While this post builds on ideas I have been exploring on this blog over the last couple of years, it draws directly on three recent contexts. The first was a virtual panel I was on recently at Octocon, the National Irish SF Convention, ‘Who Reviews the Reviewers; Current Trends in Review Culture’. The second was the Hugo awards at the even more recent Chengdou Worldcon, especially the shortlist (see my round-up review) and award for Best Novel. The third is the recent essay collection, Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (Dead Ink, 2023), which I have reviewed for the next issue of the BSFA Review (coming out in December, I think).
As I noted on the Octocon panel, there are two main reasons for reading a particular book review: one is to get a sense of whether you want to read the book in question and the other is because you have read the book and want to spend a bit more time with its themes and find out what somebody else thinks about them. More generally, reviews and criticism are (alongside fiction, poetry, art in general) part of a wider ‘public sphere’ of ideas and discussion (also including science, history, politics etc), which is historically associated with civil society outside of state control. This means that we can think things that are not simply set out for us by a centralised hierarchy, and we are able to participate in a free and democratic exchange of ideas (within the constraints of ideology, misinformation and the concentrated capitalist ownership of the press and media). While reviewing and criticism are not in themselves utopian, it is impossible to imagine a good (literate) society without this kind of public sphere.
Although critical activity has historically been comprised of different forms and styles, including specific schools of thoughts, there is no set format or approach which defines it. Talking about books and ideas is closely linked to reading and writing about them. One of the attractions of SFF fandom is that there are a range of ongoing activities including cons, podcasts, fanzines, semiprozines, academic journals etc. There is an SFF public sphere, which might perhaps be more fittingly considered a ‘counter public sphere’ because its values are oppositional to centralised authority. However, SFF, which is a literature of resistance, is now probably the dominant global cultural form (especially in film, TV and gaming) and therefore everybody now claims to be the resistance. So, in the US, the UK, and other countries, we find the adherents of authoritarian hierarchy pretending that they are the representatives of the masses acting to resist what they pretend to be the ‘elitist’ values of democracy, inclusivity, diversity etc. In other words, the cultural and critical spheres are contested on multiple levels and claims to be ‘radical’ or to be the ‘resistance’ are not in themselves meaningful (anyone can present their story as ‘their struggle’ against the system).
There are no longer individual critics or reviewers or editors who are the arbiters of taste for a broad section of the public. This is not to say that there might not be fairly wide respect for some individuals active in this field, but they don’t wield authority in the same way as in the past. Getting a good review in Locus probably helps and getting on the annual ‘recommends’ list even more, but we don’t live in a world where reviewers can completely make or break a book. Interesting clusters of debate arise but it is difficult to imagine a single publication ever again being able to set the tone for a period/movement in the way that New Worlds has come to characterise the New Wave. In any case, there is also a debate as to whether the history of the field should be rewritten within more pluralistic frameworks than those offered by descriptors such as the New Wave or the Golden Age. Furthermore, it is no longer possible to pretend that there is an objective standpoint from which to make authoritative judgments. Therefore, as I noted recently, when writing about the Clarke Award, I don’t even like ranking the shortlist for a prize:
This is partly because I don’t believe that there are objective criteria by which to make this judgement and I have problems with the whole nineteenth-century bourgeois-individualist notion of the subject who is supposedly capable of making these decisions. However, it is also because I am quite partisan about my preferences. For me, the purpose of criticism is to find a way of reading certain texts generously, which in some cases means mounting a full-on assault on the frameworks of cultural reception that act to hinder such readings. In other cases, it might work better to establish a ‘counter public sphere’ separate to the mainstream, in which a book or books can be allowed to signify freely.
I still think it is useful to have shortlists and winners for awards because they provide a way of bringing the SFF community together to discuss and celebrate books. However, I think we should think of any shortlist on winner as the product of the particular place, time, and context of the decision. On another occasion, under different circumstances, the result might well be different. This is why it doesn’t make sense to get het up arguing about why book X has beaten book Y, while book Z was unjustifiably ignored completely. Better just to celebrate, or at least accept, the winner and then find another way of celebrating and discussing the work that you are really passionate about (and framing this discussion in terms of good writing, personal artistic vision, political timeliness, groundbreaking representation or whatever else it is that you want to highlight).
Apart from anything else, criticism has to become more personal – not only because the reviewer/critic needs to give their readers some idea of where they are coming from – and creative because otherwise it might just be AI-generated analysis. This creative-critical blend is happening in the world. It has happened in the universities, where the last ten years have seen ‘Creative Writing’ become the equal of ‘English Literature’ in the relationship that typically exists between them, with students and staff increasingly keen to experiment with different combinations of both approaches. Self-publishing means many more people write creatively; maybe they should also be producing their own critical work. Many early twentieth-century canonical literary writers also wrote extensive criticism – D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell etc. – and so does a contemporary writer such as Zadie Smith. It is actually quite a natural combination. The long high-theory moment of English Literature in the university is now on the wane and its effects are being democratised, translated into the vernacular, and dispersed through an emphasis on public engagement (including open access but also more talks, festivals, hybrid events etc) rather than purely through the academic research and publishing industry. All of these factors contribute to the sense of a culture in flux.
Although all these shifts have generated a fair amount of anxiety, they have resulted in positive developments and outcomes, such as the above-mentioned Writing the Future collection, which is both a series of great ‘Essays on Crafting Science Fiction’ (the book’s subtitle) by fantastic writers and simultaneously a collection of great, very readable, criticism from the same people. The overall result, in my opinion, is a better account of the current conjuncture than you would get from either an academic essay collection or a short story anthology. Having read it straight through over a couple of days as I would a novel that I felt myself enthralled by, I find myself wanting to reread some of the chapters immediately, but also to read the works discussed and the works of the authors themselves. It’s a book that I hope and think will be successful. I’d love to see more like it. I’m also thinking about how it might be possible to harness this approach to more explicitly political ends.
This might seem to be an odd desire, but it is implicit to many of the contexts to which the authors of Writing the Future refer, such as extreme climate change, societal decay, dystopia and totalitarianism (there are some lighter chapters!). However, apart from these specific political contexts, I think it is also useful to remember that culture is political in a more fundamental sense, as foregrounded in one of the most significant SF series written in Britain in the last 40 years, Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. In particular, it is a specific non-hierarchical, polymorphous, pluralistic, feminist, inclusive culture that underpins the socialist utopia depicted by Banks. It is this kind of culture, rather than reason, that characterises human society. Tens of thousands of years ago, a culture centred on female collectivity enabled social organisation to move beyond the male dominance patterns of other primates. The maintenance of this culture remains essential to the possibility of enabling egalitarian forms of social organisation to become and remain fully free of asocial dominance hierarchies. Hence, we have culture wars in the twenty-first century because there is a sustained effort underway to overthrow democratic society and replace it with essentially masculine authoritarian hierarchies. This particular political context is crucial for thinking about culture and therefore needs to be central to criticism.
In other words, politics is central to cultural judgement, which brings me to the question of awards. The recent Hugo awards, and indeed the Locus awards earlier this year have given rise to grumblings in various quarters about not the best books or not the most literary books being awarded. Obviously, we could just simply ignore this. There are other awards that cater to a range of criteria and lead to different shortlists and winners – I rather like this feature of the field and we could just simply accept this range of awards (and, as I note above, devote our own energies to praising anything we feel remains overlooked). However, one of the reasons I have ended up writing this piece is that I feel it is worth pointing out that the Hugos are not just political in the way that all culture is political, but since the struggle against the ‘puppies’ (see, e.g., here and here) – in fact, even since before then – they have also occupied an explicitly political frontline in the culture war. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to discuss these awards or try and make sense of them from a critical perspective, unless you take this political context into account. For example, the winning novel this year, Nettle and Bone by Ursula Vernon writing as T. Kingfisher, had older female characters as its key protagonists and centred an act of regicide, as well as being a very entertaining reworking of fairytale. Furthermore, as I noted in my shortlist roundup (linked at beginning of this post), it includes genre wisdom (that you can only save people who want to be saved) and deploys the specific narrative form of the ‘fool’s errand’. Altogether it is the combination of these factors, including its political stance, that probably led to people really enjoying it and therefore to its winning of the award.
At the moment, the Hugo Award shortlists, especially the various written fiction categories, are dominated by works that are explicitly or implicitly anti-patriarchal in a broad sense and pro-inclusivity. In other words, the Hugos are a site of political struggle, conditioned by an American context, and the most appropriate critical response (for the reasons I’ve briefly discussed above) is to support that. A consequence of the centrality of this struggle is that Hugo lists are generally comprised of core genre works because that is one of the key sites of contestation. However, core genre now is very different to it was in the Golden Age. Indeed, that is the point of what has happened over the last ten years or so: many of the tropes that were central to genre SFF have been rewritten. In some cases, this just means, as Joanna Russ once complained, that the spaceship captain eventually turns out to be a woman. But, in retrospect, I think it will become increasingly obvious that core genre is in the process of being completely transformed by the impact of landmark works by writers such as N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley, etc. To be of real value, any critical account of SFF in the 2010s needs to centre these writers, as well as covering other aspects of the field. It doesn’t make sense in the current political context to fall into the trap, that literary criticism (especially academic criticism) is sometimes prone to fall into, of only focusing on avant-garde or experimental writing (especially when that status is in part being defined by publisher/content in such a way as to preclude innovation within genre).
One of the contexts for this discussion is an issue of how subjectivity is understood. As implied above, the benchmark for subjectivity within criticism remains too closely tied to nineteenth-century bourgeois individualism. This leads to works being graded on what kind of subjectivity they express – as a marketing category, ‘literary fiction’ on the whole denotes that a book will express bourgeois individualist agency. More popular fiction – as genre fiction was formerly understood (and still is in many quarters) – is therefore liable to be seen from this perspective as expressing subordinate or subaltern subjectivities. Hence you used to often find analysis such as the following (from an academic lit crit book published at the end of the last century): ‘mass-circulation novels were read by literally millions and fulfilled the role of the television soap opera in our own time as a guide to “being oneself” in the context of general submissiveness’. Such casual assumptions revealed a blindness to the critic’s own privilege (which within British contexts used to be mostly assumed to lie in class position). It’s easy not to be submissive if you are not in a submissive position. If you are in a submissive position, due to living in a hierarchically organised capitalist society, then you might need a different kind of contestation in your culture than that recognised by academic literary critics twenty years ago.
I think we should assume that going forward, the benchmark for culture cannot simply be that of the bourgeois individual subject; the unfettered ego free of all ties. In fact, much of the critical work of past decades has been ostensibly devoted to this end but the transition hasn’t been entirely accomplished yet. Subjectivity is not just the master half of the Hegelian master-and-servant relationship and so we need better cultural models of understanding power dynamics, which is another way of saying we need to have a culture based on the principle of consent. This seems to me what is happening in the kind of works that have been shortlisted for, and have been winning, the Hugos over the last ten years or so. Therefore, critics should not be complaining about the Hugos but using their criticism to support and expand what is happening there.
However, despite this central importance, the Hugos are not the only battlefront. There are many other fronts of what is a multi-pronged struggle happening across different contexts. Hence other awards reflect different criteria. This year I have reviewed the BSFA Best Novel and Clarke Award shortlists as well as the one for the Hugos. The political context in the UK is different to that in the US (despite the best efforts of some of the US-funded thinktanks). The UK has a much stronger socialist tradition for one thing and therefore the faultlines are different and the award culture is different. That difference is good in itself. I’m still in the early days of writing my projected book on the Clarke Award but part of the process of doing that is critically thinking about the wider award environment. In other words, I don’t want to situate the Clarke in opposition to fan-voted awards like the Hugos or the BSFAs, but to see it as a related part of a more complex ecology around the SFF field and its fandom. Rather than accentuate the difference between ‘experimentalism’ and ‘realism’ or between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘core genre’ or between ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ writing, I want to get completely away from those unhelpful binaries. They really are not a good way to structure criticism and I speak from the experience of having witnessed the unhelpfulness of this in both directions.
(Initially, I was intending to continue this piece by writing about Nina Allan’s chapter on J.G. Ballard in Writing the Future and then discussing the relationship between SF and modernism (partly by also talking about Michael Moorcock). This would bring together everything I discuss above in a different constellation and hopefully help cross-illuminate the ideas regarding the political nature of culture and the attendant need for criticism to be political. However, if not a book-length account, that will at least require another lengthy post at some future date.)
Prospective Cultures 