 issues, the relevant issues for this year’s Hugos. The only thing I’ve been able to read that they published in 2014 is “The Day The World Turned Upside Down,” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated by Lia Belt. I’ve already expressed my opinion on that one, and you can read it, if you wish, by clicking the link.
It’s very well presented visually, but with the Heuvelt story being the only thing from 2014 that’s available to read, I’m not prepared to rate it very high.
Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog
“Hugo Reading – Short Stories” – June 23
[Reviews all five nominees.]
The best story of the five by a few lengths was definitely “Totaled”, although it wasn’t perfect, nor even the best I’ve read from 2014. It was just very good. In descending order of quality I would rank “A Single Samurai”, “On A Spiritual Plain”, “Turncoat”… and then “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” a distant last. Four of the five have something to recommend them, but only one was good enough to even be considered for an award.
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Brian Z said:
But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
What are you talking about?
(This is why you keep getting notes from the mods at Making Light.)
True but the Dan Brown publishing juggernaut does imply that it is possible to become a blockbuster selling writer with poor prose and warmed over plots.
However it also demonstrates how even King’s less mature works are more than competently written.
Jared Dashoff — Comment on what you like, though I like to think of my proposal as an organic whole, rather than just variations on your theme.
Under my proposal (I guess I have to call it that, though that sounds a bit formal), each saga/series would be eligible in only one year, the year but one after it wraps up; so there would be no multiple chances to grab the prize each time a book was added. Let’s face it, length is no guarantor of quality, so there’s no reason to give a dekalog a bigger advantage than a trilogy.
Given that each series has but one chance to win the best series award, there are going to be fewer sagas available to choose finalists from in any given year, in which case having the award cycle shift from annually to multiple years makes the thing more competitive. No-one is going to want to enter their series for consideration the same year that Martin George finishes A Filk of Chilli & Ice Cream in your scheme; in a longer scheme he’ll face some more serious competition.
(A serious objection to my scheme as it is, is that I haven’t addressed series that start before the Saga Award is in place. Martin George will probably miss out if only the next two books are eligible for nomination and averaging. Oh, well, maybe the series will be eligible for a Retro Hugo some time in the 2060s.)
As to completeness, the series or saga will be complete when the writer or publisher says it is. Since the series only gets one chance, the writer will either have to come to a natural break in the storyline, put it up for consideration, and then start a new cycle, as per CG Limonh and her Foreign Johnnies series of trilogies; or just keep going to the natural end of the story or her retirement.
By the by, on the off chance that signal boosting will do a bit of good for someone, Mercedes Lackey recently posted to the City of Heroes fan forum about the reasons for her long absence:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,10967.msg183682.html#msg183682
Not sure if non-members will be able to see it, but short version is that she must have opened a mummy’s tomb or something. The key bit is that her housekeeper cleaned out her savings accounts with a stolen debit card. She’s not asking for money–as far as I can tell she’s not even asking for sympathy, although she sure got it–but if anyone here has had Mercedes Lackey on her list of authors to try, now would be a good time from a karmic perspective.
Peace —
If you can afford it.
John: Yow. I have been meaning to read some Lackey – I don’t think I’ve read anything by her in decades, and have little recollection of whatever it is I read by her. (Spot memory loss is one side effect of my auto-immune problems. There are little lesions all over the top of my brain as scars of old battles.) What do folks recommend as good starting places, since I’m basically coming in fresh?
I have to leap in to give a cheer for Melville and Moby Dick. I admit it can be a tough read (I read it with a friend and we shamed each other through because neither one of us wanted to be the one who cried “uncle!”), but — for me — it was absolutely worth it. Amazing book. Incredible story. A prose style both stunningly flexible and beautiful, able to move on a dime from poetic metaphysics to sly humor. I’d call it a work that is difficult and demanding written by a writer in absolute control of his craft and his genius. The first paragraph always takes my breath away. Can you tell I love this book? It goes on my top five best reads ever list.
And all this talk of literary style in sff has just moved me to pull “Little, Big” off the shelf — it’s been years since I’ve looked at it and I think it’s time for another go.
@Nicole J. LaBoeuf-Little
I’ve been meaning to ask, are you by any chance the Nicole LaBoeuf I attended SBWC with, and last ran into on an airplane three or four years ago?
And all this talk of literary style in sff has just moved me to pull “Little, Big” off the shelf — it’s been years since I’ve looked at it and I think it’s time for another go.
It’s been on my TBR pile forever. Time to shuffle the stack.
@sweet Hear hear. Moby-Dick is the original X-Files.
I also have to agree with Sweet about Moby Dick. But I think maybe I read it differently than most people do: I first read it in my 20s, and when I was more than half-way through I was still wondering when the “boring whaling chapters” people had warned me about were going to show up. I detected no boring whaling chapters … though there were *fascinating* chapters of natural history, my favorite parts of the book.
@source Thanks!
More to the point, why is someone threatening not to vote for something when he’s not eligible to vote a threat? Neither Vox Day nor Theodore Beale is listed as holding Sasquan membership.
You are a VERY BAD PERSON and the only reason you don’t owe me a keyboard is i am reading on my iPad.
Offered humbly: “Brianing”.
I agree. I think it’s a laudable idea to recognize series, but I doubt if it’s practical (God/ the Devil is in the detail). Another question I have: Wildcards (shared universe, multiple authors) is eligible so the criteria is quite broad. What happens to separate series that become combined? Asimov at a late date joined up the Foundation series with the Robots. Larry Niven’s Known Space?
Re: Tolkien’s writing
I strongly disagree that his writing was his weakness. If he had a weakness, it was his inability to finalize his worldbuilding revisions (though I can totally relate to the urge to keep tinkering).
After reading up, and integrating some of what others have said.
1) A series/world becomes eligible to have works nominated for the Series Hugo after either 2 full novels (by Hugo length standards) or 250K words of total fiction. So the third novel of a trilogy would be eligible, and I would expect, most years the Series Hugo would sort of be de-facto “Trilogy” type of Hugo.
2) If an entry in a series is nominated, that temporarily exhausts the Series Hugo eligibility until the requirements are met again. So the 6th novel of an extended series would then be eligible as well, since more than one longer series has sequential subtrilogies like Cherryh, or Hobb. Works in the series would still be eligible for their respective forms, even if they are not eligible for the Series Hugo. I don’t mind a truly great series being able to be re-enter the field, though I’ve seen some other folks are against that idea.
3) If a work is nominated under both the series-entry and another fiction form, the Hugo committee would leave it to the author discretion, and if the author cannot be contacted, it would go under whichever entry had the most nominations.
I THREATEN NOT TO VOTE FOR CLOWNFELLAS: TALES OF THE BOZO FAMILY. FEAR ME!
After reading up, and integrating some of what others have said.
1) A series/world becomes eligible to have works nominated for the Series Hugo after either 2 full novels (by Hugo length standards) or 250K words of total fiction. So the third novel of a trilogy would be eligible, and I would expect, most years the Series Hugo would sort of be de-facto “Trilogy” type of Hugo.
It COULD be much longer. It just can’t be shorter than 3 volumes as the proposal is currently written.
2) If an entry in a series is nominated, that temporarily exhausts the Series Hugo eligibility until the requirements are met again. So the 6th novel of an extended series would then be eligible as well, since more than one longer series has sequential subtrilogies like Cherryh, or Hobb. Works in the series would still be eligible for their respective forms, even if they are not eligible for the Series Hugo. I don’t mind a truly great series being able to be re-enter the field, though I’ve seen some other folks are against that idea.
The proposal is currently written to be 250k in at least 2 more volumes, so 5th work would make the series eligible again.
3) If a work is nominated under both the series-entry and another fiction form, the Hugo committee would leave it to the author discretion, and if the author cannot be contacted, it would go under whichever entry had the most nominations.
Separate proposal from the same people, but yes, if both pass. We also have written in explicit instructions for the Hugo Admin to have the power to combine subseries with overarching series nominations (since they’d stem from the same triggering work) based on the author’s decision, or, if the author can’t be contacted, by the Admin.
A bit earlier Kevin Standlee pointed out that there are anonymous memberships we never see.
… Although why the prominent attention-seeking publicity-hound leader of a movement centered on the Hugo votes wouldn’t have a highly visible Hugo voting membership is beyond me.
Style Vs. Story (1 of erm several)
Style vs. Story
I want to emphasize before I start this tl;dr about one of my favorite subjects that I am not trying to convince anyone who doesn’t like reading some/all of Tolkien that they should! Nor do I try to argue his style is somehow “objectively” good (first off, we’d have to define good, and second, don’t believe in universal objective aesthetic standard). And I understand Aaron likes and has read Tolkien extensively for reasons other than writing style which is totally cool—that’s the important thing after all.
But I do find Tolkien’s writing style(s), and the ongoing debate about it, absolutely fascinating because, especially when I started teaching Tolkien (which like many of us I got to do because the films made such a splash–unlike many people I know, I adore the films as their own separate work but that’s another topic), I started doing intensive work with students on close reading, eventually teaching Tolkien in my Stylistics course.
This question connects to the current debate because of the literary style vs. good storytelling binary that has surfaced (in various weird and warty forms) in the charges made by canines against the Hugo awards. I’m saying the debate is at least a century old (nothing new under the sun), and that this binary is an historical artifact of the 20th century, and the changes in literary/cultural aesthetics, and a number of other factors (including changes in academic literary studies of vernacular literatures, specifically “English”–which came into the Oxbridge universities as a poor relation to “classics” and was derided by some as being fit only for “working men and women” and had to work for cultural capital).*
[Off topic, but I have a theory that one reason academia literary critics have been so grumpy about sff fans — though the litcrits diss romance fans even more — is the long meta-critical tradition in sff fandom that would, to a Martian wandering through, look very similar to what literary academics do, including literary awards like, ta – dah, the Hugos. I see it as a sort of insecurity though, again, it’s only my theory; I haz no evidence outside having been the irritating person in English classes talking away about sff, and then freakout out Deans and such who looked at my stuff and mumbled about it was weird enough that lit faculty read books, but TV shows, eek! One other Dean once said it would make sense to him if I wrote about T. S. Eliot – apparently the one poet that Dean, who was a chemist, knew????]
I found this really excellent overview and online article that covers much of what I would say (and have said to my students):
Chris Mooney, Kicking the Hobbit, November 5, 2001. The American Prospect
Introduction: When it comes to the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a truism that critics either love the books or hate them: Concerning Middle Earth, there is no middle ground. Such has been the case ever since Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, first published his epic novel The Lord of the Rings in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) between 1954 and 1955. In 1956 W.H. Auden wrote in The New York Times that, in some respects, Tolkien’s story of the hobbit Frodo’s quest to destroy the Dark Lord Sauron’s “One Ring” of power surpassed even Milton’s Paradise Lost. But that same year, Edmund Wilson, at the time America’s pre-eminent man of letters, dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “balderdash” in a review for The Nation titled “Ooh, Those Awful Orcs.” Wilson also swatted at Tolkien defenders like Auden and C.S. Lewis, observing that “certain people–especially, perhaps, in Britain–have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.”
Paragraph on modernism: But probably the main reason Tolkien has not been accepted by most critics is that his writings do not conform to the tenets of literary modernism. Tolkien’s language largely eschews irony, his imagery tends to be generic, and, with some exceptions, his characters go unexplored. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster’s blueprint of modernist literary theory, story and plot are gently derided. But in The Lord of the Rings, plot is probably the most compelling literary element. Readers steeped in modernist literature simply don’t know how to respond to Tolkien’s prose.
Mooney’s article is excellent, written before the release of the first of Jackson’s films but aware of the films, giving a good overview of original critical reaction to LotR (HOB got more glowing reviews, perhaps because it was marketed as a “children’s book” which serious high intellectuals don’t take seriously anyway). Then he discusses the enduring popularity of Tolkien’s work, the history of academic scholarship on Tolkien’s work, the ongoing debates in Britain as well as the “cult status” of the work caused by embarrassing fans in America during the 1960s. I once read a hilariously BAD piece of Marxist criticism (bad in the sense of offering no evidence other than a basic correlation, in the Giddings anthology, where the scholar claimed that if college students in America hadn’t been stoned on LSD, Tolkien’s work would have fallen into a well-deserved oblivion).
Ralph Giddings edited This Far Land, the first academic anthology on Tolkien’s work published in the UK—some time after the first academic anthology was published in America, edited by Isaacs and Zimbardo (which included the Burton Raffel essay on the mediocrity of Tolkien’s style though Raffel keeps insisting, almost nervously, that Tolkien tells a good story). But I’ll talk about Raffel in another post.
Like every other movement, modernist literature tried to distinguish itself as against what went before (here’s a handy overview on modernist literature. )
I would note that medievalist-Tolkienists such as Tom Shippey, Elizabeth Kirk, and Michael D. C. Drout would all agree and have written scholarship on this very topic (including arguing that Tolkien’s work is best understood in the context of medieval communal aesthetics and, as Doctor Science has pointed out—and Ursula K. LeGuin** also wrote on—is admirable suited to reading aloud, i.e. a written text that creates the sense of oral cultures).
Someone up thread said basically the same thing (sorry, I forgot their name and am too lazy to scroll back): that Tolkien’s work is a prose romance! Judged against the other MAJOR novels being published at the same time (one of which was Nabakov’s Lolita) which the modernist critics and aesthetes were touting, of course Tolkien’s work looked….odd.
It took medievalists 50 years to point out all the influences of the medieval Germanic sources and cultures on Tolkien — and that is also an offshoot of the Lit and Lang wars over what curriculum “English” should have at the university level in which Tolkien participated (as did Tom Shippey who taught in the same positions Tolkien had, after Tolkien.
The results at the end were that “linguistics” and “literature” ended up split, and “English” as an academic field decided not to require Anglo Saxon language/Beowulf/medieval material but to ground itself in Shakespeare as the origin point (despite my students insisting Shakespeare is Old English, it’s actually modern).
Nowadays especially in the wake of the films, some of the academics in other areas including film studies of course are jumping into Tolkien Studies. One major landmark was the Tolkien theme issue of Modern Fiction Studies published in Winter 2004. (I’m a cultural studies/small p postmodernist type myself who teaches, among other things, marginalized literatures.) Hah, you can buy a copy of that issue at amazon
*Terry Eagleton’s argument, in Literary Theory: An Introduction Eagleton is one of those evil Marxists who has rooooooned the purity of English studies and sullied the canon (and also writes fantastic scholarship on Shakespeare).
** Excerpt from Le Guin’s essay can be read here.
Diana Wynne Jones is another major fantasy author who has published on Tolkien’s work in an academic anthology: on his narrative structure.
Both essays are excellent and stand out against the academic prose surrounding them (I get to diss academics because I am one, so I read their stuff a great deal, and some of it is notgood).
John Seavey:By the by, on the off chance that signal boosting will do a bit of good for someone, Mercedes Lackey recently posted to the City of Heroes fan forum about the reasons for her long absence:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,10967.msg183682.html#msg183682
Oh God, that’s terrible. 🙁
Thanks for the heads up, John. I had no idea she was going through that. Now I’m wondering about the best way to help, besides gift-buying her books for others.
Heh my style vs. story is in moderation probably because ALL the links!
I bounced off “Moby Dick” with no intention of returning. “Little, Big”, however, has been on my TBR stack for a long time. I bounced off it once but I have good reasons and good recommendations to try it again. I have also read other John Crowley and just loved it to pieces.
Reading ‘Science News’ today makes me wonder what writers could do with yeti crabs and Hallucigenia. They really are SF.
That is awful.
Because it’s ostentatiously invisible.
I do think “Bartleby the Scrivener” is one of the BEST STORIES EVER WRITTEN, and have taught it (my students mostly don’t like it, sigh, but that’s not new).
The person who turned me on to “Bartleby” is Joanna Russ who wrote about it, and Melville’s work (he was NOT popular at the time he published, and only became so because of academic critics later on) as an example of a working class writer’s experiences affecting him: she said that anybody that worked a clerical job for any time would immediately understand and empathize with Bartleby. I went and read it (despite my earlier dislike of MD–which is totally me–I’m not saying it’s bad, but that I’m a bad reader for it–though maybe I ought to try it again some day), and yep, I had worked clerical jobs, and yep, I got it.
So, YAY Bartleby!
Ongoing YAY for Joanna Russ (EVERYTHING she wrote, people, EVERYTHING).
(I mentioned earlier but it’s worth repeating: Baen published Russ as well as Melissa Scott–another one of my favoritest writers ever).
@ Rob_matic
Machete Order
@ Kate
Thank you so much for pointing me at Slow. Broke my little artist’s heart.
You know, we had MOST of a thread free of Brian Z yesterday after ML stung him. Alas, people continue to engage him in good faith today just to watch him dance around the point.
re: Vox not nominating Tor authors
1. the threat isn’t new. He made it last week sometime, it was linked,
2. I’ll say now as I said then: I hope it’s true. That way he won’t foist any more JCW on us.
Also, Vox still isn’t registered as a voting member, so why he keeps posting his imaginary ballot, I don’t know. Why we keep caring about his imaginary ballot, I know even less.
re: the Puppies getting to block-vote one work onto the ballot: so what? If they’ve got the population for it, bully for them. If it’s a good work, better for everyone; if it’s a bad work, so much easier to skip and enjoy the good works, the way we were able to do with the Novel category this year.
@ Red Wombat – Shimmer’s pull-down menu doesn’t seem to work, it vanishes behind the top image immediately after being clicked. Which is bumming me out because I really like the look of it!
@ Jared Dashoff
What’s wrong with “Best Series” since that is literally what we’re talking about? Saga means something very different than what’s going on here.
I love the Burgess shale critters! Fell in love with them through Steven Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life,” even though the science has been superseded somewhat.
I have some beautiful handblown glass Burgess Shale critters on the mantelpiece.
It was kind of a disappointment to visit the the Museum of Natural History in New York and discover that their evolution of life exhibits didn’t even start until the Devonian.
Now I’m off to look up today’s “Science News.”
@Gabriel F.
WATCH THIS SPACE!!! Ok, not this one in particular, but File 770. We are doing one (maybe two) last passes of the revision. Sasquan already has Revision A, which will still say “Saga,” but in waiting for them to post (i.e. late last night and with all the commentary today) we have made enough changes to the actual proposal and the discussion text that Revision B is almost ready. B will go up here just as soon as it is ready, as well as on SMOFs and JOFs on Facebook (if you have somewhere else you think it should go, let us know).
B will then be subject to discussion and revision and C will get sent to Sasquan for posting before the New Business cutoff of August 6 so people can see it, discuss, and bring that discussion to the Business Meeting.
@ Mary Frances on Cherryh’s Foreigner series
You said what I would have if I could have. Thanks. And I love the notion of a translator as hero, particularly all the translation jokes in Invader.
@ Sweet
Thanks for your praise of Moby Dick. I just loved it (apart from a chapter on the colour white). It helped that I was reading it on a very long transatlantic flight, so I was not interrupted.
And I finished Little, Big on another such flight. As i read the ending for the second time, a flight attendant stopped and asked if I was all right. Tears streaming down my face, I sniffled, “I’m fine. It’s just so beautiful!”
Oooooh, Bartleby the Scrivener was my entry to Melville. It’s been ages since I read it. I remember mostly enjoying Moby Dick and bouncing off of Omoo. I keep meaning to go back and read them all, but there are Too. Many. Books. Not just his, but total, and I can’t possibly read them all.
Someday, great piles of money will fall out of the sky to land at my feet, and I will be able to retire with nothing to do other than read, read, read. And garden and make tamales, so that I don’t turn into a sofa spud, but mostly read. /fantasy
@ Abi Southerland re: In Demand
YESS! That was me! Because Alan Rickman snuggling in the back of a convertible and slow dancing under sodium lights is never a waste of time!
@ rrede
What would you recommend among Melissa Scott’s work? All I’ve read is The Armor of Light, which I adore. Marlowe survives because Philip Sidney survives to prevent his murder, and they join forces with Shakespeare to save the world. Who could resist that combination?
I read Little, Big when I was young and impressionable (I am now old and impressionable) and thought it was the best thing ever.
Hello all,
I was thinking about “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” a bit more this afternoon. I haven’t been able to keep up with the threads, so apologies if my thoughts echo something else previously posted.
It didn’t connect with me until today that the style of the story is that of a nursery rhyme. This makes sense because the character is at the bedside of loved one who is likely to “sleep” for the rest of his life.
Much has been made of the beating, and I’ve also seen people discuss the revenge fantasy aspect of it. I feel that it’s not the beating that is important, but rather that violence begets violence. And that the thing that breaks the cycle is empathy; not for the men who committed the violence, but for their loved ones.
Perhaps TB is keeping his Worldcon membership on the down-low because it’s an Attending membership; that way he can conduct a “surprise attack” and cause maximum kerfuffle (cur-fuffle?).
As someone who has read and enjoyed both Tolkein’s Lord of the Ring and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, I’m skeptical about that assertion.
> “Kyra: OOOO! Just bought “Daughter of Mystery” because lesbian romance SFF! OH YEAH! Thank you!”
My pleasure! (I swear various people’s comments on file770 in the last few weeks alone have sold like ten copies of that book.)
(And incidentally, I was not at all kidding about having a list of good lesbian romance SFF. It is something I post given the slightest provocation.)
David W: It’s an overgeneralization–and I think it’s most likely referring to the readers in the 50s (even then it’s an overstatement). But I’m not sure the purist modernist would consider White’s novel to be “good” modernist literature (the big names we’re talking about here are Eliot, Pound, Forester, Joyce, etc. etc. — W. H. Auden did confound the negative critics of Tolkien’s work by loving it–Edmund Wilson sneeringly dismisses Auden’s defense of Tolkien as relating to Auden’s love of “Quest.” I can say that the faculty I have known in my departments who are modernist specialists all dismiss Tolkien firmly (especially the Eliot experts!) — whereas all the medievalists I’ve known over the years tend to be fans of sff (not true of all medievalists–there’s a strong anti-Tolkienist mode among medievalists especially these days–anecdotal evidence only).
Doc Sciene
I suppose that’s true, but I still found it the best of the series since the second, far better than the last one. I’m leaning towards nominating it.
Dawn Incognito:. And that the thing that breaks the cycle is empathy; not for the men who committed the violence, but for their loved ones.
That certainly goes a long way towards explaining why so many Puppies dislike it. Empathy doesn’t seem to be a highly valued trait amongst them.
I thought this L.A. Times article about the publisher of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer would be of interest to people here.
Anglin is quoted as saying, “Right now, a divide is happening. And there are only going to be two sides. Either you are with the SJWs [social justice warriors] or you are with the Fascists.”
SF fan, hater of SJWs. If VD ever wants to step down as leader of the Rabids, we know who he can call.
Peace Is My Middle Name on June 24, 2015 at 10:18 am said:
I recently finished my fourth time through Moby Dick, this time reading it aloud. But it was the third time through, assigned in my high-school junior year, that it caught fire for me. Melville seemed to me a master of his pace; with all the ‘whaling’ chapters that don’t advance the action at all, slowing down the reader’s perception and focusing that perception on details, so that when the action moves toward the catastrophe, in the last ten chapters or so, you’re swept away (or I was swept away) by what feels like an accelerating avalanche. This last time, I wept out loud when the Pequod went down.
Now, for reading aloud, Moby Dick was a shock after Kipling and Ursula LeGuin — both very musical writers. Melville seems to never use a period when a semicolon could do. With a lot of practice and good breath control I can imagine reading his sentences rhythmically, but I can’t claim I managed it.
Msb @ 1:34: Weirdly, the chapter in Moby Dick about the color white is one I really liked. It talks about — I think, it was a long time ago — how white usually implies something good and then it goes into all the negative connotations it can have. Since I’d grown up in a mostly white culture it was a fascinating new way of looking at things for me.
(Wow, I can’t believe I’ve actually caught up enough here to reply to something.)
And Little, Big! Yes!
DB:
Well, he’s gone from someone I read despite his prose to someone I read specifically for it. So I’d say “a lot.” Your mileage may vary, of course, but he won a National Book Award — technically, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters — in 2003, so maybe that illustrates how far he’d have had to come from the prose of THE DEAD ZONE.
Other winners of the medal include Ursula K. LeGuin, E.L. Doctorow, Elmore Leonard, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Ray Bradbury and John Updike, so he’s in pretty good company. [Oprah Winfrey won, too, but I don’t think I’ve read any of her prose.]
Nick:
I’d have recommended “Head Down,” but damn, where do you go from there?
@ Kevin Standlee
Yes, but the way that VD grandstands about his ballot and his votes and… well, everything he does? I don’t find that likely. I find it much more likely that he assumes his followers are too stupid to look up the membership rolls and call him on it.
I really enjoyed A Death, which is online and for now anyway, complete even for non-subscribers.
Kerfuffle we owe to the Canadians who adopted it from the Scottish curfuffle/carfuffle. Kafuffle is also acceptable.
Curfurfle.