oh god am i really going to write about the hugos again

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Okay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.

Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.

He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)

Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?

Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:

The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]

I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.

But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?

Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.

Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.

Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.

Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.

That’s a good thing.

It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.

[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.

[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.

[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?

[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.

Randomness for 8/15

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1) How One Misunderstanding in the 1870s Created an Entire Sci-Fi Subgenre

2) Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.

3) Someone is setting hipster traps in New York.

4) An “accomplished writer” takes James Patterson’s “Masterclass.”

5) What if Werner Hertzog directed Ant-Man?

6) Architects crowdfund to build £1.85 billion Minas Tirith in England.

7) I read NPR’s 100 best sff novels and they were shockingly offensive. Nothing to argue with here.

The Kid Curates His Own Homeschool Reading List (thx to reddit)

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A couple of days ago, I tweeted this:

Here’s the list of reddit’s 100 favorite books. There’s some good mixed in with a lot of not so good, just like reddit, but he wanted to know which of those books we had in our apartment. That, naturally, led me to search through my bookshelves, which lead to this:

My wife is an enthusiast. When she sees something exciting, she commits, and the idea that our son would return to reading in a big way had her tearing through our shelves looking for books on the list to give him. And if there we didn’t have a particular book but did have something else by the author, that got tossed into the mix, too.

It’s dangerous. As much as I love her passion, I know it can over run someone else’s tentative interest in a thing in the same way a hurricane will blow out a camp fire. So we don’t have The Unbearable Lightness of Being but that doesn’t mean you can toss The Last Temptation of Christ on the pile. And you don’t just add some Marshall McLuhan because you think it’s worthy and he ought to be interested. And I’m sorry, but you can’t substitute Dhalgren for Dune.

Anyway, while she’s at work, I’ve gone through the stacks she’s put together and set aside the books that aren’t on the list. Books not on the list by authors who are have been placed nearby, but except when they aren’t. And LOTR… well, I’m not going to bother.

For a few years, he’s hated the idea of reading anything, and did so only for homeschool assignment. Resentfully. Recently, he’s been reading ebooks of Japanese “light novels.” Then he found the list, realized we had the #1 book on the shelf, and grabbed it.

When I gave that book to him a couple years ago, he rolled his eyes, read a few pages, then pushed it away. When reddit recommends it, he’s in love.

And that’s fine. I knew he would turn around at some point. Now we just have to nurture this interest instead of vomiting a reading list on him.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates #15in2015

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Between the World and MeBetween the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book 14 in #15in2015.

Beautifully written. Powerful. Regrettably short.

Structured as an open letter to his fifteen-year-old son, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written an extensive personal history explicitly about growing up within the power structures of the U.S., and its effects on the people within it.

This is not a Racism 101 for skeptical white people feeling vaguely miffed about Affirmative Action. This isn’t a book to turn racists into non-racists, if such a book were possible. This is a heartfelt personal account of difficult times in a country that does not want to acknowledge its problems.

It helps to have read Coates’s magazine work. It helps to know the history of race in the U.S. But it’s not necessary, if one keeps an open mind.

Great book. Recommended for everyone.

Buy this book.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey #15in2015

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J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the CenturyJ.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Book 13 in #15in2015

It’s deeply pleasing to read about the language Tolkien uses in his work. Not the one he created, which this book barely touches on, but the old words, names, and place names that he drew on when he wrote.

Having studied in the same field at Professor Tolkien, the author is well-placed to talk about the complexities, structure, and foundation of Tolkien’s work. It’s clear he’s irritated at the literary critics who dismiss Lord of the Rings as having no value at all, but in his effort to prove them so completely wrong that they’ve missed the greatest work of the 20th Century, he presents an excellent argument for the artistic merit in Tolkien’s work.

Is Tolkien the “Author of the Century”? Well, no. Is his work powerful, complex, and of literary value? Absolutely. If you can bear to read through Shippey’s gripes about the literati and can skim through some tedious analysis of the professor’s lesser works, this book is a source of sublime pleasure.

Buy this book

The Babes in the Wood, by Ruth Rendell book 12 of #15in2015

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The Babes in the Wood (Inspector Wexford, #19)The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Book 12 of #15in2015

Wow. This was sort of terrible.

Rendell died recently, and the way her obituaries described her work made me want to sample it. The sensible thing would have been for me to carefully select a much-lauded novel, but instead I grabbed something at random on the shelf.

The characters were cliches: an absent-minded professor, a snotty supermodel, misogynistic Christian fundamentalists, the overweight guy who can’t resist a sweet cake in the most awkward of social circumstances. The plot dawdled, in part because of characters who find a body but don’t report it because of the bother it would cause them (missing children? So what?) and in part because there’s so little going on.

Worse, there are continual little author self-inserts that make no sense in the context of the rest of the book. Stuff like (paraphrasing) “The inspector had forgotten to ask an important question, and it would be weeks before he realized what it was” which doesn’t match the bulk of the novel, but seems very like a ham-fisted attempt to create tension.

Finally, it’s apparent from the latter part of the book that the author had a lovely vacation abroad, and much of the denouement made it tax-deductible.

Maybe her earlier work was more nuanced and interesting. Maybe it had momentum. This doesn’t.

Buy a copy

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Book 11 in #15in2015

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Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book 11 of #15in2015

It’s not often I set aside genre works to read something regarded as a literary classic, but I’ve wanted to read this since the author died a few years ago.

The main character, Okonkwo, is a tragic figure determined to make a prominent place for himself within his (fictional, but based on the Igbo of southern Nigeria) people. His father was a lazy, good-for-nothing layabout, who played music and drank other people’s palm wine, and borrowed sums he never intended to pay back. In a culture that valued community he was a likable taker.

Deeply ashamed of his father, Okonkwo was determined to be everything he was not. He worked hard, fought fiercely in war, and won renown as a great wrestler. But while he could fight and work and create wealth, he couldn’t manage the things his father was good at: he couldn’t create strong social bonds within the community. He was prone to rages, and did terrible things because he was afraid to seem weak/feminine.

Naturally, he ends up dying an outcast’s death, just like his father, because he was ready to go to war with the British colonials but no one was willing to follow him.

Okonkwo is one of those literary protagonists that literary readers lose so much: he’s an asshole you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with in real life, but as a reader you go deep into his history and his tragic flaws, watching from a superior position as his misguided instincts push him closer and closer to tragedy. The text portrays his errors but doesn’t allow much commentary on them, except in the context of the way he clashes with cultural traditions.

However, those cultural traditions are not spared overt criticism in the text at all. For a people who explicitly value community and the bonds of tribal identity, they have terrible blind spots. The vicious misogyny, the cruelty toward babies born twins, and more, create weak points in their society that the English missionaries, who show up late in the book, exploits. Okonkwo’s own son, whom he has treated with nothing but anger and criticism (in the hope that he would grow up hard and strong) is one of the first to flee his traditional tribal community for the Christian church. And just as with the man, so it is with the community as a whole: the lowest and most despised break away first, and once on the outside, attack the culture they were once a part of.

Not that the British are made into good guys, with their sham talk about justice while they destroy the Ibo traditions and kill their people.

It’s a sad book. I like sad. It’s also complex–much more so than this review makes it seem. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the subsequent books.

Buy this book

The Distance by Helen Giltrow #15in2015

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The DistanceThe Distance by Helen Giltrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book 9 in #15in2015

Charlotte Alton is a socialite with the money, manners, clothes, and a secret identity as, Karla, an underworld information broker and fixer who arranges impossible crimes, new identities for fugitives, and carefully leaked tips to government spy agencies.

Sound far-fetched? Well, that’s just the start.

I’ve been trying to read more thrillers lately, in an attempt to get a handle on the way they handle exaggeration. This one…

It’s a weird book. It has high thriller characters but for most of the book it’s a low thriller plot: Karla arranged a cover ID and temporary entrance into an experimental prison colony for a hit man she’s secretly in love with. He has a troubled past! The big boss in the prison wants him for his troubled past! His target is a mystery woman that everyone thinks is already dead!

Eventually, the plot turns it around to big stakes and state secrets, but it takes a long time to get there. In the mean time, there are a lot of dead end investigations, scary prisoners being scary, and our protagonist putting herself more and more at risk for her personal haunted tough guy.

Honestly, I would have given it an extra star if it had been shorter. I enjoyed it, but the plot had too much flailing. Still, it was fun.

Buy this book.

The Drowning City by Amanda Downum #15in2015

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The Drowning City (The Necromancer Chronicles, #1)The Drowning City by Amanda Downum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book 8 in #15in2015

I wanted to like this more than I did. There’s a lot of promise in the description (A necromancer and spy goes a city that on the brink of open revolution to offer financial aid to the revolutionaries) but the execution doesn’t have a lot of momentum to it.

Part of the problem is that too many of the names are similar. Part is that the protagonist’s mission does not seem particularly difficult to execute. Part is that the text feels awfully slack. There are betrayals, murders, bombings, magic duels, allies switching sides, forbidden attraction, and more, but I never felt that pull that makes it hard to put a book down. I was never powerfully attached.

The setting is terrific, though, and very well-realized.

I’m sorry I didn’t enjoy it more.

Buy this book