U.K. SF Writers Dominate Hugos 290
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.'"
There is one... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called the Nebula Awards [wikipedia.org].
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.
Who cares where they're from? (Score:2, Insightful)
Weird timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Just not that great? (Score:3, Insightful)
But lets get real: We're not talking about great literature or ground-breaking fantasy.
That said, I thought book #6 was the best since The Prisoner of Azkaban. A great read, but still not what I'd consider Hugo material.
Stefan
Re:why the hard-on for China Mieville? (Score:2, Insightful)
King Rat was an early work, haven't read Perido Street Station, loved "The Scar", thought "Iron Council" was good but flawed.
Agree about Richard Morgan, but I'd have thought the nomination would be for "Woken Furies".
The business of the future (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't bring myself to visit the SF & F section of bookstores often these days.
When I do, I'm struck by the large amount of "comfort food" fiction: Either outright fantasy, or fiction nominally set in the future but whose society and technology essentially duplicate that of a familiar and understandable past.
I've quoted this before, but it fits:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is amoung the benefits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
Alfred North Whitehead, 1925
" . . . lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history . . . "
Damn straight.
American politics and culture seem dead set on crawling into the past where everything was swell and things made sense*, and when faced with something scary that might require sacrifice, imagination, and change, a class of professional blowhards, F.U.D. artists, and useful idiots rise to their feet screaming that there is no problem.
We're even losing our nerve when it comes to dealing with opportunities.
Stefan
* Assuming you were middle class, white, and didn't have a goddamn clue or did but didn't care.
Re:Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Score:2, Insightful)
The second comma you added to the phrase from the book is an abomination of the highest order. Please do not correct archaic, albeit understandable, grammar with such monstrous modern miscarriages of language.
Yeah, Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
DUH!! Worldcon is in Scotland this year... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Weird timing (Score:3, Insightful)
My point wasn't to go into a treatise about why the war was misguided, but since you're asking, I believe that al Qaeda attacked America in 9/11, and we wisely attacked its base of operations in Afghanistan. However, there has never been any convincing proof that Iraq had any real connection to al Qaeda, or that diverting essential resources to invade and occupy Iraq has helped rather than hindered the fight against al Qaeda. We should have learned enough from the experiences Western European nations had in fighting terrorist cells in the 1970s and 80s to understand that successfully eliminating terrorists is a matter of long-term deterrence, and that the military is in most respects utterly ill-suited to the police work required to take down terrorists. As I mention in another post, there were a raft of preventable mistakes in the planning phase of the war, once it was decided upon.
Why not go with Vietnam? If you want to live in the past, you'd have more people there with you if you went with Vietnam. Everyone else is doing it.
I never directly compared the operational situation in Somalia to that of Iraq, and Vietnam is even further off the mark as any student of military history knows. My point in bringing up Somalia was that as a soldier there I felt let down by the civilian leadership, and I feel the soldiers in Iraq today are being let down by the current leadership.
Failure to imagine what? Failure to envision what? Ignorance of what specific lessons of history? Misunderstanding of what ground truth?
Failure to imagine options other than a ground invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Ignorance of any number of lessons about the limits of power, including those learned the hard way by the British when they ruled Iraq from 1918 to 1932. Misunderstanding of the ground truth that rather than being greeted with flowers in the streets of Iraq's towns and cities, Iraqi nationalism transcended Saddam. It is not a secret that in the run-up to the war that we were relying on intelligence sources that fed us what we wanted to hear.
From your post, you seem to know neither what to do, nor what not to do. You certainly haven't given an example of either. Your post is almost completely without substance, but it goes on for almost a page. You have no ideas to offer and no insight on any specific event. Just vague criticism.
My post was not intended to be a lengthy critique of the war, or an alternate plan for its prosecution. Its substance, for whatever it is worth, is my emotional response to reading Stross's comments about America's "deep trauma". I can understand why you don't like my response, but I think it is important to take it in context.
What political office are you running for?
Don't worry, I have no interest in running for office.
All wars always go badly. Things never work out the way you want them to. Regrets are unavoidable. Mistakes happen. The future is always largely unforseen.
I agree.
When the inevitable bad things happen, those things have to be overcome -- you can't let them overcome you -- or you fail. That'll be how the outcome of the war on terrorism is decided -- the allies will either choose to succeed or they'll lose heart and give up.
We are in absolute agreement on this point. I believe without a doubt that we will succeed. We will adapt and learn, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't feel sorrow at what I perceive to be tragic and costly mistakes we have made thus far. The Bush Administration's failure to learn from its mistakes weakens our overall effort and means that it will take more lives, money, and time to wipe out the deranged militants who are trying hard to defeat us.
How do you think your complaining fits into that picture?
If enough people complain, and it forces the government to pursue more effective policies in the fight against terrorists, I see it as worthwhile.
Re:Elitist Cultural Failure (Score:3, Insightful)
The Bush administration has almost certainly dramatically accelerated proliferation. They've adopted an obvious bifurcated policy in dealing with nations depending on whether they have nukes, or at least they say they have them, or they don't.
North Korea says they have nukes so the Bush administration negotiates with them, and treats them with a hands off policy focused on diplomatic efforts and not much saber rattling.
Iraq has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them and they get whacked.
Iran has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them, and the implication is they may well be in line to get whacked one way or another, air strikes on their reactor before it goes online, fomenting revolution thanks to the CIA, or outright invasion if they can gin up a case and get out of the quagmire in Iraq.
Libya has something of a contrived nuclear program, give it up and are showered with benefits. Leads you to think you should start a sham program, just to give it up to see what you can get for it in concessions from the U.S. and U.K.
There is an obvious pattern here a 5 year old can see. If you are on the wrong side of the U.S. the best policy you can pursue is to acquire nukes or at least say you acquired them and fake a good case to support it. If you do you're safe from American aggression. If you don't have nukes and you get on the wrong side of the U.S. chances are you get whacked. Therefor every enemy the U.S. has, has been incentivized to get nukes.
Very scary nuke situation (Score:3, Insightful)
The most disturbing part of all this is not just that nation-states are getting nukes. The ability of rogue actors like bin Laden, et. al. to acquire them is very real. Pakistan, for example, is a known nuclear technology exporter. We all know how tight their borders and civilian control of the military are.
The fact that the Bush Administration just tacitly approved India's nuclear status, and already does so with Pakistan, doesn't make matters any easier. We have essentially opened the floodgates to nuclear arms development by letting the loopholes in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remain open. We oppose the Comprensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and we've violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Maybe someone ought to dust off the phrase, "No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism."
Re:Who really cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly the point. People buy good books, regardless of the author's nationality.
Right now, US SF authors are mostly churning out either glorified soap operas or thinly disguised political diatribes. So they're not popular.
On the other hand the UK, and particularly Scotland, has a set - clique, whatever - of novelists who are truly revitalising the genre. Their stories have the same spirit as (ironically) the great books which US authors used to produce. So they win awards.
Right now there's a definite correlation between nationality and quality of SF. I just hope the US writers get over whatever's bothering them and start writing the good stuff again.
(BTW, how on earth could someone read an Octavia Butler novel and *not* realise she's African-American.)
Re:Chavs definned for 'Mericans! Help? (Score:3, Insightful)