Saturday, January 27, 2024

My crank list of which novels should have won the Hugos


Why do the Hugos matter?  No one really knows.  Literary awards are usually judged by a group of experienced critics, academics, and/or writers who put some work into reading widely and trying to evaluate literary quality.  The Hugos are chosen by notably provincial SF fans who are typically from the US and who paid $50 for the privilege of voting.  Yet the Hugos are still referred to as science fiction's highest award and recommended to people as if they represent books that people may want to read.

My concern with the Hugos is as a list of recommendations for readers.  Every now and then someone decides that it would be interesting to read the major books in SF and they naturally think that maybe they should start with the Hugo list and read one from each year.  They shouldn't.  

I'm going to go through the list of Hugo novel winners and pick out which novel should have won in each year.  What makes me a good critic, or at least a better than the combined opinion of Hugo voters?  Not much, but frankly it does not take much.  I've read somewhat widely in SF and fantasy and I'm at least aware of what literary fiction is in a way that Hugo voters do not seem to be (I will get to the much discussed case of Gravity's Rainbow around 1973.)  There are going to be holes in my recommendations because I am still from the US and have not yet gotten around to reading Italo Calvino or the Strugatsky brothers.  For the purpose of this initial list I'm not even going to look at the winners of SF's juried awards and crib off of them: I may do that at some later time.

Since the Hugos are supposed to be about popularity, I'm going to consider popularity to at least some extent. As explained below, this is for the time being a list that only chooses winners for the 20th century.

Eligibility

I am going to consider which novel should have won, whether or not it was nominated for that year.  For the purpose of doing this, I had to figure out the Hugo award's eligibility rules.  To summarize:

* each Hugo award is for works first published in the year before that, sometimes for a longer period

* works published that are not in English are eligible in their first year of English translation

* serialized works can only win once, either for one element of the series or the whole series with its last installment

* one of the specific ways in which eligibility can be extended is that works are eligible up to their first year of US publication if they were first published outside the US. 

* there are rules that only science fiction cares about concerning the differences in length between novels, novellas, and novelettes that I may or may not follow.

 Lastly, there is one mind-boggling element listed in the Hugo award rules: the Hugo awards are apparently not for SF after all.  A breezy subheader called "Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?" says that works of fantasy or horror are also eligible.  I had originally looked at the list of Hugo winners and decided that they must have changed the rules to make fantasy eligible in 2000 (there are very few fantasy works nominated before this).  It seems clear to me, given that the change around 2000 was so notable, that the Hugos are awards for a marketing category -- in other words, the books placed in the science fiction section of a US bookstore that are now a mixture of SF and fantasy with fantasy predominating.  As such I'm going to choose which works should have won the Hugos as if fantasy was always eligible: horror gets a different couple of shelves in the bookstore so I will leave that out.

The 1950s 

Amusingly the Hugos started in the 1950s and therefore left out SF's "Golden Age" (1938-1946) entirely.  Don't worry, you are not really missing much.

1953: The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester , eligibility 1952-1953
my pick: same
 
After all I've written about the Hugos, they arguably got it right for the first ever one.  The Demolished Man is probably better than Bester's other major work and since it concerns a mentally ill oligarch who has to be taken down it is still relevant.  People will have heard of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a lot more but it is not actually a better work. 

1955: They'd Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley, eligibility 1954-1955
my pick: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

The whole trilogy was first published 1954-1955.  Not many people may have heard of this obscure work, but it's better than whatever the Hugo process picked out.

1956: Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein, eligibility 1954-1956 but I will only consider 1956
my pick: Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
 
Alternatively, The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis was published 1956 so I could have chosen the entire Narnia series but the work above is for adults and is better.

1958: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber, eligibility 1957-1958
my pick: The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance

I've read The Big Time and it is an absolutely horrible work that should be forgotten.  That is not to say that Fritz Leiber is a bad writer: he is going to be long remembered for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories but not for this.  The Hugos don't seem to have picked much Vance even when he wrote SF, inexplicably.
 
1959: A Case of Conscience, James Blish, eligibility 1958
 my pick: The Zimiamvian trilogy, E.R. Eddison

People may start complaining that my list is too fantasy dominated but what can I do -- The Mezentian Gate published in 1958 is the last element of the Zimiamvian trilogy, which is far better than anything Blish ever wrote.  That includes A Case of Conscience, which is incidentally one of the most morally and ethically objectionable genocide justifying books that SF has ever produced which is saying a lot.
 
This was the first Hugo with runner-up nominations.
 ,
1960: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein , eligibility 1959
my pick: Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake or The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

Neither of these are fantasy works: Titus Alone has an actual surveillance drone in it and if Arthur C. Clarke invented satellites then Peake probably invented drones.  But of course the Gormenghast series, which Titus Alone is the last of, is better as writing than anything that Heinlein ever wrote.  The Sirens of Titan was nominated for a Hugo this year and I should acknowledge that this time they at least nominated something that plausibly should have won.

Hugo score for the 1950s: 1 out of 6

The 1960s 

The 1960s were the time of religious and ecological SF in the US, and were also when 3 of the best SF writers produced many of their major works -- Philip K. Dick. Ursula K. LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem.  Going by the Hugo criterion of first publication in English, Lem's works do not show up in the 1960s although they should: I will try to drop them into later decades.  This decade's works were dominated by SF instead of fantasy as with the 1950s, and involved the first actually difficult decisions that I encountered.   All Hugos for this decade had the previous year as their eligibility period.

1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. 
my pick: Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys 
 
Rogue Moon was one of the nominees: it's not a great book but it's better than the Hugo winner.  I also considered A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.
 
1962: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein 
my pick: same
 
This was amazingly popular and gives a feel for the religious SF of the time: I think that it's amusing that it's likely to be the only Heinlein that makes my list because in terms of general writing quality it is not very good.
 
1963: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick 
my pick: same
 
The Hugos are really going strong here: two in a row!
 
1964: Way Station, Clifford D. Simak
my pick: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 
 
Cat's Cradle was nominated, so the Hugos are still doing pretty well.
 
1965: The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber 
my pick: Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick  

I don't know why people kept voting in minor works by Leiber.  Martian Time-Slip is a foundational work about the abandonment of people who are disabled, depressed, or old.

1966: tie between This Immortal, Roger Zelazny and Dune, Frank Herbert
my pick: Dune, Frank Herbert
 
The Hugos came so close but had to make this a tie.  This Immortal by Roger Zelazny is fine: I've read almost everything Zelazny has written and it's not his best but it's OK.  Dune was both popular and influential as one of the first major SF works to actually consider that alternate societies and ecosystems to "generic US or medieval Europe" might exist.  If there was going to be a tie, it should have been with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD.

1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein 
my pick: the totally incongruous combination of Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, or The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
 
The 1966 publication year was an extremely difficult one to choose from.  The Hugos nominated Babel-17 by Samuel Delany which was certainly in the running, but Giles Goat-Boy was one of the first popular metafictional / postmodern novels.  The Master and Margarita is in no real sense "a novel of the sixties" and was written between 1928-1940, but this was the year of its first English publication so in it goes.

1968: Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
my pick: same
 
I might argue here but I wrote that I'd go along with the Hugos when they were close enough.
 
1969: Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner 
my pick: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch or A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Brunner wrote some good books but this one should not have won for this year.   The year also had Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD which also would have been better.

1970: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin 
my pick: same
 
The year had PKD's Ubik, which usually would have won but not against this competition.
 
Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10.  I'm guessing this will be the best decade ever for the award. 

The 1970s

The 1970s were the decade in which people questioned the whole direction of SF as a genre, mostly particularly with a push to integrate SF into literary fiction.  The experimentalist fiction of the New Wave was the closest thing SF has had to an avant-garde.  People also started to point out how homophobic classical SF was and push a more feminist SF (one classic marker being The Female Man, Joanna Russ, 1975).  In general, this was a direction not followed in later decades, with the movie Star Wars (1977) signaling a change in SF from written to visual media and a corresponding reversion back to a more pulp style.

1971: Ringworld, Larry Niven 
my pick: Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation 1970)

The conparison between these two is particularly harsh because they are both supposedly hard SF writers.  It's just that one is "hard" by convention (how does the Ringworld material stand up under stress? Should the writer handwave something no don't bother, um, it's very hard) and one is the best hard SF writer ever, who wrote a whole oeuvre about the limits of science and how science actually works.

1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer 
my pick: The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.

1973: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
my pick: The Iron Dream, Norman Spinrad 

Which should you choose, someone who you want to reward for work they did in the Golden Age, or someone who wrote a work that essentially destroys the Golden Age?  I'm not going to forget The Iron Dream and I can barely recall what differentiates The Gods Themselves from similar works.
 
1974: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke 
my pick: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
 
Before I get to Gravity's Rainbow,  I'll mention that two Stanislaw Lem books, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Invincible, were both first translated into English in 1973.  While Clarke was writing a classic Big Dumb Object book Lem was in print with SF's first use of nanomachines (in The Invincible).  Both Lem books were better than anything written within the genre that year.
 
But what about outside the genre?  There was a moment in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for a Nebula Award when it seemed like literary fiction and SF might be converging, in which SF would no longer be a ghettoized genre and be evaluated in literary terms.  That did not happen.  For a longer treatment of this theme, read Jonathan Lethem about it-- this is from a 1998 Village Voice article, but he's written the same in many other places.

In between Gravity's Rainbow and the end of the 20th century, each famous US literary author wrote approximately one SF novel.  In terms of technical writing skill, these were of course better than what SF writers could do: in terms of understanding SF ideas and the history of the genre, they were abysmal.  I'm going to ignore most of them.
 
1975: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin 
my pick: same
 
As an anarchist I'm supposed to especially like this anarchist novel: I do not -- it is one of the most deprived and disappointing anarchies envisioned.  But it's a good book.  Quite possibly this should have been the year for Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (first year of English translation) but I haven't read it.

1976: The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
 my pick: Dhalgren, Samuel Delany 

I really like The Forever War and I would like to just agree with this Hugo, but I can't.  Bonus pick: if you want something as end-of-the-Vietnam-War as The Forever War, but quite possibly a bit better, there is also The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson also published 1975.
 
1977: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm 
my pick: The Cornelius Quartet, Michael Moorcock 

I considered and rejected Ratner's Star by Dom DeLillo: the Cornelius quartet (the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, now generally bound into a single volume) are a pure distillation of what the English New Wave was.

1978: Gateway, Frederik Pohl
my pick: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick 
 
Gateway is a fairly good book, but A Scanner Darkly captured an era.

1979: Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre 
my pick: same
 
I thought of The Chain of Chance but this list is already overpopulated with time-shifted Lem books.  

1980: The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke
my pick: On Wings of Song, Thomas M. Disch
 
This was at least nominated for a Hugo.  Runner-up: Engine Summer by John Crowley.
 
 Hugo score for the 1970s: 2 out of 10. 
 

The 1980s 

The 1980s were a fragmented decade for SF -- they were certainly the decade of the emergence of cyberpunk, but the list of authors who have written cyberpunk that will last is a bit thin: it's William Gibson for a book that essentially created the subgenre for the public, and Bruce Sterling.   The end of the decade saw the first SF books by Iain M. Banks, part of what I consider to be a renaissance of politically left writing from UK authors.
 
1981: The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge 
my pick: Return From the Stara, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation) 

This should be the last time-shifted Lem book.

1982: Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh
my pick: Little, Big by John Crowley 

Little, Big was at least nominated for a Hugo.  In almost any other year, Lanark by Alasdair Gray would have been my pick.
 
1983: Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov
my pick: The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe (standing in some way for the entire Book of the New Sun)
 
The last Gene Wolfe book in the series was published in the next year, but this was the year in one of them was nominated for a Hugo so I will stick with this one.
 
1984: Startide Rising, David Brin 
my pick: the Dying Earth series, Jack Vance 

My pick would have been The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe but it is not really a standalone book and the third book in the series was nominated for a Hugo in the last year.  Therefore I chose Cugel's Saga, published 1983, as the end (in terms of novels) of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.

This year is as good as any to mark the start of a trend of popular fantasy series that are more of less open ended and that end when their writers can no longer write.  In particular, this year has the first Terry Pratchett Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, and the first Steven Brust Dragaeran book, Jherag.  I would expect these to win some kind of series award at some point, but not for any of the individual novels in the series.

1985: Neuromancer, William Gibson
my pick: same
 
1986: Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card 
my pick: Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling 

It's understandable that SF fans would like a book in which adults watch a child kick another child to death so that the child can be prepared to naturally accept genocide as a way to win, but Ender's Game is not actually a good book in any sense.  Schismatrix is better read as a later book, Schismatrix Plus which adds a number of short stories, but since this is a list of awards for novels I decided on the earlier version.

I would have liked to fit something by Brian Aldiss in here, such as Helliconia Winter standing for the whole Helliconia series or Hothouse in the previous year, but those are the tail end of the New Wave and this is the time of cyberpunk.

1987: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
my pick: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood 

Margaret Atwood notably does not consider her works to be SF, but in a category that spans SF and fantasy they should be in there somewhere.

1988: The Uplift War, David Brin
my pick: Consider Phlebas, Iain M.. Banks
 
The first of Iain Banks' Culture books.  Not his best, but better than anything else at the time.  This is usually classed as a space opera: I think it's better classified as a form of anarchist SF.

This year also has Soldiers of Paradise, the first book by Paul Park.  Some book by Paul Park should be on this list somewhere but popularity is part of even a fake Hugo list and I don't think that his books ever got the attention that they deserved.

1989: Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
my pick: Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling 
 
This was at least nominated for a Hugo.
 
1990: Hyperion, Dan Simmons 
my pick: The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
 
Probably Banks' second best book.
 
Hugo score for the 1980s: 1 out of 10.  

The 1990s

 The 1990s were a decade of decline for written SF.  A larger and larger number of novels were published: fewer and fewer had any particular kind of literary quality.  For some previous decades it was a challenge to pick the best work in a year: for this one it's a challenge to pick anything.

Lois McMaster Bujold is a perennial favorite for this decade of Hugos.  I've read and enjoyed all of her books: as with any everlasting series, they don't seem individually better than the others or rising to the quality of something I could recommend as a single work. 
 
1991: The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold 
my pick: Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
 
Probably Banks' best book and certainly should have won this year.
 
1992: Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
my pick: The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 
 
The definitive steampunk - as - cyberpunk book.  
 
1993:  Doomsday Book, Connie Willis, and A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
my pick: same
 
I am not enthused by either of these but I can't find anything better.  I might have chosen Red Mars but another book in its series won the Hugo next year.   I really should have chosen The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison but it wasn't published in the US until 2004 and for a US dominated award like the Hugos should probably win in a later year.

1994: Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
my pick: same
 
Red Mars was a better book, but I will defer to the Hugos since it's close enough.

1995: Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold 
my pick: A History Maker, Alasdair Gray
 
This one would have been Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin but it is classed as a collection of short stories.   There is a trend through the rest of this decade (and to some extent for the rest of SF's existence so far) of ignoring work from the UK because it is not as well known in the US or not even published in the US.
 
1996: The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson 
my pick: Fairyland, Paul McAuley 
 
1997: Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson 
my pick: Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling 

This was nominated for a Hugo and is one of Sterling's best books.
 
1998: Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
my pick: nothing
 
I looked diligently over the list of books published in 1997 and couldn't find anything that seemed worth putting on this list.  I guess I'll count this as agreement with the Hugos but really this could have been a year for no award.
 
1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis 
my pick: anything else
 
I will try not to write too much about the book that won, written as it was in a sentimental style that infiltrated the plot to the extent of characters saving a cat at the risk of destroying the historical timeline.  There are a good number of books better than this one published this year: they include A Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler, The Book of Knights, Yves Mayanrd, and A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin.  I will count this as disagreement with the Hugos since it should have preferably gone to any of those.

2000: A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
my pick: A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold 
 
It seems like a joke that I would choose a book by Bujold after disagreeing with the Hugos so many times about them before, but there is a particular reason why this one should win: there is a trend in popular fantasy / SF that begins around this time in mashing up genres or reworking famous characters, and this book is a successful SF version of a Regency romance.

Hugo score for the 1990s: 3 out of 10.  

The 2000s Through Now

I don't think that I can trust my own judgement to make a list of winners from this point forward.  I was discouraged by the state of SF in the late 1990s and stopped reading as much of it.  There were certainly authors that I continued to read, and I could assign a number of years to China Mieville or Adam Roberts.  But I really haven't read enough of the field to be as confident of who should have won in each year.  For instance, I still haven't read any N.K. Jemison.  Here is a list of works that I think should have been at least nominated, by year of publication instead of eligibility year:

2001: Perdido Street Station, China Mieville

2002: Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan

2003: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke and The Scar, China Mieville

2007: Land of the Headless, Adam Roberts

2009: Anathem, Neil Stephanson

2010: New Model Army, Adam Roberts, the city & the city, China Mieville

2011: By Light Alone, Adam Roberts, Kraken, China Mieville, The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman

2012: Embassytown, China Mieville

2013: The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks

2014: The Islanders, Christopher Priest

2016: Europe in Winter, Dave Hutchinson 

2017: The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts

2018: Above the Snowline, Steph Swainston

2022: The This, Adam Roberts

I may add to this at some later time if I read more.


Total Score for the 20th Century Hugo novel awards

Rounding up, this gives the Hugos a total score of 12 good picks out of 46 awards, or 26%. If you had gone back to the Hugo list of novels that won in the 20th century, you would have had a 1/4 chance of getting the best one for each year.

 



Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Animal and plant labor, part III

 

Part III: Why does it matter?

Before I go on to plant labor – complete with quotes from Luke 12:27 and Buenaventura Durruti – there's the question of why any this matters. So you can describe animals as doing labor if you define your terms in a certain way: why should this matter to anyone?

It matters because the classic European leftist imaginary is all about work. It doesn't matter that newer (or older) imaginaries exist that aren't so focused on producerism: the left was dominated by Marxist ideas until the fall of the USSR, and the neoliberal era after that has suppressed any widespread adoption of anything else. For better or for worse, when many people on the left think of what defines the left, the answer has to do with the working class. Since Marxism is basically a 19th century ideology, it has no ecological understanding, and has a false model of value in which all value comes from human work. No socialist state informed by the Marxist tradition has ever done better than capitalist states have in ecological terms.

It's not necessary to argue against Marxist ideas directly: these have more or less died out as living technical ideas for most of the population. What's left is a kind of folk Marxism. Psychologists now say that Freud was wrong about many important things: this doesn't stop generally literate people from thinking about the conscious and unconscious, the superego, ego, and id, the Freudian slip, the father complex and so on, or the more pop culture versions of these ideas like “daddy issues”. In the same way, people who adhere to class forms of the left rather than identity forms will immediately come up with ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest.

I'm one of these class-form people myself: as an anarchist, I've seen what happens when people claim leftism on the basis of identity but otherwise have a liberal politics. Neoliberalism runs on that kind of thing. So it seems to me to be imperative to re-use or recycle folk ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest into a form that can address the most important problems that we have as a civilization: our ecological limits. To do that, it becomes necessary to see animals and maybe even plants as workers, to feel solidarity, to understand that there is a common interest between them and ourselves.

This is a long-standing part of the anarchist lineage. In the Eurocentric tradition it goes back to works like Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902. As such it is nothing new, but rather represents a kind of 20th century that should have occurred but did not, either in the capitalist west or the Marxist east. For real 21st century ideas we'd probably do better to turn towards Indigenous anarchists. But I myself am a product of the Euro tradition, and this is all I can write about.

Monday, January 30, 2023

Animal and Plant Labor, part II

 

Part II. Do animals work?

When people discuss this, they generally attribute work that an animal does that's supervised by a human as something that only counts as work because a human being is directing it. So, horses pull plows, provide transport, were used in war and so on but in this view they are generally understood as tools or adjuncts to human beings who are working – as capital, in other words. Dogs do what we might call emotional labor (and assist in the hunt) in the same way. Because I don't want to argue about this, I'm not going to address labor by domesticated animals.

For wild animals, our ideas of what labor is tend to match what we do in our civilization. So, for instance, models of animal labor from the last couple of centuries involve building things: beavers and dams, spiders and webs, birds and nests, bees and honeycombs. They don't involve packs of wolves doing the work of going out on the hunt and bringing down prey, because in our civilization we no longer often go out in hunting groups as a form of work occupation. So for now I'll only write about animals who build. The immediate objection is that animals are doing this instinctively, while we think about it, so our activity counts as work and theirs doesn't.

I suggest that this is not as large or as binary a difference as some people believe. To start with, Taylorized forms of human work have been developed that involve human beings doing simple, repetitive motions over and over on an assembly line: no one doubts that they are working, even though any opportunity for thought has been purposefully excluded. But this would be answered that human adaptability can be used to have people do repetitive motions that are not instinctual, but instead changeable and appropriate to the situation – of earning pay via wage labor, in this case. That leads me to my main argument, which is that both humans and other animals find their opportunities for routine work limited by their environment.

You can't define work as something that only geniuses or extraordinary individuals do. For most of us, it's limited by what is available: beavers build dams based on the wood that grows nearby, birds use leaves or human litter, bees build into the confines whatever hollow exists. Humans have extraordinary capability for language, culture, and the development of technology, and this creates a social environment that acts much like their physical environment. When beavers go into a new region, you'll see beaver dams appear: when humans do, you'll see characteristic human structures as defined by the physical resources available, their culture, and their technology.

I don't expect everyone to be convinced by this, although at least we are past the days in Europe when animals were considered to be a kind of machine. People these days at least consider that animals have emotions, feelings, and (in some cases) tool and language use, or a form of creativity. At any rate, I will consider labor to be strenuous, purposeful activity that a living thing does in order to live. By this measure, animals do work.

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Animal and Plant Labor, part 1

"Air, virgin soil, and natural meadows are not static piles of things lying in bins. They are the result of ecological processes, which means that they are the result of unremitting labor. It's just animal and plant labor rather than human labor."

In what sense do animals and plants do labor? People have talked about the first but generally only as an adjunct to human labor, and very rarely conceive of the second. I'm interested in this as part of a questioning or re-centering of the fundamental ideas of leftist thought, which are still based on Marx's writing as folk ideas.

I wrote a number of Twitter threads about this during the years in which I was on Twitter: I'm going to see whether I can rewrite them as a somewhat more coherent set of blog / Mastodon posts. They never would have been written at all without the sense that someone was reading and replying to them.

Thursday, December 15, 2022

55 good SF / fantasy books

These are all of the science fiction and fantasy books out of the thousands that I've read that I 5 starred on Library Thing. As such the list is not intended as a comprehensive list of the best, and it certainly could be more diverse in various ways, but it is what it is -- SF/F books that I thought at some time in my life (possibly when I was 13) were among the best. They are in alphabetic order by last name of the author.

  • Iain M. Banks: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons
  • John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost
  • James Branch Cabell: The Silver Stallion, Figures of Earth, The High Place
  • G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
  • John Crowley: Little, Big , Engine Summer
  • Avram Davidson: The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy
  • Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny), Ubik, The Penultimate Truth, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Galactic Pot-Healer
  • Lord Dunsany: At the Edge of the World, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Complete Pegana
  • William Gibson: The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling), Neuromancer
  • Alasdair Gray: Lanark
  • M. John Harrison: The Course of the Heart
  • Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
  • Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea
  • Stanislaw Lem: Solaris, Return From the Stars, The Futurological Congress, Memoirs Found In a Bathtub, The Cyberaid
  • H.P. Lovecraft: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
  • China Mieville: The Scar, Iron Council
  • Michael Moorcock: The Cornelius Chronicles Vol 1. (collects The Final Programme through The Condition of Muzak)
  • Ward Moore: Greener Than You Think
  • Jenna Katerin Moran: An Unclean Legacy
  • George Orwell: 1984
  • Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan, Gormenghast
  • Christopher Priest: The Islanders
  • Adam Roberts: New Model Army, The This
  • Michael Shea: Nifft the Lean
  • Norman Spinrad: The Iron Dream
  • Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker
  • Bruce Sterling: Schismatrix Plus, Holy Fire, Islands in the Net
  • Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • Steph Swainston: Above the Snowline
  • H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man
  • Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 5

V. Other conclusions

Isekai has had a minor Satanic Panic in Russia in 2021 due to a belief that the genre depicts reincarnation as desirable and therefore may tempt people to hasten it. Judicial clowning aside, a more serious backlash has occurred throughout the last decade. It probably peaked in 2016-217 when a Shōsetsuka ni Narō short story contest banned isekai entries and the publisher Kadokowa followed suit in its own contest the next year. (1) As far as I can tell, there was a feeling that the genre was overpopulated and might have exhausted itself. Whatever the merits of this, the genre remained popular and the bans did not continue. (2)

So why has isekai, at least so far, kept coming back? It is not merely because it is an escapist genre about literally escaping to another world. The virtues of escapism are part of an ancient dispute within fantasy, with Tolkein supposedly saying to C.S. Lewis that the people most hostile to the idea of escape are jailers, and Michael Moorcock retorting much later that "Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape." Whichever side of this you prefer, the point in the present context is that there are many genres that provide escapism if that is what people want. Why isekai?

I suggest that part of the answer is isekai's wholehearted commitment to Eros. There are other escapist genres that are commited to Thanatos – science fiction, for instance, likes to call itself the literature of ideas but might more accurately be called the literature of genocide – but death drive abounds in our societies as we embrace ecological and other catastrophes, and perhaps that is what needs to be escaped from most of all.

Another possible answer is provided by Baudrillard, writing in 1983 just 4 years after Eco's _The Role of the Reader_. In these four years something uneasy has happened to that word "infantilism":

"The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he also responds with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, revolt, emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand to be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously with an object's resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite manner: infantilism, hyperconformism, a total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other. The resistance-as-subject is today unilaterally valorized and held as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, emancipation, expression, and constitution as a political subject are taken to be valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal or perhaps even superior impact, of all the practices-as-object - the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning - exactly the practices of the masses - which we bury and forget under the contemptuous terms of alienation and passivity."

[...] "the system's current argument is the maximization of the word and the maximal production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of a refusal of meaning and a refusal of the word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception."

Closed genres, with their multitude of slight variations around what the reader already expects, are a way of producing content without also producing meaning, and are therefore ideal for this strategy. I find this somewhat persuasive since the charge of infantilism never made any sense for what is essentially an adolescent pursuit.

In any case, Baudrillard's concept of the mass leads back to the religious beliefs in reincarnation and demiurgy – in this context, practices of the mass rather than the individual genius. The individually talented writer, like Tolkien, may well feel that they are practicing subcreation, a sort of divinely approved inpiration, and we refer to the judgment of the works of these writers as being up to history, as if they have gone to Heaven.

Reincarnation, on the other hand, is a practice that everyone does, taking roles in turn, with no single act or single life being definitive. Demiurgy in its classic Gnostic context was the individual act of a Demiurge, but in a more ordinary sense is the effort of any creator to make a fictional world that they know will be seriously flawed. As such it can be done by anyone, and is done, as the more than a million novels submitted to Shōsetsuka ni Narō show. It is the task of our time to find a way to value this work as itself, without taking the trouble – in any case impossible – of reading all of it. (3)

Endnotes

1. The Kadokowa ban was supposedly in favor of adult content, since teenage protagonists were also banned. The publisher specified that it had to be a male, adult protagonist, so it may have been a matter of them going for a very specific demographic.

2. American reception of isekai is largely based on anime, for which a common perception is that isekai displaces more varied works (anime is a medium that has works in many different genres) and replaces longer series with a succession of 12-episode ones that often only have a single season. Since isekai is not as closely identified with anime in Japan, I don't know whether this is as much of a cause for backlash there.

3. I have thought about a universally produced art for a much longer time in the context of poetry: in the US, the audience for live poetry events comes perilously close to a 1:1 ratio of writers to readers.

Monday, August 15, 2022

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 4

IV. Open publishing

How are isekai works produced? My first experience with them was as anime (as I imagine is most common in America) and I vaguely imagined a staff of professionals, dissatisfied by having to work on them instead of some auteur project, set to writing, drawing, and directing them full time much as American TV is produced.

The truth is much stranger. A large majority of isekai (other than a few precursors) started out as amateur web series or "web novels" published on the Japanese site Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become A Novelist"). (Of the well-known series I spot checked, one, _Sword Art Online_, started as a web series published on the writer's own site.) Shōsetsuka ni Narō started in 2004 and lets users post written works, read them for free, and upvote them if they like them. By the late 2000s, isekai became so popular on the site that they were called Narō novels: the term isekai itself was coined around 2012.

As a result, isekai is a genre of fanfic without a canonical fictional universe (at least, without one that is copyrighted). One of the early popular isekai on Shōsetsuka ni Narō was _The Familiar of Zero_, and it became popular to write other isekai on the site that were fanfic of that work. However, the new genre quickly took as its setting the generalized world of computer RPGs, a setting which can not be copyrighted. In every respect the writers and writing style are fanfic. Fanfic was once defined as being commercially unpublishable because of copyright: now it fuels an entire popular genre.

Studios and publishers go through the site and pick out the highest voted works, then buy rights to them and start them out in some other branch of mass media. Isekai usually starts as web novels, then become light novels (serial written text with occasional illustrations), then become manga and/or anime, gain other spinoffs like a gag manga, and then with even higher popularity may become a movie, live action film, or computer game. The result is that a publisher risks nothing in the way of initial advances or ongoing payments to keep professional writers writing, the writers are pleased to be published (many seem to write as a sideline to their "real job"), and the work produced is perfectly suited to its audience because that audience is generally the same as the people voting on the site. (1)

This seems to me to be the future of how these kinds of works are produced. One can see something similar with the popular (non-isekai) South Korean Webtoon platform, whose most popular series have started to be published as anime and live action TV series in their own right. It only takes one more historical accident or technology transfer to get science fiction, for example, writing thousands of vaguely Star Trek or Star Wars like (but not copywritable) fanfics on some site and that becoming a main source of English-language SF. In this respect isekai had a boost because its setting, the computer RPG, was familiar to an entire generation yet generic and closed.

This is not to say that a backlash has not already occured. In the last part of this series I'll get into the reception of isekai and try to tie some of these threads together.

next part of the series

Endnotes

1) I have no idea whether the voting on the site is fair. There may be the usual problems with using a botnet to mass upvote, payola, having insider connections etc. My sense is that the methods for getting works to medium popularity may be unfair but that the number of legitimate voting users is high enough so that it would be difficult to cheat from there to the top.

2) Images: Shōsetsuka ni Narō site logo, chibi versions of popular isekai characters, a scene from the popular early Webtoon _Noblesse_.