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The Hugo Nominations Are Again Filled With Garbage

Well, boys and girls, the Hugo nods are out again. And they’re slightly less fucked than last year! I don’t want to recap the situation too much, but here’s a short primer. The Hugos are the most prestigious speculative fiction awards. Last year, some gross, conservative bigots found out they could manipulate the system to get their garbage nominated. These are the Sad Puppies. Some even grosser, fascist bigots latched on to this, and got their barely-literate screeds nominated. These are the Rabid Puppies. All the nominees (most of which are terrible, some of which are innocent bystanders placed on the list without their consent) placed below “No Award Given,” which is basically the equivalent of the Leonardo DiCaprio presenting at the Oscars and saying, “You know what? All the acting this year sucked. I’m not going to give this to anybody.”

Select a bunch of high-profile writers who would have been nominated anyway along with a bunch of puerile trash … It’s called Poisoning the Well.

I was really hoping the Puppies would have gotten bored of ruining someone else’s party to make some sort of point, but they’re back again and show no signs of quitting. As Mike Glyer outlines, 64 of the 81 recommendations on the Rabid Puppy slate made it to the ballot. As Donald Trump would say–sad!

The biggest problem with this mess is I’m genuinely unsure which nominees are deserving, and which are simply there because they were on a slate (or a “recommended reading list” which is just a broader fucking slate), or because they were sticking it to the ess jay double-yous. Vox Day’s submissions are obvious, but the rest are up in the air to anyone who isn’t following this catastrophe on a daily basis.

For instance, let’s look at the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Four out of the five nominees appeared on the Sad Puppy list, which makes me immediately skeptical of their talent and really hesitant to read, let alone actually purchase, anything they’ve written. But! Let’s just take one example: Alyssa Wong. By all accounts, she seems to be a talented writer who has been published in multiple prestigious magazines and who seems to be generally supportive of diversity in fiction (which is something the puppies vehemently oppose). So, a false positive! I’m looking forward to reading her stuff.

But are we expected to do this for every single nominee? Will the casual Hugo voter? Probably not. Which is entirely the point of this year’s insidious campaign. Select a bunch of high-profile writers who would have been nominated anyway along with a bunch of puerile trash like “Safe Space as Rape Room,” an offensively inaccurate piece of work that appeared on both Puppy slates. It’s called Poisoning the Well. The thought is that, since the nominees aren’t all hateful, self-published nonsense this year, people either won’t notice or care about the trash that did make the list. The truth is, of course, that these nominations will utterly fail to place in the actual awards. My only hope is that writers like Ms. Wong aren’t unduly punished in the wake of it.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that a rules change set to take effect next year may mitigate some of this in the future. The bigger problem, though, is that several of the Puppies themselves make the circuit within the speculative fiction convention fandom, despite being actively toxic. Saying ‘Hugo nominated’ puts you quite far ahead of most panelists, so there’s plenty of damage done that will be hard to repair. We will continue to fight against this, but it’s clear this is a hissy fit that’s not going away any time soon.

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Authorial Consent is Bullshit – Why ‘Clean Reader’ is Okay

Chuck Wendig (of whom I’m a big fan and more than a little jealous) posted about an app called Clean Reader. Long story short, Clean Reader sanitizes a book to take out all of those naughty, corrupting, no good words (like ‘poop,’ or ‘Mike Huckabee,’ I imagine). A lot of authors are very upset about this.

Chuck talks about a concept called Authorial Consent. Basically, his issue is that he hasn’t consented for his work to be sanitized in this manner, and therefore it’s both legally and ethically unacceptable.

The main problem I have with this is that authorial consent is a nonexistent concept, and our society already recognizes this. To clear up a few misunderstandings first:

No one is infringing on your copyright

There seems to be some misunderstanding about what Clean Reader actually does. Really, the description is mostly in the name. It’s a reader. It is not a marketplace*. It does not sell the clean versions of any books. It does not even share detailed modifications between users. It requires the user to purchase an author-approved copy of the work. All Clean Reader does is read the file — the same as any number of ebook reading apps.  The only difference is that Clean Reader omits any profanity. That is literally all it does. And it does this ONLY for the user of Clean Reader. No one else who purchases your book will see any of those changes.
Sure, there might be a slippery slope argument to be made. Chuck points out his worry that today, it’s censoring out “fuck,” and tomorrow, it’s slapping Chuck’s name on a book full of Bible stories. But that’s not what’s happening here, and I’m not a fan of slippery slope arguments in general. Criticize what’s happening now, not what might happen later.
*(UPDATE: The CleanReader app does have a store of sorts. However, this is just a mirror of the Inktera eBook marketplace.)

We modify art — and ignore ‘authorial intent’ — constantly

Have you ever fastforwarded through a traumatic scene in a film? Or perhaps a scene you simply didn’t like? Have you ever skipped a song on an album? Have you ever skimmed a few pages of description because you found them intensely boring, or read some chapters of A Game of Thrones out of order to get to the characters you liked?
Well, bad news, bub. You just ignored ‘authorial consent.’ George Fucking Martin put the chapters in that order for a reason, you know. Tolkien put in that Elven (Elvish?) poetry for a reason, and you damn well better read every single word of it.
We can get even more absurd. Mystery Science Theatre 3000? A total subversion of authorial consent. Like, WAY more than Clean Reader. Watching a film with 5.1/7.1 audio through two (or one!) speakers? NOT AN INTENDED USE. 

Once it’s in the world, your art is not yours. And that’s okay.

Lots of artists have trouble with this concept, and I can understand why. As much as successful authors like to say “Your story is not your baby!”, well, it’s pretty clear that your story is your baby, in some sense. Or, perhaps not your baby — perhaps it’s you, a part of you, and it’s understandable that you don’t want people changing pieces of you without your consent.

But that’s simply not how it works. By far, the most important thing about a work of art is the meaning a reader or viewer gets out of it — and of course, that is the one thing that authors absolutely can’t control (oh god, how some have tried, though). You can write a gripping, emotional tale of a young black man navigating an oppressive society dedicated to protecting its prison industrial complex, and sadly some readers are simply going to see “lol yup, black people are all criminals.” It’s a shame, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

Similarly, you shouldn’t think you can control reactions to a certain word in your book, no matter how long you spent slaving over its choosing. And I think that Chuck would agree that, of course one can’t control the reaction to our words. But once we agree on that point, I don’t see why we have to be oh-so-protective about how our work is read. The reaction is the single most important part of the whole thing, and if we can’t control that, then why bother to try to control the rest of it?