On Literary Tastes

[chris_gerrib]

I am a fan of kristine_smith's Jani Killian books. So when I heard that she had released a mystery novel under the name Alex Gordon, I pre-ordered Gideon. Alas, it was not to my tastes, and I put it aside literally half-read.

This got me thinking about the Sad Puppies. (Yeah, they have been on my mind a lot lately. So sue me.) Their rational argument, as opposed to the "waah, they're picking on Straight White Dudes" emotional one, is this:

1) It's clear what is and is not good literature in a given genre and this is universal despite ethnic, racial and sexual experiences of the reader
3) Awards can and should pick out what will become classics in the literature
4) Being a "best seller" is a mark of quality (except when it's written by John Scalzi)

Needless to say, all of the above is bullshit. (That's a technical term. Look it up.) Using the numbering scheme above:

1) Kristine Smith's novel referenced above has a boat-load of good reviews, and I like both the author and her previous stuff. Yet Gideon is not to my tastes. I've also never read, and probably never will read, any of Tolkien's stuff.

2) Edward Bulwer-Lytton was considered one of the best writers of his era. Now, the only way we remember him is as a punch line to a joke. ("It was a dark and stormy night.") Charles Dickens, his contemporary and the guy we remember, was considered a hack. We remember Herman Melville for Moby Dick, yet that novel was a critical and commercial failure in its time.

3) Here's a list of the bestselling books of 1930. How many of those books have you heard of? Hell, how many authors have you heard of? (I got 2 for 10, one of which because two of her other works became Hollywood movies.) Sure doesn't look like most of those books were timeless classics.

I really thought these facts were self-evident. But apparently not.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

They don't *really* believe being a best-seller is a mark of quality.

If they did, they wouldn't try to diddle the best-seller lists with book bombs.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I *did* note the Scalzi Exception ;-)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

As long as one can still buy Bovril (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril), Bulwer-Lytton's legacy is not completely erased. Also, I think The Last Days of Pompeii might still have legs.

I have long thought that "It was a dark and stormy night" is not a particularly bad way to start a story, nor an example of bad writing.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Well, when I was in the Navy I learned that some nights really are darker than others.

Thanks for the tip on Bovril. It's appropriate that Bulwer-Lytton was at least a proto-SF writer!

Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

As neither a 'sad puppy' nor an anti-puppy I've found this whole thing to be fascinating. I feel as if a PhD student in psychology or sociology would find a rich vein to mine in how both groups view one another and interpret each other's comments.

From what I've gathered the Sad Puppies believe that a group of like-minded SF fans have 'captured' the Hugos and are nominating and voting for works primarily based off of the works' championship of certain social/political themes. I suspect that the Sad Puppies are more than a little correct though I don't believe that this is as nefarious as they seem to believe. If a story 'speaks' to a reader for whatever reason then I would imagine that the reader would be justified in believing the story to be award worthy and vote for it.

The Sad Puppies also seem to be espousing that this like-minded group is quite small because other best selling authors that they believe to be at least as good are rarely (or never) nominated/awarded -- again, to their minds, based primarily off of the 'black listed' authors' social/political stances. I think there is likely some justice to this view but primarily only as it pertains to certain high profile authors. From reading blog comments I can not imagine many posters here and at File 770 or Scalzi's site voting for Larry Correia, John Wright, or Vox Day for a Hugo. By the same token I can't imagine many of the posters from their respective blog sites voting for anything by Scalzi, Tempest Bradford, or Kameron Hurley.

As I've argued for years with John Wright and the commentators on his site if everyone (conservative and liberal) would step back and not view the other side as either profoundly evil or profoundly stupid and instead at least attempt to view the opposing side with empathy and listen to what they say with charity then each side would find themselves agreeing a lot more with one another than either side suspects.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Sad Puppies argue that the award has been captured. But their "proof" of the capture is that certain people haven't won the award. As it happens, I've read Correia and Wright's stuff - I think Wright's better (and I may even have nominated him - can't remember) but if your argument starts from a flawed base then the argument is flawed.

In other words, any argument that starts "*because* the Earth is flat" is wrong. The Sad Puppies start from "we didn't win *because* those evil people..." and is thus flawed.

Re: Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

I believe that both sides argument is flawed -- at least insofar as I understand the arguments. I believe, based purely off of speculation with no real evidence, that the SFF community is more liberal than conservative and that the fandom subgroup which are members of Worldcon is even more liberal than the already left-leaning SFF community. I also suspect that this liberal subgroup is more connected via social media and *has* pushed the Hugo's towards a 'social justice' perspective both intentionally and unintentionally. I just don't necessarily believe that overall this is done with malevolent intent but rather is the sign of a different worldview.

I've only read two of Mr. Wright's novels (LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS and MISTS OF EVERNESS) and while for the most part I enjoyed them I was completely thrown out of the final novel when a major character went on, what felt like, a Randian rant. I was thrown out of the story because it felt like the 'rant' was wholly out of left field and didn't feel organic to the story. I suspect, from what I've read, that this is how the Sad Puppies feel about some of the 'Social Justice' themes in Hugo and Nebulae nominated stories. They believe the themes to be overbearing and poorly integrated because they find the elements so jarring -- and quite possibly offensive. I assume that this is the same feeling that Tempest Bradley was describing when she used the term 'ragequit'. The problem is that neither side is willing to be empathetic and concede that the other side might have an authentic point.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

with malevolent intent except that's exactly what "we're" accused of having, while the SPs are merely trying to help out of pure love for the genre.

So if you click over to the link (that you didn't ask for but I gave anyway) you see a leading SP complaining vehemently that Elizabeth Bear's new novel is an attempt to force "SJW shit" down SFF's throat and needs to be fought against. (The post title is "why we fight.")

In short, his argument isn't that he doesn't want to read "SJW shit" but that merely publishing it is offensive.

Re: Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

Well, yes, that has been rather my point. Both sides have close to zero empathy for one another. Each believes the other to have sinister motives and to be engaged in a campaign to muzzle them and both, whether intentionally or not, read each's posts as uncharitably as possible and ramp up their own rhetoric to match.

I will provide an example from what I perceive to be 'your side' in this. When Ms Bradford posted her essay various parties became extremely incensed. Indeed, even I thought that the post was bigoted and offensive. However there are a large number of people that didn't see it as offensive at all -- which calls to mind the current 'That Shirt' phenomenon. A number of people read humor into the piece that I, for example, didn't find and looked at the article as a call for diversity and reading stories that challenged the reader's viewpoint. This to me would have made perfect sense if Ms Bradford herself was white, male, and straight and hadn't written her article from the point of someone who started her experiment because she was offended by a *majority* of white, male, and straight SFF stories -- including award winning stories. Rather than a call to diversity the piece read to me like a broadside attack.

I bring this up because I find it interesting that I haven't read very many people who self identify as anti-puppy as believing the other side to have an actual point in their criticism of her article. Scalzi, as an example, saw nothing wrong with what she wrote and even wrote happily of Ms Bradford calling him out on occasion for some misdeed or another but saw no reason to call her out for the needlessly provocative nature of her article. I really believe that if each side would 'call out' (a term I dislike) people they generally agree with on occasion for going too far that their would be a lot more trust between what looks like hostile camps.

Do I think that Vox Day is offensive? Absolutely. I also recall one time admonishing Mr Wright that what he wrote on his blog was offensive and his response was that his side was allowed to have fun and make jokes as well. I believe that he eventually responded to me that perhaps on that occasion he'd gone further than he intended but never the less it had little if any long term impact. The interesting thing is I sincerely believe that most of the time he intends for his posts to be read in a *much* more humorous tone than I, or his targets, take them.

I guess what I am saying is that I don't really understand this overwhelming desire to mock and goad and denigrate. Each side acts like, to use Mr Wright's term, that the other 'side' are Morlocks rather than fellow humans that should be respected and who have valid concerns that perhaps they are not articulating well. That said, do I believe that each side has 'bad actors' on it who are deeply bigoted and use the conflict to advance a bigoted cause.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I didn't find Bradford's article offensive in part because I don't go around looking to take offense. She said that she, as a black woman half my age, had had different experiences in life. These caused her to find a lot of the stuff she was reading (stuff written by straight white males) not to her tastes.

So she decided to change what she read, and found she enjoyed it more. She suggested others try it too, which I took as offensive as saying "try the veal" at a comedy club.

It's "needlessly provocative" only if you seek to take offense. It's "needlessly provocative" only if you dispute her statistic on New York Times reviews, or dispute that more than a few anthologies seem to end up with few or no female authors in them.

Regarding Mr. Wright - he called me a "dickless wonder" (in so many words) on his blog. I failed to see the humor in that.

Re: Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

I'll likely be out of pocket for the remainder of the weekend but I would note that you have now informed me that the reason I found Ms Bradford's article to be provocative was because either solely or predominantly I *sought* to take offense. This is the sort of complete shutdown of communication that I was referring to. You can't even entertain the idea that Ms Bradford's article could be found legitimately offensive by someone. Would that have been your response to Ms Bradford as well? She was simply looking to be offended by the stories that she read that caused her to ragequit them?

Have a good weekend. I'll look back in Monday but I'm thinking that my posting here, much like at Mr Wright's, is not a particularly useful activity.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why you or anybody would take offense to Bradford's response to stories. (Or mine, or anybody's.) People like or dislike stories for very personal reasons, which was my original point.

My question, is why anybody would take the statement "I don't like X because of Y, therefore I did Z, maybe you should try it" as anything other than a mild suggestion? Now, if she'd said "all them honkies is dumb, don't read them" I could understand the heartburn.

Re: Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

It is the frame of her article that makes it offensive. If Ms Tempest had written, I challenge readers for a year to read stories by authors with a radically different background than their own (be it race, sex, gender identification, country of origin, etc) then I would have applauded her challenge -- I think that such an exercise builds empathy and a lends legitimacy to worldviews that are based on different experiences. If Ms Tempest had challenged readers to read minority authors for a year to broaden most readers horizons and to help them introduce themselves to less popular authors I would have applauded her challenge though I think just reading outside of the bestseller list would be tremendously beneficial to both readers and writers. One of the larger problems that I see with the Hugo and Nebula is how for the most part the same authors make up the list year after year.

Instead though Ms Tempest mentioned rage-quitting numerous magazines and fiction anthologies which drove her to stop reading Cis White Male fiction for a year and this change virtually eliminated her rage-quitting. Even now, she wrote, she only read Cis White Male fiction if it has been vetted by someone she trusts. Think about the bigotry of that for a moment. If someone had written that they were rage-quitting magazines and anthologies because of fiction by Jews, gays, or PoC and found that their reading enjoyment improved once they excised one or all of these groups I would wonder if they had their robe and hood machine washed or dry cleaned before their Klan rallies. I'd like to think that if an author wrote such an article that everyone of good conscience would be outraged.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Maybe "ragequiting" is a bad term, although "toss the book across the room" is a frequent substitute and means the same thing. In any event, the recommendation is based on her personal tastes.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

You asked for a link - here's one (http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-we-fight.html).

Unless you want to argue that people being born transgendered only occurred in the 20th century.

Re: Literary Tastes

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

I apologize, but I don't know what you are referring to. I don't recall requesting a link or mentioning transgender people.

Re: Literary Tastes

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

sorry - wrong post. My apologies.

Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

I meant to address your question about the bestsellers of 1930 but forgot. I'm familiar with Cimarron because of the movie and Thornton Wilder because of his play Our Town. If you extended the time period to 1931 then I would also include Willa Cather for O Pioneers! and My Antonia; and Pearl Buck for The Good Earth, Sons, A House Divided, and Satan Never Sleeps.

I actually don't believe that being familiar with 20% of top-ten bestselling authors from ~85 years ago is all that bad. I think that it is also interesting to note that with 1930 and 1931 combined 11 of the 20 best selling novels (55%) were written by women.

Re: Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I recognized Buck - Willa Cather doesn't ring any bells for me.

Even so, those 1930 bestsellers aren't read much today

Re: Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

When I was in high school, back in the Eighties, Buck, Cather, and Wilder were taught in English/Literature; Some of the other authors from 1930 and 1931 may have been as well and I simply no longer recall them. Other names from that decade that popped out at me were Sinclair Lewis, James Hilton, Thomas Wolfe, Margaret Mitchell, James Hilton, George Santayana, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, and Daphne du Maurier.

I agree that they are probably not popularly read much today but I don't understand what point you are driving at. I suspect that we both could name any number of excellent authors that are no longer widely read and we wouldn't have to go back to the Thirties. For Christmas I bought my nephew, who is in middle school, a complete collection of Roger Zelazny's AMBER novels. So far he has been enjoying the collection but even as a self-described SFF fan he told me that he had never heard of Zelazany before he received my gift.

Re: Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

My point is that the SPs tell us Amazon sales rank is a better indication of quality than a Hugo award. Based on the above list, my argument is that sales are not a measure of quality.

Or shorter - nobody is handing blue ribbons out to McDonalds.

Re: Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[darrell moring (from livejournal.com)]

I believe that it was Napoleon, possibly apocryphally, that said quantity is a quality all of its own. McDonalds' is doing 'something' right or it wouldn't be as successful as it is -- and that something might be a high consistency to middling quality. At any rate, many of the novels from the Thirties that we were discussing were award winners, whether Pulitzer or otherwise, and more than a few of them are still taught in HS or university.

I may have misunderstood the Sad Puppies but I thought that their argument was a bit more subtle. Essentially I understood them to be saying that it was odd that popular SFF novels were for the most part underrepresented. As an example, when I asked my brother what the best restaurant that he ate at was he told me the Olive Garden to which I turned up my nose and internally mocked him for. That said, my wife and I ate at a 2 Michelin Star restaurant on one occasion for her birthday and I *hated* it as nothing in my opinion was edible. Who eats a freaking flower? My point being popular awards tend to be more plebeian in who they are awarded to than awards given by experts. In theory Gene Wolfe should be more popular among Nebulae voters than Hugo voters.

As to the Sad Puppies contention that popular works were at one point the norm for the Hugos then I would think that it would be possible, but perhaps prohibitively difficult, to put that to a test. The link to the Thirties novels that you provided was for Publisher Weekly bestsellers (the fact that some were award winning may have played a role but was not directly associated with them being on the list) so a list of SFF bestsellers would be a useful tool to compare modern and 'classic' SFF novels to and see if their is a notable disparity in the number of Hugos that make it on both lists.

Re: Bestselling Novels in the 1930s

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Well, I would be more persuaded if actual data was provided. As it is, I get from SPs a whine about how Redshirts or Ancillary Justice sux followed by a suggestion that Larry Corriea should win the award based on sales.

I have seen zero evidence that he sells significantly more than either Leckie or Scalzi - in fact what limited data I do have suggests he's neck-and-neck with them.