Shot in the Dark

Science Friction

I’ve been a voracious reader all my life.  My brother can sit at the breakfast table to eat a whole bowl of cereal without reading a single word on the cereal box.  I have no idea how he does it.

I never cared about the authors.  I lived for the stories.  The Archmage Ged, Kip Russell, Archie Goodwin, and Miss Marple were more real to me than Ursula LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, Rex Stout or Agatha Christie.  I relied on national book awards to steer me toward the best stories: the Hugo, the Nebula. 

So when the latest Hugo Awards controversy erupted, I felt left out.  I don’t know who any of these people are, or what their race or gender or politics might be.  And I really don’t care.  Can they write good stories?  Sadly, the answer appears to be No.  If they could, they wouldn’t need affirmative action awards to make themselves feel better. 

Joe Doakes

I’m not a huge SciFi fan – but Joe’s premise confirms Dennis Prager’s dictum: the left destroys everything it touches.

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Mitch Berg

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18 responses to “Science Friction”

  1. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Bruney is Esquire’s editor for culture & politics, so, naturally, she is a WOC. Because Esquire has explicitly racist hiring practices.
    Bruney knows nothing about literature, or history, or she wouldn’t have written rhis bizarre sentence:
    “History, like reality, can be tough to analyze subjectively.”
    History and reality can only be analyxed subjectively. “Analyzing” is an action verb. When history or reality is analyzed, they are literally the subject, because they are subjected to analysis.
    It isn’t that the Left destroys everthing it touches, it is that the cultural elites corrupt the things that they touch. The do this by turning them from their true purpose (in this case, entertainment) into something else, a tool to impose their’ vision on non-elites who they do not understand and do not much like.

  2. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    My SF cred goes way back. I used to hang around Uncle Hugos, not only before they moved to their Lake Street location across from the old Sears building (previously they were next to the Electric Fetus head shop on 4th), but before they opened that location, when they were at the corner of 4th & Franklin.
    I think SF is a lost cause. The audience of American boys in their early teens simply is not there any longer. The pulps that nursed careers are gone. Short form SF is mostly written by women, academics, and women academics, and mostly read by the same. The last realy good long form stuff I discovered was written back in the late 80s or 90s (Vernor Vinge, Connie Willis, Neil Stephenson). Stephenson’s _Snow Crash_ and _Diamond Age_ are classics. On a whim I picked up his more recent _Seveneves_ (2015). It was unreadable. A bizarre, unexplained catastrophe that leads people to react in ways that real human beings do not react. I didn’t get further than a hundred pages.

  3. shakingmyhead Avatar
    shakingmyhead

    MP – I’d agree that Seveneyes was tough to get through in places. But, there are some great authors out there now as well – Larry Corriea with Monster Hunters Inc, John Ringo has a couple great series, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid. Oh, Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen.

    I also started going back and reading the “classics”. Stuff I was reading or should have read when I was a teen. Jerry Pournell/Larry Niven was an amazing writing team. Shockingly, they are a whole lot less concerned about making sure everyone is somehow maginalized. They want to tell a unique story that keeps the reader engaged. Strange concept.

  4. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    What I found unbelievable about _Seveneves_ was Stephenson’s belief that, when faced with extinction withn a generation (except for a lucky few), the rest of humanity would selflessly sacrifice to enable those few to survive. That is not how humanity operates. The earlier Stephenson novels I refered to put human character first. In _Seveneves_ Stephenson put his vision of a technolgical future first.
    But apparently I am alone. _Seveneves_ has had praise heaped upon it & the movie rights have been sold.
    I adored Heinlein when I was a teen. I find him unreadable now, mostly because he divides humanity into good, deserving people and useless moochers. His heroes never have a fatal flaw. Jack Vance’s novels hold up better.

  5. Pig Bodine Avatar
    Pig Bodine

    The Sad Puppies Campaigns (or Sad Puppies Think of the Children Campaign) and subsequent “No Award” votes illustrated the success of the left at capturing the genre to further their Cultural Imperialist™ goals. Now if you want to participate (be published) in the mainstream of the genre you must follow diverse, “woke” guidelines or be LGBT/BIPOC.

  6. golfdoc50 Avatar
    golfdoc50

    This “controversy “underscores my belief that awards in the arts are inherently corrupt and subject to political motives far removed from judging artistic merit. The Oscars is a leading example. I wish the best seller list could substitute but even that is subject to manipulation. Has anyone read Bernie Sanders’ book?. Didn’t think so.

  7. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    IMHO, SF reflects the era and the golden era was from the mid 50’s to the mid 60’s. Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and my personal favorite Walter M. Miller Jr.

    These were guys who served in WWII and witnessed the “golly gee optimism” of science future morph into the Holocaust and nuclear war.

    Vonnegut literally inserted his experience of the bombing of Dresden into his fiction and Walter M. Miller was moved by his participation of the bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino.

    Writers like Philip K Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin were too young to experience WWII directly and went off in another direction but they too wrote during that golden age.

    Gosh, does anyone remember when Playboy published SF, now I hear they don’t even publish nudes.

  8. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Heinlein is good, even great, genre fiction, but it is not good literature. The early Heinlein was contemporary with Raymond Chandler, and both wrote short form for the pulps. Yet Chandler is literature, and Heinlein is scifi.
    When you read Chandler, even today, you see characters you recognize, acting in ways you recognize, though the words they use has changed over eight decades.
    Ditto Jack Vance (though Vance was a bit too repetitive to really be literature).
    Heinlein essentially wrote about himself and the way that he viewed the world, and that view was an eccentric one, even eight decades ago.
    Here I am, trolling you Heinlein fans, and no takers yet.

  9. Loren Avatar
    Loren

    MP, Heinlein might not be LITERATURE, but boy, were those some great stories.

    Chris Kennedy, Craig Martelle, Michael Anderle, and Nathan Lowell are some authors who are currently putting out some great new stories. SF is not dead yet.

  10. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    MP,

    Chandler is prime rib, Heinlein is hamburger, both are delicious.

    Woke SF?

    Oh, that’s veggie burger.

  11. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    When buying electrical equipment, look for Underwriter’s Laboratory seal of approval.

    When buying a used car, look for good reviews by Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, Kelly Blue Book, or other rating service.

    When buying science fiction books, look for . . . well, not Hugo Award winners anymore, not since about 2010, maybe before. There have been good science fiction books written, but they didn’t win because the authors were not politically correct, not diverse enough. The winning books are the sort of boring message fiction which is the leading cause of puppy related sadness.

    Instead, look for Dragon Award winners. Those are books people actually read and enjoy.

  12. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Nobody’s mentioned Asimov in this thread? I cut my teeth on his books, especially because they were so available in the local library. They were older so usually on the shelves, and that was at an age where I averaged a book a day (yes, I was a nerd and basically allergic to the sun, but fascinated by science and technology, why do you ask?). Asimov, Heinlein, Zelazny, Niven, Pournelle (to a lesser degree, although much better combined with Niven), etc. LeGuin I utterly despise to this day. Never liked her style.

    The stuff that came later, like Haldeman’s obvious post-Vietnam ripoff off of Starship Troopers, I could like, but just didn’t excite me like the optimism of the Golden Age writers. They were sometimes good stories, but they lacked the spark of the earlier writers. It was at this point (mid 90s) that I realized Hugo awards meant that those were books to avoid as I probably wouldn’t like them, and my SciFi consumption tapered off.

    And the stuff after that? I don’t read it. There may be good SciFi out there now, but the pre-woke (wokening?) stuff drove me to other genres long ago before the present cesspool that are SciFi awards. These days I laugh at what is considered “quality SciFi” by the critics. Give me Patrick O’Brien or a good history any day over modern SF.

  13. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    Stephenson is kind of hit and miss, and given the length of his books that can discourage you from diving in. I loved Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and the collaborative Mongoliad project, but the Baroque Cycle books just bogged me down too much. REAMDE, however, was fabulous – great story, and tautly told (for Stephenson). He brought the main characters for that back in the book Fall: Dodge in Hell; it was ok, but the scope is way too vast and, like MP, I find some of his reasoning of human behavior quite unlikely.

    A current writer I like is John Scalzi, especially his Old Man’s War series and it’s spinoffs, which are very Heinleinesque. He’s “progressive” in his blog and politics, but is funny and quite the story-teller in his books. I like the old masters mentioned earlier from A – Asimov, to Z- Zelazny. Aside from Scalzi now, there isn’t anyone I’d buy because of the current review and award environment, and even Stephenson I’m going to do a little digging before automatically grabbing the latest.

  14. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    I thought the Old Man’s War books were Heinlein parodies, sort of Hainlein taken further than Heinlein would go.

  15. Chaosfish Avatar
    Chaosfish

    Small Anecdote v.v. Scalzi , approximately 5 years ago he got up on his woke soapbox and said if there were people reading his work who didn’t agree with his woke position of the moment , they should just stop reading him. I emailed him stating that I was doing just that and got a snide ” don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out” response. I gifted my hardback copies of his stuff to a more woke friend and never looked back

  16. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    Re: Scalzi – sounds about right. I know I stopped following his blog sometime after “The Human Division” (Book 5 in the Old Man’s War series). I thought Human Division was very good, and the plucky, resourceful and smart-assed Lt. Harry Wilson character a very Heinlein-type portrayal, perhaps a more callow Lazarus Long.

    As for OMW, I saw it more of a homage than a parody, but maybe that’s just me.

  17. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    What I found unbelievable about _Seveneves_ was Stephenson’s belief that, when faced with extinction withn a generation (except for a lucky few), the rest of humanity would selflessly sacrifice to enable those few to survive. That is not how humanity operates.,/i>

    That’s how elitists think collectivism operates. It is exactly diametrically opposed to the basic innate “wiring” in every living creature: Self preservation/survival.

    Did Stephenson’s mind become contaminated with leftism?

  18. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    sonuva…

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