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U.K. SF Writers Dominate Hugos
gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that For the first time in its 63-year history, all the writers nominated for the prestigious Hugo award for the best novel are British." From the article: "Mr Stross says that what an author writes is a reflection of his society, and currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America. 'What we write tends to reflect our perceptions of the world around us,' he says, 'and if it's an uncertain world full of shadows it's no surprise you get wish fulfilment or a bit downbeat.'"
You can't hear the cool accents in writing. I don't get it.
Hey, I live in Ecuador, and I've always looked for sci-fi written originally in Spanish, but darned if I can find much. What authors write in other languages, and do they ever get Hugo awards?
It's called the Nebula Awards.
I don't see the problem. There have been years when almost every author was American, and there have been years when almost every author wasn't. Statistically speaking, this isn't that unusual. Maybe it was just a really good year of British writing. I say congratulations to the British, don't sweat it, and maybe we'll do better next year.
On a side note, a friend of mine for a very long time didn't know that Octivia E. Butler was a woman. I haven't told him yet that she's also African-American.
It's not that I'm not ready to see the soldiers doing their thing in Iraq. I was a soldier myself, so I appreciate watching soldiers going about their business without any "analysis" from those doing the filming. Rather, I avoided the film until now because I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
It is supremely frustrating to see American soldiers doing their jobs with as much humor and professionalism as they can, all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion. I experienced something like that on a much smaller scale myself, when my unit left Somalia after not quite three months in country. A few months later, all American forces left Somalia. We had done our job very well, but because the American government had no real plan of action beyond immediate food security operations, a few casualties was all it took to send the global superpower packing.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia and the way in which our leaders profoundly misunderstood the situation there before, during and after my deployment. I'm not suggesting that we stay in Iraq indefinitely to "make all those sacrifices worth something." I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
What does all this have to do with Charlie Stross's comment about the "deep trauma" of America? I think that in different ways Americans have been avoiding complex issues in our movies, our fiction, and our music specifically because we have been more deeply affected by the string of events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) than we care to admit even to ourselves. For me, that means avoiding footage of the war. For others the reaction might be keeping minute track of every skirmish and ambush. Some might prefer to ignore the war entirely and pretend it isn't happening.
Those of us who believe wholeheartedly in the manner in which we are fighting Islamic militants don't want to see anything that will shake our convictions. Subversion in the cultural sphere could easily spread to the political.
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments. We want to be comforted that somewhere, even if only in fictional worlds, people with power are capable of making the right choice.
For the majority of the American population, who sit somewhere in the middle, the constant bickering between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating. We're at a watershed in American history, and people know it, even if they don't articulate it. Decisive, capable heroes, preferably unrelated to the current reality, fit the bill.
A friend of mine once said that everyone remembers the cultural achievements of Athens, but not of Sparta. Why? Because Sparta was a completely militarized society, while Athens was not. Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.
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Well, it doesn't bother me, but then I'm British. The lack of a 'full stop' after 'Mr' is normal style in British punctuation; it is a little inconsistent, but full stops are becoming less common in abbreviations in British English. Then again, some American conventions are strange as well; like inserting a comma before 'and' in a list, such as 'apples, bananas, and grapes are fruit' compared to the British style 'apples bananas and grapes are fruit'. The comma is intended, historically, to represent the omission of the word 'and'; the American tradition would imply 'apples and bananas and and grapes are fruit' as the original etymology. Such is the price of diversity.
/. readers). It was very popular and underwent several versions with different spellings and house punctuation styles; both American and British versions were produced and in both cases they were published on the opposite side of the Atlantic then they were originally intended.
American and British punctuation and spelling differ in many places; I always find US spellings such as 'ax' versus 'axe' or 'color' versus 'colour' jarring. Sometimes a work is re-edited for publication on on the opposite side of the Atlantic to which it was written, but just as often -- as in this case -- it appears that the book has just been imported wholesale without being re-typeset. Typesetting is an expensive activity, and a book will need to be very popular to justify doing it all over again rather than just reprinting and slapping on a new cover.
For an interesting history of the different versions of a book check out some of the prefaces to later editions of the Lord of the Rings (an example that should resonate well with
As for the second point, British writing these days has been tending towards old-fashioned and formal styles, I think as a backlash against the influence of informal American idioms. We are writing ourselves into Merchant-Ivory stereotypes that we have spent the last thirty years trying to escape. Go figure.
I used to find works written for the American market difficult to read, but I got used to it. We may be able to understand each others language, but we should not expect them to be the same. Languages have diverged to the point of unintelligibility in less time then we have been seperate nations. We should get used to each others lingustic foibles, and claim a new fluent reading language on our CVs (or resumes, as they say in the Americas -- a strange, alien land whose tongue I am studying in my spare time).
-- "let's get wild. There's plenty of time to do nothing when we're dead." - Dorothy Parker
Then again, some American conventions are strange as well; like inserting a comma before 'and' in a list, such as 'apples, bananas, and grapes are fruit' compared to the British style 'apples bananas and grapes are fruit'.
As an American, I learned that both are acceptable. However, I prefer the comma, as it adds the potential for an additional shading of meaning with reduced ambiguity, e.g.
"Food combinations that go well together are rice and beans, steak and potatoes, and liver and onions." (note the potential confusion from omission of the last comma)
Actually, the Hugo Awards are explicitly for both fantasy and SF:
Section 3.3: Categories.
3.3.1: Best Novel. A science fiction or fantasy story of forty thousand (40,000) words or more.
3.3.2: Best Novella. A science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.
Etc etc.
I'm all for the World Fantasy Awards -- I won one in 1987 and I was a judge this year -- but they're not different from the Hugos in that they're for fantasy and the Hugos are "for SF". They're different in that they're a juried award and the Hugos are a popularly-voted one. You're mixing apples, oranges, prosciutto, and turpentine.
"currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America."
Bullshit.
They're mirroring the "deep trauma" that being unable to write anything except "Lord of the Rings" ripoffs has inflicted them with.
Enough of this fantasy shit.
If you can't write worth a shit because somebody flew a plane into a building and killed a couple thousand people, then you couldn't write for shit before.
Am I supposed to claim I'm "traumatized" because 150,000 people got killed in the tsunami, or 100,000 Iraqi civilians got blown up by our illustrious warriors (over 1,800 of whom in turn got their asses waxed)? Is that why I can't make a buck?
Where is Thomas Harris - who can write wonderful satire about psychiatrists and cops urning into cannibals - when we need him?
Somebody needs to write a "Catch-22" or "M.A.S.H." or "Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal" about Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
I guess I need to get cracking on my "Transhuman" series of novels - more rabid sex and merciless gunning down of monkeys than anybody has seen since the Marquis de Sade...
I got your "deep trauma" right here, assholes.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A Chav is roughly the equivalent of the American redneck, in that it's the last cultural group that we're allowed to make fun of (with the possible exception of gypsies and the welsh).
White, lower-than working class (they don't work), benefit scroungers. They are primarly interested in drugs, alcohol, hooded garments and have an intricate knowledge of the benefits system. Their language is a bizarre mixture of estuary-english and hiphop, with a bit of asian patois thrown in 'innit'.
I'm surprised that you posted this as an AC. You obviously have thought this through quite a bit. Personally I don't agree with your broad characterization of Slashdot as a vehicle for the "cultural elites" (for one thing, a much larger than average chunk of the Slashdot population are died in the wool libertarians), but if you want to change the Slashdot dynamic, why not post under a member name?
You make a solid point about the failure of cultural elites to adapt to the end of the Cold War, but I think you take it a bit far. Clinton cut and ran in Somalia, but he also pushed NATO into action in Serbia and assisted Croatia in booting the Serbs from Krajina. The Fukuyama "end of history" argument lost credence as soon as the first aircraft hit the tower, and nobody in the mainstream American Left would argue that the 9/11 attacks didn't profoundly alter our reality as a nation.
I also agree with your statement about the stupidity of being post-modern and ironic in a world where there is a very real conflict of worldviews. Hell, anyone who joins the volunteer military understands that being tragically cool is a farce, and I support America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for putting themselves on the line for a belief in their country.
But one of the persistent threads I've encountered in discussion after discussion is that supporters of the Bush approach to fighting terrorists can't seem to separate the desire and intention to fight terrorists from the techniques used to do so. The failure of cultural elites to recognize that war is sometimes necessary is matched by the failure of many of their detractors to see that just because war is necessary doesn't mean that it has to be fought in the particular manner our President has selected.
It is no secret that the top military brass were very reticent about going into Iraq, in part because they'd spent the entire decade of the 1990s policing the world. The Bosnia mission, still one of the American military's most underappreciated successes, had been ongoing since 1995. We had the lessons of the Somalia and Haiti missions behind us. Many of the generals had been on the ground as junior officers in Vietnam. These guys knew their jobs inside and out and were part of the most professional and experienced "peacetime" military we'd ever fielded. But when Gen. Shinseki told Congress we'd need several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq, Rumsfeld at best ignored him, and at worst hastened his departure.
Beyond the notion of whether there was any meaningful linkage between Saddam and al Quaeda, the difficult issues of how to handle the reconstruction, security, and political reconstitution of Iraq didn't spring up unforseen after the invasion began. Most of them had been planned for by the Pentagon, by experienced NGOs, and by other well-informed and nonpartisan entitites. That the White House chose to ignore that wealth of expertise to me betrays something beyond "knowing yourself," something that strays into a very dangerous hubris.
The culture war analysis only takes you so far. Cultural elites may not understand Middle America, but that still doesn't really have anything to do with the essential recklessness and lack of sophistication displayed by the Administration in its post-9/11 response.
For example, President Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a new Pearl Harbor attack, when it patently was not even remotely like Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on Pearl was a purely military move designed to wipe out the US Pacific Fleet, while the 9/11 attacks were symbolic attacks designed to cripple us economically, cause panic, and serve as a propaganda tool for the cause of militant Islam.
We have done very little under the Bush Administration to t
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