Science Fiction

I didn’t need to get very far into the Hugo-nominated Neptune’s Brood to come to an initial conclusion that author Charles Stross doesn’t like money very much (and the same goes for its corollaries, debt and capitalism). I’m only really calling this out because much has been made during this Hugo season about how SF should or shouldn’t be political, how some authors stress ideology over storytelling, and the like. Personally, I think it a little foolish to prescribe what a piece of fiction can and can’t do, and this book is probably a good example. I do not take anywhere near the dim view of money, debt, or capitalism that Charlie Stross apparently does, and yet I greatly enjoyed this book. Why? Because Stross thoroughly explored the universe he created, and any questions you might have about the economic conundrums that he devises are answered, and he did it while telling a fun space opera story. Indeed, the ideas of this book come off to me as a grand thought experiment on the expense of interstellar travel, and the various realities any such endeavor would face.

Thousands of years in the future, humanity has gone extinct (multiple times). It turns out that the human body, while well adapted to survive on earth, is not very well adapted for space travel. But our story follows beings that are so closely patterned after humans that they have maintained much of our social and cultural norms, as well as the physical form factors (though those are often adapted to their environments as well, as we see in the course of this story). Reproduction seems much simpler, with children being “instantiated” rather than born, among other such terminology derived from software and hardware, but on the other hand, messy human characteristics like emotions and love still seem to exist. These are post-humans, but ones that are easy to relate to.

Krina Alizond is a “forensic accountant” who has embarked on a decades long study pilgrimage to visit and work with several of her colleagues. As the book opens, she has just found out that one of her colleagues, a distant sib named Ana, has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It doesn’t take long for Krina to get entangled in a similar web as she seeks out her sister and gradually finds out that the subject of their study, various interstellar debt scams, has become somewhat more complicated in that they’ve stumbled upon the biggest financial scam in the history of the universe. Along for the ride are a small crew of down-on-their-luck religious folk (though their religion appears to surround bringing back “fragile” human beings), a look-alike assassin hot on Krina’s tale, privateers chasing Krina’s sister’s life-insurance policy, and a group of squid-like communists.

The story generally takes the form of a roller-coaster space opera, with occasional interludes of exposition and info-dumping. It’s mostly written from the first perspective of Krina, and you could argue that this is a rather clunky way of delivering a lot of exposition, but on the other hand, I rather thought those chapters were among the most interesting in the book.

Much of the detail surrounds the nature of metahumanity’s expansion to the stars, how expensive that proposition is, and how that expense is structured. A lot of this falls back on physical realities like the speed of light, and how it takes centuries to reach new star systems and so on and so forth. It turns out that using something as malleable and fragile as “cash” in that context is rather foolish. Stross takes the unglamorous nature of space travel and expansion and combines it with economics, devising a clever ponzi scheme of debt based on something called “Slow Money”:

Slow money is a medium of exchange designed to outlast the rise and fall of civilizations. It is the currency of world-builders, running on an engine of debt that can only be repaid by the formation of new interstellar colonies, passing the liability ever onward into the deep future …

By design, the slow money system is permanently balanced on the edge of a liquidity crisis, for every exchange between two beacons must be cryptographically signed by a third-party bank in another star system: It takes years to settle a transaction. It’s theft-proof, too – for each bitcoin is cryptographically signed by the mind of its owner, stored in one of their slots. Your slow money assets are, in a very real manner, an aspect of your identity.

…the very slowness of slow money guarantees that it isn’t vulnerable to bubbles and depressions and turbulence and the collapse of any currency that is limited to a single star system.

For all its benefits, Slow Money does seem to have a lot of structural difficulties. Krina, being a forensic accountant, has studied all sorts of scams and just plain failures (where, for example, one of the three involved parties dies to soon or other such similarities). Her job is often to swoop in and grab unclaimed slow money that has been sitting around for centuries. There’s even a fantastic riff on the usual hand-wavey FTL mumbo-jumbo that always shows up in Space Operas. Here, Stross has adapted the Spanish Prisoner scheme to work on an interstellar scale. If FTL travel was invented, it would suddenly make it possible to trade fast money across interstellar distances, thus depreciating all of the slow money out there (and slow money is what the rich and powerful trade in, so you can see why they would want to preserve the status quo). It’s impossible to travel faster than light, but that doesn’t stop con artists from attempting to defraud folks (only now it’s happening across the vast distances of interstellar space).

I won’t obsess over all the nooks and crannies of these shenanigans, except to say that I really enjoyed the way Stross was able to structure all of this and build his plot around it. I also enjoyed the way that Stross was able to adhere to known physics of the universe and pull interesting story aspects out of that, rather than just hand waving his way around the science the way a lot of space operas would. One example of that is the concept of Slow Money, but we also touch on things like interstellar warfare (“It is a well-understood truism that interstellar warfare is impossible”) and some impressive underwater conceptualization.

From what I’ve read of the Best Novel ballot thus far, this seems to be vying for my number one vote (along with Ancillary Justice). I have not finished Mira Grant’s Parasite and have only just begun Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, but from what I’ve read so far, I don’t see them overtaking Neptune’s Brood or Ancillary Justice.

As for the politics of the story, there were maybe one or two paragraphs in the book where it felt like Stross was simply lecturing for ideology’s sake, but even those were generally part of the story he was trying to tell here. If I felt obliged to not read anything I thought I might disagree with (or to denounce such things), I’d find myself reading very little (or enjoying even less of what I read). While an author’s politics will no doubt color their work, some authors are more difficult to figure out than others. Stross seems pretty easy to read. While I tended to think of his story as a grand thought experiment, there are definitely times (the aforementioned “lecturing” graphs) when I caught a whiff of something more politically motivated. Other authors may be more difficult to suss out, but even a cursory glance at Charlie’s Diary indicates that yes, Charlie and I would probably disagree about a lot of things when it comes to economics. And you know what? That’s awesome! No one has all the answers, and the idea that we all thought the same things and didn’t question anything would be far more terrifying than the fact that Charlie and I might disagree about something (which is not, in any way, terrifying to me).

This might seem obvious, but the amount of vitriol expended over this year’s ballot (from both the right and left) seems rather misplaced. When people talk about politics ruining SF, I don’t think they’re talking about the fact that, for example, Stross’s book takes a dim view of capitalism. They’re talking about the way we discuss those views, and the fact that some folks are attempting to game the nominations process (and others, seeing this, are attempting to counter by blanket voting against certain authors and works, etc… without even reading those books). Me, I don’t want to politicize my every action, I don’t want to let politics determine my every move, and I don’t want to do an exhaustive biography of every author I could potentially read to see if their views align with mine. Not only is that unnecessary, it’s unhealthy. It’s a good thing to have your core, foundational beliefs challenged from time to time. It can be infuriating, but it is often productive. There are extreme cases, times when it becomes impossible to separate the art from the artist (hello Vox Day), but I would argue that those should be rare exceptions. Otherwise, I would have stopped reading this book and missed out on what may be my favorite nominee. I used to think this was an obvious truism, but apparently it’s not: it’s possible to enjoy or like a book without agreeing with it (or without liking the author as a person, not that we ever really get to know the author). I’m really happy that I read this book, and I’m going to be facing a difficult decision when it comes to voting time…

When I was but a wee nerd of 11 or 12, I had a brief dalliance with Dungeons & Dragons. For whatever reason, I found the High Fantasy stuff fascinating and gobbled up game manuals and started reading The Lord of the Rings. This was before my love of reading really kicked into high gear too, so it was notable that I was reading this stuff on my own. And it wasn’t the first time, either. I have fond memories of reading Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books for school, and even wrote a knockoff short story on my Commodore 64 called The Land of Analak (I’m pretty sure I still have a hard copy of this somewhere; I’m also positive that it was terrible.) All of which is to say, I don’t know when or even why I fell out of love with High Fantasy, but at some point, Horror and Science Fiction became my reading mainstays, with only the rare Fantasy novel for variety.

As such, if I had picked up the first book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, when it was published in 1990 (i.e. right around the height of my exploration of fantasy), I would have probably loved it. Instead, here I am 24 years later, slogging through it because the entirety of The Wheel of Time was nominated for a Best Novel Hugo Award. I’ve already covered how a 14 book, 11,000+ page, 4 million+ word series of books came to be nominated as a single work (short story: a quirk in Hugo nomination rules says that if no individual work in a series is nominated, the entire series can be nominated once it concludes), so I won’t belabor the controversy all that much. Ultimately, it wouldn’t even really matter if only the most recent work was nominated, as it would probably be difficult to read without knowing what happened in all the earlier installments.

After finishing this first volume in the series, I will say that there’s no way that I will finish the series this year (it’s simply too long) and I’m positive that it will not land in the top two slots of my Best Novel ballot. It’s not that The Eye of the World (henceforth TEotW) is bad, per say, just that it did not reinvigorate my decades past love of the Fantasy genre. You might think that a bit unfair, but I will say that some recent consumption actually has sparked some interest in exploring more of the genre, notably Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion novels and the Game of Thrones TV series, both of which really grabbed me in ways that TEotW failed to.

In a lot of ways, this book was exactly what I was expecting. Heroes journey, complete with naive farmboy? Check. Mysterious cloaked riders? Check. Obvious Tolkien inspiration? Check. Hearty stew? Check. The number of fantasy cliches this book hits is almost impressive, even to a genre novice. On the other hand, there were plenty of things I wasn’t expecting, and there were a bunch of things I did really enjoy.

The story follows the aforementioned naive farmboy Rand al’Thor, who is pretty obviously The Chosen One, despite attempts to obscure that fact by ensnaring 3 naive farmboys (Rand, Mat, and Perrin) in the scheme. Their idyllic little hamlet, Emond’s Field, is mysteriously attacked by orcs and Nazgul Trollocs and a Myrddraal, but fortunately a visiting historian turns out to be a powerful Aes Sedai (basically a magician), and she is able to repel the initial attack and helps our targeted farmboys flee, along with a coterie of friends. Thus begins epic journey number one, followed by several episodic stops, hearty stews, and at least three or four other epic journeys. Eventually a threat to the titular Eye of the World (basically a powerful magical object of legend) is discovered, and our heroes and heroines race to confront the Dark Ones who threaten the world.

At first, I was happy to see that your typical “Chosen One” plot was obscured by the notion of three boys being targeted, but since the story is mostly told through Rand’s eyes, it seemed pretty obvious to me that he was The One (there are some other indications of this that I did not pick up on, unless I was doing so unconsciously). At some point on their journey, they do get split up, so there are some other viewpoints, but Rand and Mat are together (and their sections are told from Rand’s perspective) and Perrin runs afoul of some wolves, making it pretty clear that he has other latent talents. As a protagonist, Rand is rather bland, which tends to be the case with these hero’s journey type stories. A blank slate of a protagonist makes for an easy entry point for readers (and would undoubtedly have ensnared a younger me), though there’s not a ton of depth to the character or even much of an arc throughout this book (but then, there are still 13 books to go…) He is mostly passive, scraping by through luck and the goodwill of others.

As characters go, most of the core seem only slightly less bland than Rand. Mat is a bit of a prankster, and gets caught up in some cursed treasure like an idiot. Perrin seems like the strong silent type, and he’s got some talent for talking to wolves, which is neat. The aforementioned Aes Sedai is named Moiraine, and she seems more interesting due more to the fact that she’s an Aes Sedai than anything else. There is much in the way of rumors and hearsay about Aes Sedai bandied about here, which is actually a rather interesting notion. Most of the time, a story like this would buckle down for gigantic info dumps (of which there are still plenty, don’t worry), but what we get here is a more realistic sort of information. Aes Sedai are famous, but their fame seems to be an accumulation of misunderstandings and half-truths. Or something like that. They do not seem to have great reputations, with many warning that accepting the help of an Aes Sedai will open you up to repayment of some kind, like they’re some sort of Mafia/Lawyer hybrid. Moiraine is the only Aes Sedai we see a lot of in this story, so perhaps she’s an uncommon example, or perhaps she just hasn’t dropped the hammer on our unsuspecting farmboys (I was definitely expecting something of the sort in this book, and it did not really come). Moiraine has a warder named Lan that is basically a badass bodyguard, though we find out enough about him to know that he’s also a bit of a poet. I suppose you could call Egwene a love interest for Rand, though not much comes of that, and the story instead focuses on her desire for adventure and latent abilities that could allow her to become an Aes Sedai herself. Then there’s Nynaeve, who initially seems rather caustic and whiny, but also has some latent magical abilities (there’s a lot of that going around in this book). Finally, we’ve got Thom Merrilin, who is an old “gleeman” (basically a bard or entertainer). He’s old, well traveled, and wizened, and has enough experience to help guide our lowly farmboys.

To be honest, my favorite characters tended to be off on the periphery. There’s Min, who is basically a fortune teller and seems rather cool (though we get very little of her here). There’s a loner named Elyas who can communicate with wolves, and helps awaken the latent ability in Perrin. Rand accidentally meets a princess, some princes, and the queen (and her feared Aes Sedai advisor). I suspect many of these characters would be fleshed out in future installments, and I would be disappointed if they weren’t…

In the end, I did enjoy this book. It reads like a slightly more accessible, but bloated Tolkien story. I’m reminded of the Tom Bombadil chapter in Fellowship of the Ring, except that I feel like there were, like, 7 Tom Bombadils that seemed inconsequential for this particular installment, but who will show up later in the series (not that Tom Bombadil shows up much in the rest of LotR, but still). I’m a little unsure how to really think about this book in context of the Hugo awards though. I feel like many of the things I’m holding against it would be resolved later in the series, but on the other hand, the fact that the series is so long is prohibitive in itself. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t necessarily mind long books, even meandering ones, but even I have my limits. While I’m sure much of this stuff will be fleshed out in the sequels, I still can’t quite shake the notion that this didn’t really need to be as long as it is. But since Tor has decided to include the entire series in the Voters Packet, I will most certainly read more of the series before I vote, but given what I’ve read so far, I can’t see myself getting too carried away with this. I did grow to like this story as I read it, and now that I’m familiar with a lot of the concepts, maybe the future installments will be less jarring. That being said, given its competition in the Best Novel category, I can’t see this one winning…

So while I start chomping through this year’s Hugo Nominees (controversies aside), I figure I’ll catch up on some non-Hugo related (er, mostly) reviews.

• The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu – Wesley Chu is nominated for the The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, which is technically not a Hugo award, but they are administered, voted upon, and awarded as part of the same process (I believe I’ll be eligible to vote, though I’m not sure if I’ll get through all the nominees either). That being said, I picked this up before those nominations were announced, as it was garnering a fair amount of buzz amongst nerd circles as a fun, Scalzi-like SF adventure story (incidentally, Scalzi is a Campbell winner). And it is!

  The story follows Tao, an ancient member of an alien race called Quasings. They crash landed on Earth when life was in its infancy. I’m a little unclear on Quasing physiology, but they cannot survive on earth without inhabiting a host. Their goal is to find a way to leave the planet, so they have guided evolution along, attempting to build an infrastructure that would allow them to return home. As humans became intelligent and Quasings guided them further, disagreements arose around how best to leverage the humans, and a civil war has arisen amongst the Quasings, who have split into two factions: the peaceful Prophus who want to cooperate with the humans, and the more ruthless Gengix who will destroy the planet if it means they can get home. Tao is a Prophus, and as the story opens, he finds himself unexpectedly in need of a new host. Enter overweight, underachieving Roen Tan, a meek IT worker stuck in a dead end job. As Tao whips him into shape, the war rages on, and Roen finds that the life of a secret agent is not all its cracked up to be.

  This is a neat premise, and it allows Chu to play with history without altering what we already know. There’s a whole alternate timeline here that happens to match up perfectly with our notion of history, but, for instance, Tao once inhabited Genghis Khan, putting an interesting spin on what we know about him. This implies that humans are a rather malleable, unambitious bunch, but perhaps future installments will change that… and yes, this is the first in a series. It comports itself well enough, and there’s a solid character arc for Roen here, so it’s not one of those first-in-a-series books that is unsatisfying. So we’ve got some interesting ideas, a well paced plot, secret agents, intrigue… if this were a movie, there would be some fantastic training montages. I’d say that the Scalzi comparisons are fair, though Chu clearly has his own style. Roen is an unlikely action hero, and a fair amount of the story plays with his expectations of glamor and adventure… it’s certainly fun for me to read the story, but it wouldn’t be quite so fun to live it. This is a series that I will actually revisit. The next book is actually already out, but at this point, I’ve got my hands full with other stuff! Still, I look forward to returning to Roen and Tao.

• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey – This book has an odd reputation. It was nominated for a Hugo Best Novel, but it has some very loud detractors as well (it did not win, nor have any of its sequels garnered further nods). The story is set in a highly developed version of our solar system, with the three main powers being Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt (“belters”). It follows two main viewpoint characters in alternating chapters: Holden, a down-on-his-luck captain of an ice mining vessel who runs afoul of a nefarious plot, and Miller, a down-on-his-luck police detective in search of a missing rich kid. They eventually meet up, the nefarious plot becomes more clear, and hijinks ensue.

  I’m a big fan of old-school space opera, but this just wasn’t cutting it for me. There are some fantastic ideas here, and the high-level premise (involving an ancient alien virus/organism/somethinglikethat) is very interesting, but it’s the journey that’s the problem, not the destination. I had a difficult time relating to Holden and Miller, and most of the folks who surround them, and the story wallows in their misery a bit too much for me to really get into it. Holden has some very high-minded ideals, and he sticks to them, which would be admirable if he wasn’t otherwise pretty incompetent. At first, I thought Miller’s hard-boiled detective story would work, but he spends more time wallowing in self-pity than tracking down criminals… of which, there are many. The Asteroid Belt is portrayed as a cesspool of prostitution, crime, underage prostitution, rape, riots, and prostitution. I’m not entirely sure why humans have settled on these rocks, but apparently 90% of their activities are criminal enterprises. It’s a long book, and we spend way too much time with this mostly irrelevant world-building. We get it, the solar system is a grim, gritty place.

  It takes entirely too long (like, half the book) to get to the meat of the plot, the aforementioned alien virus conspiracy, at which point, things get mildly more interesting. The details of the conspiracy (including a rather cartoonish plot to maliciously expose millions of people to the alien virus, complete with mustache twirling villain) strain credibility, but if you’re able to take them at their face, it works reasonably well. The physics are probably the least problematic aspect of the story, and the author manages to wring plenty of suspense out of that, which is good. Still, I found it was not worth wading through all the crap to get to the good stuff. There are some aspects of the ending that work reasonably well, even when the dedication to rigorous physics fades away, but the ultimate resolution (at Miller’s hands) borders on the ludicrous. James S.A. Corey is the pen name of Daniel Abraham (a mildly successful Fantasy author) and Ty Franck, and they’ve written three books in the series, with a fourth on the way. Alas, I’m not particularly interested in revisiting this series.

• Consider Phlebas by Ian M. Banks – Since Leviathan Wakes didn’t really scratch that space opera itch, and since I’ve really been meaning to check out some Banks, I decided to start reading the Culture series (in this case, the series appears to consist of self-contained stories sharing a setting, rather than one long story). Being a completist, I started with Banks’ first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas. Unfortunately, I’m getting the impression that this isn’t a particularly great way to enter the series.

  What we have here is a episodic series of stories centered around Bora Horza Gorbuchul, a quasi-human shape shifter and agent for the Idirans, an alien race of religious-minded warriors who have picked a fight with the Culture (comprised mostly of humans). We don’t see much of the Culture in this book, but the implication is that they are a decadent, hedonistic people that are technologically advanced enough to create Artificial Intelligences that are so advanced that they are able to create a sorta utopia (whether this is possible is another debate, probably best saved for another time). The opening of the book winds up being very disorienting, as we find our hero, Horza, being continually captured and thrown from one place to another, managing to escape and survive only through guile. After a couple hundred pages, I was beginning to think the book would be nothing but disjointed tales of Horza’s escape from one band of crazies to the next. But then things settle down a bit, Horza resumes the mission he was given at the beginning of the book, and a more steady plot emerges. Of course, it’s still a rather small plot (Horza must retrieve a Culture Mind that has crash landed on his difficult-to-reach home planet), and again, what we’re left with is disjointed and episodic. Which is all well and good, but not very cohesive.

  We get our fair share of grim and gritty here, too, but unlike Leviathan Wakes, it doesn’t feel quite as all-encompassing or oppressive. While we are following Horza and his Idirian allies, it gradually becomes clear that the Culture will emerge victorious. For his part, Banks never paints this conflict in blacks-and-whites, allowing for more nuanced views of each side. The Culture is not Skynet, and the Idirians are not Klingons (though individual Idirians, especially towards the end, prove to be quite capable of wreaking havoc). While the episodic nature of the story ultimately harms it, each episode is imaginative and features some rather fantastic scene-setting, from the thousand-mile-long ships of Vavatch Orbital to treacherous Temples of Light. There’s plenty of action, raids, heists, even a rather strange high-stakes card game. Some of these vignettes, like the weird cannibalistic cult that Horza runs across, are perhaps not as successful and only really serve as filler. Ultimately, what we end up with is a bit too sloppy for my liking, but this is interesting and at least somewhat ambitious stuff, even if it leaves something to be desired. I am certainly curious to further explore Banks’ Culture books, even if this one was not really pushing my buttons (and my understanding is that the next two books in the series, Player of Games and Use of Weapons, have more cohesive stories, which will help!)

So there you have it. Up next on the SF review front will be one of the Best Hugo nominees, though I’m not sure which I’ll finish first (probably Neptune’s Brood). I’ve also read some non-SF stuff that I should probably go over as well, but I may save that for later.

The Hugo Award nominations were announced last week, and as you might imagine, there’s been a lot of blathering about it on the internets. There always is, but this year is especially heated due to some controversial happenings. I covered some of this in last week’s initial thoughts, and while I don’t want to dwell on the negative, there have been plenty of discussion this week that’s probably worth checking out (after which, I plan to move on to the meat of actually reading and writing about the nominees).

In short, there are three major issues that folks are incensed about. One is that, due to a quirk in the nominations rules, the entire While of Time series of books has been nominated as a whole (that’s an 11,000+ page, 4+ million word series). Two is that Larry Correia explicitly sought nominations for himself and some others, with the express notion of making a political point. To my mind, these first boil down to the same problem: The Hugos are a populist award, and thus vulnerable to voting blocs. Both The Wheel of Time and Larry Correia are very popular, and both were the subject of an explicit push for nominations. Many are skeptical of the quality of these popular works, and thus upset that they ended up on the final ballot. For his part, Correia seems to have engaged in this for the express purpose of pissing people off, which is obviously against the spirit of the thing. That being said, the issue here is largely a matter of semantics. There’s no evidence of fraud or stuffed ballots or anything like that, just populism, and Correia’s posts on the subject mirror a lot of other folks who want to see their favorite things nominated. To my mind, these first two issues are not new at all. Indeed, you could very well argue that the inclusion of Charlie Stross and Mira Grant on the Best Novel shortlist are also populist choices that are more reflective of fandom’s love of the authors than the works themselves. Last year’s winner was John Scalzi’s Redshirts, and many complained that it won more because Scalzi is a popular guy with a high traffic blog than because that was truly the best work of science fiction last year. And so it goes.

If that was all that happened this year, there’d be lots of grumbling and shouting at the sky, but that’s always the case (and it probably also applies to other awards too – just look at all the griping the Oscars get every year). But there is a third issue that seems to be severely mucking up the works, and that is the nomination of Vox Day in the Best Novelette category. Once his name shows up, cries of racism/sexism/homophobia become rampant, and to a fair extent, warranted. There will be more detail below, but for now, I’ll just say that he seems like an ass and I think it’s valid for people to not want to have anything to do with the guy. Personally, I’ll be reading his story and judging it accordingly, but I get that some won’t be able to separate the story from the man.

With that scene set, let’s see what some other folks are talking about:

• On Merit, Awards, and What We Read – Joe Sherry uses the Vox Day issue to struggle with the question of separating the art from the artist:
  

  …I want to extend this a little bit beyond Vox Day and into a more general thought. Also, I believe where a line is drawn will depend both on the reader as well as on who the writer is and how the two intersect. How much does who the artist is matter in our enjoyment or appreciation of the art? How much should it matter? Does time and distance matter?

  Can we watch a Woody Allen movie knowing the credible accusations of molestation against him? Do we view Annie Hall or Manhattan differently, or do they remain major works of art? Does it change how view his new work? Is Ender’s Game a lesser work because Orson Scott Card is openly homophobic? Rachel Acks can no longer read Card’s work, despite having admired it deeply before she learned of his homophobia. Does reading a particular work suggest support for the personal views of the artist even if those views are not evident in the work itself? Does it matter if the artist is still living?

  He doesn’t have an answer, and neither do I. There are lots of other examples. Fugitive child rapist Roman Polanski is someone I have trouble with, though oddly, not as much with films made before the rape (or films I watched before I knew the details, which I believe are the same). When The Ghost Writer came out, I couldn’t really get past it. Maybe that’s because that movie isn’t as good, or maybe I can no longer separate the art from the artist in that case. On the other hand, noted racist H.P. Lovecraft isn’t as difficult to deal with, perhaps because he is not alive. There’s historical and technical value in watching The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, but those have troubling content, rather than just troubling artists (who are also no longer with us). Ultimately, I tend to come down on a hard-line free speech position. No one is calling for governmental censorship of Vox Day, but self-censorship can be problematic in itself. A while ago, Salmon Rushdie was commenting on anti-Muslim videos, and said this:

  “Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them,” he told me. “They go underground. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”

  Again, no one is banning Vox Day’s story and a commitment to free speech is not the same thing as nominating something for an award, but I also have a hard time condemning something I haven’t read. If I refuse to read Vox Day’s words, that doesn’t make them disappear or any less dangerous. Some have said that reading his work implicates you in his hate, which I would argue strongly against. Especially if the work in question is not about hate or any of the horrible things that get tossed around when Vox’s name is brought up (and apparently the story is rather tame in that respect, though I have not read it yet and cannot say for sure.) To me, words can be harmful, but banning them or forbidding yourself to read them isn’t going to solve anything either.

• An explanation about the Hugo awards controversy – Larry Correia has responded to the whole kerfluffle on his blog. At some points, he sounds reasonable, at others, it sounds like he’s just engaging in shennanigans to piss people off then trying to play a victim card (though, in fairness, many of the things said about him seem to be false). He also seems to think that he is the one who got these people nominated, and yes, I’m sure he had something to do with it, but I’ll be very curious to see the actual stats when they’re released later in the year. At the very least, one should acknowledge that Correia himself didn’t do this, but rather, a small, dedicated portion of his fans (more on this in a bit). I would be really curious if those fans simply voted as a bloc, blindly nominating the things Correia suggested. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is not the case. Shockingly enough, the people who voted on the Hugos are human beings and not automatons. And yet, the grand majority of the discussion around Correia’s suggestions, on both sides, seems to assume that everyone who voted for these stories did so blindly and without question. It’s not like Brad Torgersen or Dan Wells haven’t been nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards before, even without Correia’s help.
• Well, the Hugos… are not – Ian Sales has a predictably terse response, though the real gold in this post comes from the comments, in which JaneG very courteously explains her perspective on why she nominated many of the works that Correia suggested (among other works not on Correia’s suggested ballot). As mentioned above, it’s good to put an actual human face on some of these voters, even if this is only anecdotal. Still, she certainly knows her stuff, and while this is only one person (and I guess not a confirmed voter either), I suspect it is more representative than most are claiming.
• On Writing the Good Fight: Hugo Roundup – Kameron Hurley (one of the best Fan Writer nominees) tackles the populism aspect of the award, predicting that Best Novel will be crushed by the Wheel of Time fans (I am more sanguine, as the ballots apparently use an instant runoff process, where the winner has to have a good distribution of votes. This may help control the voting blocs). She also touches on politics and the other issues of this year.
• Hugo Did What? – Population: One sheds some light on just how many votes it takes to get nominated. It turns out that Correia’s bloc probably wasn’t that large, but that it didn’t need to be either:
  

  This year, there were 1,595 nominations for Best Novel. Last year, there were 1,113 nominations. That’s 43% more nominations. This year, there were 728 nominations for Best Novelette. Last year, there were 616 nominations. 18% more nominations.

  … It took 38 nominations to get on the Best Novelette ballot last year. Apply the 18% adjustment: it probably took between 44 and 45 nominations to get on the Best Novelette ballot this year. That’s not block voting, that’s a mild wave in a fairly shallow wave pool.

  It turns out that the number was more like 69, but that’s still not that many votes. Steve Davidson notes something similar in Amazing Stories.

• No, The Hugo Nominations Were Not Rigged – John Scalzi has taken a very pragmatic approach to the whole situation, and one that more or less mirrors my own. He has also written about how he reads nominated works (with special focus on how he plans to tackle the Wheel of Time) and graciously linked to people who think he’s crazy for wanting to read the works and vote on them.
• Fear and loathing at the Awards Table 3 – Brad R. Torgersen is one of the folks who appeared on Correia’s shortlist and presumably benefited (though again, it’s not like Torgersen wasn’t getting himself Hugo and Nebula nods before this year).
  

  You can’t have a healthy fandom unless you run a big tent. And by big tent, I mean a fandom that doesn’t impose litmus tests. Fandom (that very-small piece of the consumer pie that keeps Worldcon alive) represents an increasingly monocultural segment of the overall fan market. The so-called TruFans work to marginalize and exclude the NeoFans. “Show us your cred!” the guards cry at the entry points to the science fiction “ghetto” that fandom jealously occupies — though Larry Niven once famously argued it’s not a ghetto, it’s actually a country club. Those with insufficient or bad cred (“You only like movies and games!” or “Your politics make you stinky!” or “Your favorite author is too commercial!”) are discouraged in both obvious and subtle ways. Go back to what Brandon Sanderson said: if you invite people in, it’s rather strange of you to then try to kick them back out simply because they’re not matching your taste and preferences 1-for-1. So while I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion of, “Well we liked science fiction before science fiction was popular,” I also think this is the slogan of a dying culture. And that makes me sad. Because as someone who came of age reading Larry Niven’s wonderful anecdotes about Worldcon, the picture he painted was not that of a dying culture. Worldcon fandom can’t be healthy if it imposes hard filters and actively shews away “interlopers” who haven’t been properly anointed or baptized into the field, per traditions of old.

  A very fair perspective (and lots more in the post), though I think Vox Day does sorta strain that big tent a bit.

• 2014 Hugo Nominations – the reactions – Well, if my posts don’t have enough to chew on, head over here and gander at this near comprehensive list of reactions.

So that’s all for now. I don’t expect to tee up on the controversy much more, but I guess you never know. Next up, I’m going to catch up on some non-Hugo reviews, after which point I should have finished my first Hugo works. Stay tuned.

I started this year with a goal of reading the fiction nominees for the Hugo Awards and casting an official vote. The nominees were just announced yesterday, so it’s game on for the Kaedrin Hugo run. Today, we’ll give some initial thoughts on the Best Novel slate, as well as some general thoughts on the rest of the nominations. Let’s get to it:

Best Novel (1595 nominating ballots)

• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – No surprise here, and I gather that this is the favorite to win the award as well. I’ve already written a review of this one, but I’ll say that this seems like an eminently worthy nomination and I could certainly see myself voting for this if none of the other nominees grab me.
• Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross – A frequent nominee, Stross has yet to actually win the Best Novel award (though he has taken home a couple Novella awards). My experience with Stross is limited, and I genuinely disliked Accelerando (I did not finish, but that says something in itself, since I can count the number of books I’ve not finished on one hand), but I do enjoy his blog from time to time, and a lot of his books do sound interesting. This one is apparently a “follow up” (but not a sequel) to 2008’s Saturn’s Children. It is positioned as a standalone novel though, so I’ll only be reading this one. Of the nominees I haven’t read, this one seems the most up my alley.
• Parasite by Mira Grant – Another frequent nominee, Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) made waves with her trilogy of Zombie novels. I’m not a big fan of zombies, so I did not read those. This book looks to be the start of another series and has a premise that I find interesting. Assuming this book is self-contained enough to stand on its own, I could certainly see myself enjoying this.
• Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia – This appears to be a controversial nomination, as Correia has made a hobby of whining about liberals, political correctness and, in particular, the frequent nominations (and wins) of John Scalzi (who won for last year’s Redshirts). There is a lot of speculation that this is a protest nomination that happened more for political reasons than for the quality of Correia’s work. Not having read anything by Correia, I cannot say, but I’m not immediately endeared to him because of his antics. I’m also a little annoyed that this is the third book in a series. I’ll have to look into this further, but I’m guessing I need to read all three books (and they’re all of moderate length).
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson – Holy hell, I thought this was a joke. Not having read the books, I can’t speak to their quality, but the fact that a 14 book, 11,000+ page, 4.4+ million word work has been nominated makes this a pretty impractical nominee. It hinges on a relatively obscure rule that says if no individual work in a series is nominated, the entire series can be nominated once it concludes. When this possibility was raised earlier this year, I thought it was pretty funny, but now that the work has made it to the final ballot, I’m a little unsure of what to do here. 11,000 pages is around how much I read in a year, and I don’t have that long (not to mention all the other stuff I want to read). If I want to be honest in this process, I’ll need to read at least some of this… and if I really enjoy it, that will be a problem, because voting for something that I haven’t finished seems rather dishonest. If I hate it, I can at least say I made the effort and read at least a couple entries in the series, but even that rubs me the wrong way. I guess we’ll see how this goes.

Other assorted thoughts:

• The series thing bugs me. It’s always been a tricky proposition, because even if they had only nominated the final Wheel of Time book, wouldn’t I have to read all the others to truly understand what’s going on? This has always been something of a turnoff to me when I looked at the shortlists of previous years. Heck, the Correia nomination might force me to read two additional books, and if I don’t like the concept of “Grimnoir” (which I don’t find particularly inspiring by itself), that’s going to be a slog. Last year, Mira Grant’s zombie series had the same issue. The year before, the latest in the Song of Ice and Fire series book was nominated (which would also mean thousands of pages of catchup, etc…). Bujold’s Vorkosigan series at least consists of somewhat standalone novels, though I’m guessing that fans who’ve read the whole series are getting the most out of the recent books. And so on. I don’t know what the real solution is here, except, I guess, to quit my job and start reading full time or something.
• The politics thing also bugs me. There are two works that seem to be on the ballot solely to jab a finger at a certain liberal element of fandom, which strikes me as rather boorish. I’m really not down with the whole politicization of everything that seems to be happening in our culture these days, and that goes for everyone, not just these two writers (I expect a lot of people will try to make something big out of these nominations, which will of course only feed the fire and cause more annoyance and frustration than is needed. I’m already seeing people claim that this year’s awards are tainted by these two nominations, which I find a bit ridiculous, and it’s exactly the sort of attitude that gets these protest nominees on the short list in the first place. We need a way out of this negative feedback loop that politics has put us in…) That being said, I will take these works on their face and judge them as I would anything else. I could see myself enjoying Correia’s books, and I know nothing of Vox Day, except that he appears to be an ass (he’s nominated for a Novelette). So it looks like I’m taking the Scalzi approach to this.
• Speaking of Scalzi, no Scalzi on the ballot. I was a little surprised by this, but my guess is that while he is a popular guy and has garnered all sorts of noms over the past decade or so (including almost all of his novels, and several shorter works), no one saw The Human Division as a cohesive novel (it being a series of loosely connected Novellas and Short Stories), and that because there are 13 different eligible stories, any sort of votes for Scalzi got spread out amongst the eligible stories (i.e. there was no clear favorite).
• There are some categories I won’t be voting in at all. I’ll leave the more specific complaints about the structure of categories for a separate post, but I can’t see myself voting for the Best Editor awards (Seriously? How I am I supposed to know how good they are as an editor, I’m only seeing the finished work…). And the notion of “Zines” is…. I don’t know, it’s 2014, they seem quaint and not very relevant (though it looks like some are at least online). I’m not sure what to make of the Artist awards
• Best Fan Writer looks to be an interesting category, as all the nominees are online (apparently, this was not so in the past) and some are writers I already read. They also represent a “terrifying flood of girl cooties” (to borrow a phrase from Cheryl Morgan from last year).
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form is an interesting list, but the best SF film from last year is missing (that would be Upstream Color). This is one of the few things I would have nominated for, since I’m pretty up to speed with SF and Fantasy movies, so I regret not submitting the nomination (I’d guess my vote wouldn’t be a deciding one, but still, it’s the principle of the thing).
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form is a consistently weird category in which fully half the nominees are from a single show (Doctor Who)… This is not a new thing (and usually the proportions are even worse), but in this case, I’m hit with the same series problem from above. I’ve been slowly wading my way through the early seasons of the recent run (i.e. starting with the Christopher Eccleston Doctor), so do I need to watch more before I watch these three? They seem to be particularly focused on continuity, so I’m not sure what to make of that. Otherwise, I’ve already seen Game of Thrones and really want to get onboard with Orphan Black, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what’s going on there…

So it begins. I’m in the process of finishing off two books right now (should be done within a day or two), then I start in on the Hugo reading. I’m sure many posts will follow.

I’ve fallen a bit behind in reviewing recent SF reading, though a few individual reviews have made their way to the site recently. So before I start my 2013 movie recap (a month late, I know), I figured I’d catch up:

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – This book follows a teenager named Wade, though everyone knows him as Parzival, a low level warrior in OASIS. OASIS is kinda like Snow Crash‘s Metaverse mixed with World of Warcraft. The real world is dystopic and lame, so everyone increasingly escapes into the OASIS. Just about everything is in the OASIS at this point: school, jobs, just about every piece of culture ever created. Its part game, part alternate reality. When the creator of OASIS, James Halliday, dies, he leaves behind a contest to determine the heir to his fortune and ownership of OASIS (think Publius Enigma, except that this actually works). To win this contest, Wade/Parzival will have to find a series of Easter Eggs (hidden messages in video games) and complete a series of challenges, all of which will require an intimate knowledge of Halliday’s passions – 80s culture and old school video games. I don’t normally like dystopias, but this was recommended to me and it turns out that the real focus here is on Wade/Parzival. It’s a coming of age tale, of sorts. When we meet him, he’s a poor, out-of-shape, loser, though his reputation online is slightly higher. As the story progresses, we see him make friends, gain confidence, take hold of his real life (even outside the OASIS) and battle a corporation intent on winning the prize for themselves. It’s written in first person, and so it’s easy to become wrapped up in the story. As a child of the 80s, the referential nature of the story (constant references to 80s television, movies, music, and video games) hit me right in the sweet spot, though I have to wonder how transferable all of this would be to someone outside of that age group. It certainly doesn’t bode well for long-term relevance, but it’s a fun enough story (and Cline is always careful to explain the reference) that I’m sure it’ll hang around for a while.
• Warhorse by Timothy Zahn – I always find myself coming back to Zahn whenever I want to read something fun, and Warhorse did the trick. It’s not Zahn’s best, but it’s a well crafted story. A future human society is expanding into interstellar space, and they’ve run across the Tamplissta, a race of humanoid pacifists with a big environmentalist streak. Their technology isn’t anywhere near the human level, except in one key area: space horses. They are huge space-dwelling creatures who eat asteroids and can teleport across interstellar distances. The Tampies and humans are wary of each other, and space horses don’t seem to interact well with humans (they do, however, respond to the Tampies soft, eco-friendly touch). As tensions mount between Tampies and humans, a mixed-crew exploration ship is launched to prove that the two races can cooperate. Hijinks ensue. There’s plenty of interesting ideas that help drive the story along, and the Tampies are an interesting species, depending on how you interpret their presence (are they a comment on real world environmentalists?). The characters are pretty straightforward (if you’ve read Zahn before, you know what you’re in for) and so is the prose. Still, it’s a decent novel and Zahn continues to be a workhorse in my SF reading.
• Night Film by Marisha Pessl – Investigative journalist Scott McGrath has fallen on hard times ever since he accused acclaimed and reclusive filmmaker Stanislas Cordova (think Kubrick, but with a lot more secrecy and evil) of heinous crimes on television. Years later, when Cordova’s daughter Ashley turns up dead in mysterious circumstances, McGrath picks up the trail again. With the help of a few oddball assistants, he sets about unraveling the mystery of Ashley and her father. This is a book that takes its time getting to the meat of the story, but once it gets there, it gets really good. It’s never really boring or anything, and it doesn’t succumb to indulgent style exercises or anything pretentious like that, it just takes its time letting the story unfurl. I don’t know that it quite needed to be this long, but it works nonetheless, and I really enjoyed it.
• Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above by Ian Sales – The third in Sales’ Apollo Quartet, where each story is some sort of alternate history stemming from the Apollo-era space race. The first two have brilliant premises (though the second’s premise is only revealed at the end), while this one is a little more tame. It does shed light on an unheralded episode in actual space program history. The Mercury 13 were 13 American women who went through a lot of the same training and physiological tests as NASA astronauts that would eventually man the Mercury program. Sales’ novella postulates that the Korean war was still raging, so NASA couldn’t pull the best and brightest from the Air Force. Instead, they relied on the Mercury 13, who are also moving on to the Apollo program. It’s an interesting work, and Sales’ prose continues to shine, but I was expecting a little more in the way of ideas (like the first two Apollo Quartet novellas). Regardless, I am greatly looking forward to the fourth and final novella, due sometime this year.
• Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold – This is the second book in Bujold’s Chalion series of fantasy novels, and it takes an interesting approach. It follows a minor character from the first book, and gives her the Hero’s Journey (Heroine’s Journey?) treatment. It’s kinda like a coming-of-age tale too, though it’s unlike most others of that type in that the protagonist here is Ista, a middle-aged retired queen who suffered under a maddening curse for most of her life. In the first book of the series, the curse is broken and Ista (well, the whole royal family) is freed. She’s still royalty, though, and no one wants to let her go out into the world a live the life she’s always wanted to find. The first book had a large scope and ranged across the whole kingdom. This book is a bit tighter, and more focused on Ista. Along the way, there are kidnappings, sorcery, invasions, and sieges, but it’s all pretty well contained, and it works remarkably well. This is a rather exposition heavy novel, but Bujold excels at these sorts of things, and it never drags or feels boring, even if some mysteries seem more obvious to the reader than to the characters in the story (but then, we know more than them, eh?) The other unusual thing about this book (and the series so far) is how much of it is focused around religion. Not any sort of religion that we’re familiar with, and it seems that in Chalion, these gods are real. I’m particularly interested in how well balanced the magic in these Chalion books is, as I find that magic can often be a crutch for a writer. Not so here, though this book has much more magic than the first book. As usual, Bujold excels at creating characters and feinting relationships, etc… I’m actually pretty excited to check out the last book in the series at this point. Unfortunately, that means I’m quickly running out of Bujold books, so I may need to start rereading some Vorkosigan novels…

So there you have it, a pretty good run. Stay tuned next week for the Kaedrin Movie Award nominations!

SF Signal posted these questions yesterday, and I’m amazingly on the ball here, giving my answers just one day later. Go me.

The last sf/f/h book I read and liked was:

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. I don’t read a lot of Fantasy, but since I’ve already exhausted all of Bujold’s SF, I figured I’d try out some of her Fantasy books rather than suffer through withdrawal pains. It turns out that these Chalion books are really good, too. This is the second in the series, but it’s only loosely connected to the first, and the main character here was a bit player in the first book (but she’s an excellent protagonist). It’s an interesting book, because it’s mostly talking and religion, with light action interspersed throughout. Anywho, I really loved it, and will probably be reading the third book in the near future…

The last sf/f/h book I read and wasn’t crazy about was:

The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey. A book about a sentient spaceship that wasn’t all that bad, but which never really connected with me. Something about the episodic nature of the plot bothered me as well.

The sf/f/h book I am reading now is:

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu. I only just started this one this morning, one of a few 2013 books I planned on reading in support of my Hugo run this year… So far, so good!

The sf/f/h book(s) I most want to read next is/are:

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I’ve put off reading Banks’ Culture series long enough, I think.

An underrated sf/f/h book is:

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I have no real sense of what is underrated or overrated out there, but this is a book that seems to consistently be left out of “best of” lists and such (for example: the NPR list)

An overrated sf/f/h book is:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a fine book, to be sure, and I get why everyone loves it, but I never really got into it.

The last sf/f/h book that was recommended to me was:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I’m usually turned off by dystopian futures, but a friend recommended this and yes, she was right. It’s a fun book.

A sf/f/h book I recommended to someone else was:

Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy came up in a discussion about the new movies (incidentally, wouldn’t it be awesome if they made movies out of Zahn’s books? Alas, I think the most we could expect would be a Thrawn cameo or somesuch.)

A sf/f/h book I have re-read is:

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I’ve probably only reread about 4 or 5 books in my life, but I’ve read Cryptonomicon three times, which is impressive since it’s a 900 page face melter. Or something.

A sf/f/h book I want to re-read is:

Almost anything by Lois McMaster Bujold (I’m curious to reread the beginning of the Vorkosigan series again) and Neal Stephenson (in particular, I’d like to dip into The Baroque Cycle again, though that’s obviously a daunting task considering the 2700 page length!)