Following a series of links, I came upon The Complete Debarkle: The epic saga of how a culture war came to consume science fiction’s most famous literary award, by the pseudonymous Camestros Felapton. The book is 440 pages, which maybe is the longest document I’ve ever read from beginning to end online, and it’s pretty readable, really impressively so given that before reading it I’d heard of none of the main players in the story and had only heard of one or two of the minor characters. It’s all about battles within science fiction around 2015 or so, and yes I’ve read lots of science fiction but almost nothing written since 1990. (This doesn’t represent a literary judgment on my part; it’s just not stuff I’m in the habit of reading.) So I’m far from the target audience here. Or maybe I’m right in the sweet spot, as the story is all about politics, blogs, and beefs. And I did watch a few episodes of Game of Thrones a few years ago, so it’s not like I’m completely out of the loop.
Debarkle—the “bark” in the title is a punning reference to a group of fans and authors who called themselves the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies—tells the story of how this group tried, ultimately without much success, to either disrupt or take over the Hugo Award and win more prizes for authors associated with conservative political views and certain aspects of traditional science fiction. I don’t really care about those details, but I can see how they’re important to people within the field (just as, for example, I remain angry that Ed Wegman received a major award from the American Statistical Association, or that the journal Public Choice chose to publish a paper that is “riddled with errors” but comes to a political conclusion that they want to support). As in those examples from my own fields of research, it can be necessary to get into the nitty gritty of the examples to understand the bigger picture.
The bigger picture of Debarkle is the political radicalization of some of the participants in the dispute, who started by talking about problems with politicization of fan communities and different tastes in science fiction but ended up at the political extremes, writing about pushing journalists out of helicopters, “Satanic evil,” election denial, and literal stab-in-the-back political rhetoric. It’s all pretty scary.
The starting point—an argument from some conservative or traditionalist fans that something was amiss in the science fiction establishment—was itself controversial. From one standpoint, socially liberal views represented a mainstream in much of the science fiction and fan communities, to the extent that conservatives could feel excluded, in the same way that conservatives might feel they don’t fit in with the audience in a typical theater production in New York, or liberals might feel outnumbered in the stands of a college football game in the South. So you can see how conservatives could have the impression that politics was biasing what was published, what was promoted, and what won awards, and they’d want to right the balance. From the liberal point of view, biases in these areas were not new, as evidenced by decades of white male dominance of publishing and awards, sexual assault at science fiction conventions, etc. All of this is a familiar argument in the context of U.S. politics; this particular example is interesting in that it was happening in this small environment, with much of the discussion happening on a few blogs and bulletin boards, hence Felapton was able to track down the sequence of events and form a clear narrative.
The biggest plot twist in Debarkle is not what happens with the science fiction awards—unsurprisingly, given the socially liberal views of the author and fan communities, they ultimately shrugged the whole thing aside—but rather the gradual political radicalization of the Puppy groups, paralleling right-wing radicalization in this country more generally. There’s also a connection to the Gamergate campaign and various political controversies that arose during this period.
I enjoyed Felapton’s writing style. It reminded me a lot of the style of Alexey Guzey, author of the classic post, “Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors'”—really, I think this is one of the hundred greatest blog posts of all time—in how direct and clear he is. It’s not so easy to write with this sort of precision, especially when writing about a cast of characters who are prone to exaggeration. Politically, Felapton and Guzey appear to be in much different places, but they both write with a kind of purity that’s entertaining in its naivety. Or, what appears to be naivety. I’m not saying that either of these authors is naive or pretends to be so; rather, they each write with a charming-to-me person-from-Mars perspective which seems appropriate both when writing about science (as with Guzey) or science fiction (Felapton).
So, yeah, for all these reasons I found Debarkle to be a fun read despite its unusual length (in proportion to its topic) and despite the underlying story being horrifying. And that’s pretty much the same way I felt about “Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors'”!
This sounds like an example of Sayre’s law: the bitterness of intellectual disputes is inversely proportional to the stakes involved. I doubt that very many people care about science fiction awards. Fewer and fewer people are watching the Academy Awards, and the Oscar offer opportunities to glimpse scantily clad starlets. The science fiction fan world is smaller than movie fandom, and I don’t think that Liu Cixin parades in sexy clothes.
Oncodoc:
To me, the interesting part of the story is not the battle over the Hugo award but rather the scary way in which some of the participants have slipped into political extremism, a reflection of the disturbing polarization in our society. Extreme political views are not a new thing in science fiction (see here, for example), so who knows if things are getting worse. Let me just say that some of the extreme rhetoric in the Debarkle story was horrible. While at the same time the story was fun to read, in the same way that Guzey was fun to read even though he was describing some of the anti-scientific practices of the academic/scientific/cultural establishment. I’d say that the Debarkle case was less disturbing, as the extremists are on the outside, not the inside—but, unfortunately, although they’re on the outside of the science fiction and publishing establishment, they’re not far from the inside of the political establishment.
Thanks for linking this book, I have seen the various Puppies being mentioned in discussions about Hugo a while ago, but I was not aware of this whole thing so I didn’t understand it at the time. (I use the Hugo and similar awards occasionally to pick SF books to read).
My reading of the story is optimistic: with enough transparency, apparently things work out eventually. It is difficult to design institutions to be robust to similar interventions though, so accounts like this can be valuable.
Tamas:
I wouldn’t be so optimistic. The science fiction community is kinda left wing (not completely, but on balance), and it was able to resist an invasion from the far right. An invasion from the far left could’ve succeeded, in the same way that the Republican party succumbed to an invasion from the far right.
Andrew: you make a valid point, but I think that the key difference that determines outcomes is entry cost. If someone takes over Hugo or another similar award, it is perfectly feasible to establish a new one, so in the worst case scenario little damage is done in the long run, readers just learn that it was taken over and can ignore it from then on; the gains are transient and not worth much per se. There are zillions of SF awards, on the national and international levels.
In contrast, the two-party political system in the US has near-prohibitive entry cost for new parties (with the goal of capturing a non-trivial share of the votes), with few historical examples of successful new entries. So capturing existing ones makes sense.
From watching it at the time and reading some of Cam’s posts afterwards, it was less a “left versus right” thing than thousands of casual fans going “these jerks are trying to take our award and give it to awful rubbish which would not have got on the ballots in the 1940s. Their ideas about the history of the genre can’t survive a month reading old paperbacks. We need to vote now and change the rules so that can’t happen again.” To have a chance, the Puppies would have needed to have better stories on their slate and a story about the history of the genre which did not make older fans say “hold on, what about …”
“the Republican party succumbed to an invasion from the far right.”
No, it hasn’t. It has succumbed to an invasion from an ideologically incoherent personality cult. Mainstream conservatives do not see that faction as advocating a more extreme version of their principles or values, but as something different altogether.
Far right? The Republicans controlled the White House and Congress in 2017-2018. Did they pass any extreme laws? Did they start any wars? Did they declare martial law?
More recently, Florida passed a school anti-grooming law. Was that far right?
I’m not sure if this comment is a joke or is sarcastic or what. Of course the GOP enacted right-wing laws and policies when they had the power to do so. For instance, for a while young children of illegal immigrants were separated from their parents, and the parents deported, without even collecting enough information to ever reunite the families.
As for the “anti-grooming law”, I’m not aware of any such law but I’m guessing you’re referring to the law whose stated purpose is to prohibit “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.” (The quote is from the preamble). If you (Roger) are a Republican and you think “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” constitutes “grooming” then that’s kinda funny itself…yeah, I’d call that a right-wing attitude and a right-wing law.
Is that your best example? There was a 1997 court settlement that required separating a child from a detained parent. Trump just continued previous policy. It is also true that if an American citizen does something illegal and gets jailed, his children get separated from him.
If you don’t like children being separated from their parents, visit your local family court. You will be horrified.
Roger,
The claim that nothing changed under Trump is not true. I’d call it a lie but I suppose there’s a slim chance that you don’t know it’s false. Here’s a Wikipedia article you could read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
The Wikipedia article says that Trump had a reduced tolerance for illegal crossings, but the family separation policy was the same as before. Policing the border is not far right; it is what most countries have done for a long time.
Roger,
Would have thought the fact that the policy started in April 2018 would have been enough to show that it’s a Trump Administration policy, even without other subtle cues such as the title of the article.
Well, how about this, here’s a new article, from that time, about the Administration announcing the policy.
https://time.com/5268572/jeff-sessions-illegal-border-separated/
This is a really dumb thing to be arguing about. There’s no question that the Trump administration implemented the policy. I’m the end it was too horrible for even the broader base of Republicans to support. Maybe you should switch to arguing that it wasn’t really a right-wing policy because even the right wing didn’t support it in the end, that would at least have the virtue of not making it look like you simply won’t face facts.
But Phil: you understand why the policy was implemented, right? It was implemented as a deterrent because the far left was encouraging people all over central American to come to the US, where the left would use every means possible to shoe-horn them into the country. Furthermore, even though there was clearly a huge problem at the border, the left refused to deal with the problem. And this occurred in the additional context of cities and states like the one that I live in declaring that they would refuse to cooperate with ICE on immigration enforcement!
So please spare us the “far-right” whining. When local and state governments are so far to the quack left that they openly refuse to cooperate with the Federal government legally enforcing immigration laws, something has to be done. Unlike Bush before him, Trump did something. That remains popular – as it should.
Not to enter into a completely fruitless political debate with a right wing quack who’s been vaguely following the news through headlines, but–well, I guess that’s what I’m doing.
Immigration laws allow people to cross the border and seek asylum. The family separation policy is actually an end run to allow them circumvent the proper legal process for denying asylum seekers–you throw charges at people that probably won’t stick, separate them from their kids, and use their desire to be reunited to get them to agree to a plea deal quickly. It’s a violation of due process, which is why the courts granted injunctive relief for Ms. L v. ICE in 2018. Whatever you think of the supposed necessity of the policy, the idea that the policy was proper enforcement of law and order is untenable unless you think the nation’s judges are the ones who don’t know the law and have been corrupted by far-left ideology.
-Donald Trump
https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1007630384539033600?s=20&t=0AMGN9N3p1oujpZ-eQWW-w
I dunno man, I don’t think it was very popular, at least not with people named Donald Trump.
Anonymous,
Roger said “Far right? The Republicans controlled the White House and Congress in 2017-2018. Did they pass any extreme laws? Did they start any wars? Did they declare martial law?” So I gave an example of an extreme right-wing policy that was enacted. Roger then denied that was a right-wing policy and claimed it had been policy under the Democrats too, so I debunked that.
You don’t seem to be disagreeing: it was a right-wing policy. Indeed you are saying it was a reaction to a previous left-wing policy. So I don’t know what you’re going on about; you’re agreeing with me.
Yeah I agree with you Phil. Roger is the right wing quack
I will read the post, probably with appreciation. I heard about the Puppies at the onset on the old Obsidian Wings blog, and had read a novel by the head puppy, featuring werewolves. It would have impressed me a bit as a young teenager, but having read a lot of good authors since then it did not. The idea that should deserve any kind of literary award seemed laughable. Heinlein and Niven won Hugos albeit their conservative viewpoints, but were much better writers. Meanwhile some strong literary voices have joined the sf ranks.
The main problem with sf as a genre, for me, is that most of it depends on the premise that the speed limit of the universe can be broken, a premise I have given up on. It was very mind-expanding in the 1950’s though, with aliens, robots, and so on. Seeing us as intelligent aliens or intelligent machines would see us is kind of the essence of liberalism, it seems to me.
Theodore Sturgeon wrote a short story about a way to unite the Earth by faking an alien invasion, a notion later taken up much later by Paul Krugman.
Really, after only ~100 years? It took 20x as long to figure out “Euclid’s 5th postulate” was a special case.
JimV,
Faster-than-light travel is indeed a very common feature in science fiction, and if you aren’t willing to swallow it then that does knock out a bunch of SF. I wouldn’t venture to guess the fraction. But there is a ton of great science fiction that doesn’t involve faster-that-light travel.
I don’t read much SF anymore but some of the books I have enjoyed that don’t involve faster-than-light travel or other such stuff are listed below.
“The Windup Girl”, by Paolo Bacigalupi. (This is a great book, but I recommend NOT reading reviews of it first. They make the plot sound too confusing and baroque. For the books below, you can read the reviews and see if they seem like your cup of tea; this one, though, I suggest just starting and seeing if you like it.)
“The Martian”, by Andy Weir. This was made into a pretty good movie, too.
“The Children of Men”, by PD James. Also made into a pretty good movie.
“Snow Crash”, by Neal Stephenson.
“The Long Tomorrow”, by Leigh Brackett.
“Neuromancer”, by William Gibson.
“Farenheit 451”, by Ray Bradbury.
“Never Let Me Go”, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Thanks for the recommendations. I have read about half of them so far. I continue to read and enjoy sf, but consider it mainly fantasy. I started one recently whose travel mechanism depends on the premise that consciousness is required to collapse wave functions, which has been disproven (e.g., the C60 two-slit experiments). That I couldn’t go along with, and stopped reading. However, I suppose most fiction requires some suspension of disbelief.
I have read approximately 100% of Neal Stephenson, starting with “Snow Crash”. My favorite is “Anathem”, They all contain science or technology I regard as unrealistic, but often make up for it in other ways.
I am up to year 2016 in the “Debarkle” PDF. It mentions a science essay “The Hot Equations” which shows that most space battles in sf stories are thermodynamically impossible. Such considerations have to dampen my enjoyment somewhat.
I haven’t read “The Martian”, but enjoyed the movie. I didn’t notice any of the huge amount of required radiation shielding against solar flares in the spaceship, but maybe there was in the book. Also, the idea that there are windstorms on Mars capable of toppling a rocket lander seems implausible. Still, a good movie, and more plausible than “Inglorious Bastards” which I also enjoyed. Of course, many books and movies don’t pretend to be plausible. I guess the thought that some people make take a story to be factual or at least possible because it is “science fiction” is what bothers me.
I suppose my own comments bother some people. For what comfort it may provide, I make a donation to Ukrainian aid or some other charity for each comment I submit.
Read about half of them already! You read fast.
Andy Weir has already commented on both issues you raise about The Martian. You’re right about both. He says he didn’t even think about cancer, so that explains that. In contrast, he was aware the Martian atmosphere isn’t thick enough to topple a rocket but he needed some plausible way to strand an astronaut. I feel like it should have been possible to come up with something better, but it’s not so easy. Of course he had other options for just having a different plot, but I don’t blame him for choosing plot over verisimilitude.
Phil:
I didn’t like the ending of The Martian; see here for my suggested improvement.
Andrew,
An ending that was less triumphant might have made for a better movie artistically, but would have been less popular I think. Maybe a lot less. So it depends on what you’re going for. (By “you” I mean the investors and the producers).
Maybe they could shoot two endings: the one they shot, and one where Watney can’t fly his way to the ship and ends up drifting away in space and dying. Release both versions.
A) Science and math are cumulative. The more that is known, the faster it snowballs, until any existing limits are reached. The study of geometries on curved surfaces seems almost trivial now. FTL travel is still a chimera. Besides, the fact that Euclid listed it as a postulate implies he knew there could be other possibilities.
B) I don’t have even another 100 years to work on formulating my opinion, but have to go with what I know now. My bet is that FTL travel will never be achieved, and we should put our efforts into sustainability on our planet and with each other.
It may be cumulative over the long term, but short term you can get centuries to millenia of stagnation interspersed with the shorter periods of creativity.
Usually a kind of religious belief grows up around the assumptions of the previous creative period. Ie, it becomes “true” and questioning it is heretical, so people have difficulty thinking about the problem in a new way.
Eg, just a random idea I am sure is not original: Perhaps it takes infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, but it is possible to create a particle already moving faster when it pops into existence.
JimV: yes, there is a whole genre of science fiction story which reworks themes which were cool and new in the 1940s and 1950s like “what would everyday life in orbit / on the Moon be like?” Its like the Aristotelians who imitated his *conclusions* rather than his *methods*. The age of ubiquitous surveillance, companies worth whatever they can persuade people to pretend they are worth, and novel viruses spreading by jet is ripe for science-fictional treatments, if you can pull a Charlie Stross or Neal Stephenson and see what parts of our world not a past world deserve them.
Fixing the Hugo Awards to prevent slates from controlling the ballot was a very big deal which got thousands of ordinary fans out voting.
Sean:
I can see how stacking the awards ballot could seem at first like a fun hack, then I could also see how it would be more difficult to carry out in practice than it might seem at first. The big problems of the Debarkle seemed to come, not so much from the initial attempt to stack the votes, but in the later stages, when the people behind it became more extreme. In that way, as Felapton says, this foreshadowed recent developments in politics.
Its hard to say, some of the people writing for Baen in the oughties were already pretty extreme! But it does seem like the people Cam found grew progressively more deranged as the years passed. The story of “Finn, when the flight departed” is going to go into SF fans’ lexicon.
Interesting. People seem to want art to do at least three things simultaneously. (1) Entertain people; (2) Be recognized by their peers as good work; and (3) Create a community of people who not appreciate the art itself, but form a community of like-minded people who can be like-minded in other ways.
(1) is fine. (2) has the obvious problem that award processes are inherently political. The Oscars reward fils that the members of the Academy want to award, and the members of the Academy, while far from monolithic, are bound to make decisions that reflect their interests , both artistic and professional, and unfortunately (in an era in which political views are a critical part of self-selection into groups) conventional political ideology. (3) Is absurd. We used to celebrate the fact that fans of X could span the spectrum of views on everything else. We now seem to demand conformity in political outlook as a minimal requirement for any sort of joint enthusiasm. As Trump says: Sad.
Jonathan:
In most settings, I agree that item 3 is absurd—but the science fiction community of fans really does seem different from the audience of most art. Fans do want to be like-minded in other ways! That said, science fiction fandom also has a long history of being a niche subculture that is accepting of diverse political views.
I am a participant in a long-running blog of fans of a particular team. The main reason the blog is so long-running, even surviving the unfortunate death of its founder, is that the founder insisted, vehemently, that no discussions were off-topic except politics. And any discussion of politics got you banned. (There are edge cases of course, but that’s another issue.) We all love the same team, and we can all talk about that team and 50,0000 other things we find interesting, including, but not limited to, music, other sports teams in the same city, other sports in other cities, restaurants, PEDs, domestic violence issues, and pets, but who voted for whom and why is off limits…. and it works great.
Parallel to the Sad Puppies controversy, there is a long term change in the nature of science fiction which may have created some discontent. In the very early days of Science Fiction, it was possible to write about ideas that were genuinely new to fiction, and some of the works driven by this struggle to attain readability – Weinberg’s “A Martian Odyssey” and Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”. Out of this came the pulp works – usually written for cheap magazines, the best of them finding new ideas or variations, but first and foremost very readable (if clunky) entertainment – Asimov’s Foundation Series and E.E.Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series. Smith overlaps with writers like Heinlein, whose strengths included some in characterization and dialogue, but who was still writing readable entertainment.
Fast forward to 2013, and the typical Science Fiction novel is no longer ludicrous by the standards of any other genre. Academics criticize, analyze, and even write Science Fiction, and fans keen enough to vote for Hugos are looking for the sort of literary features valued in other literary circles. The fans celebrating Ann Leckie’s novel “Ancillary Justice” write breathlessly about the character’s use of only female pronouns in a culture which does not distinguish by gender. The only scene in the novel I can remember involves a genteel tea party in which the characters waste a lot of time talking nonsense (I think these characters are intended to be shown as time-wasters but I am not sure). A reader who has waded through the no doubt very subtle shadings of character and dialog without appreciating them in search of a climactic scene in which massive spaceships exchange swarms of missiles and then blow up – and leaves without finding one – might be excused for asking themselves “What has happened to Science Fiction?”
I think you should read it again – I enjoyed it much more the second time. And best to read all three books as the first is the set-up.
I’ve read most of the Hugo winners since the mid 70s. The earlier ones seem adolescent and unpolished compared to the more recent winners.
I am more optimistic that I will enjoy a Hugo winner than say a Booker prize winner.
> “What has happened to Science Fiction?”
Maybe nothing. There are plenty of good SF books out there to match a wide range of preferences about subgenre (hard sf, space opera, dystopian, etc) and style, but it is best to treat Hugo and similar awards as _one_ possible signal to select them, and use others too.
Personally I find book reviews useful: I search for reviews of books I liked, then see what else the reviewer recommends. For me, the bottleneck is not finding good books, but time to read them.
I thought Ancillary Justice was wonderful, understated but fast moving and clever. The sequel, Ancillary Sword, was insufferably awful. (And I think it was full of tea parties.) Based on a recommendation from someone I trust, I read #3 (Ancillary Mercy), which was far better than #2, and nearly as good as #1.