On Legitimacy, Academia, and the Hugos (or, Someone Needs to Take a Class)
If you’ve been following the Hugo Awards fiasco, you might have come across Philip Sandifer’s fascinating analysis of Theodore Beale / Vox Day, his followers, and the Hugos. Sandifer has since become a minor target within the Sad / Rabid Puppies discussion, but not so much for what he actually said as for who he declares himself to be: an educated man. Why would this matter in a conversation about the Hugo Awards? What is so offensive about being a PhD in English (or any other individual with a PhD in the humanities)? As someone who is roughly a year away from acquiring a PhD in English, I find this blatant anti-academic stance rather perplexing if isolated to the science fiction and fantasy world. After all, so many of our greatest writers were academics — mostly in the sciences, but occasionally in the humanities. But once I think about the wider culture — in this case, U.S. culture — it becomes abundantly clear: it’s anti-intellectual posturing. The U.S. has always had a strong anti-intellectual perspective, but in recent years that has reached alarming levels, with mountains of outright derision lobbed at those who are identified as intellectuals — especially academics in the humanities. And as an academic, I still struggle with how to respond to this derisive viewpoint. How do you convince people who already view intellectuals (and academia) with contempt that there is value to be had among the intellectuals (and academics)? That’s a question to answer another time. All of this leads me to R. Scott Bakker’s recent post on the Hugos. In particular, I’m interested in Bakker’s conclusion, since the majority of his post has little to do with academia, except insofar as he demonstrates a significant dislike for us (we’re fools and clowns, apparently, for believing we can teach critical thinking). That dislike also seems to extend to Sandifer, though I’ll admit that it’s difficult to parse posturing or rejection of ideas from actual dislike (and, hell, they may not be that different anyway). Sandifer is a necessary starting point here, because what Sandifer argues about the effects of the Sad / Rabid Puppies (and Beale in particular) on the Hugo Awards can be boiled down to “damaging the Hugo Awards” and “damaging the value of fandom by infected it with bile.” To this argument, Bakker eventually concludes the following: And let’s suppose that the real problem facing the arts community lies in the impact of technology on cultural and political groupishness, on the way the internet and preference-parsing algorithms continue to ratchet buyers and sellers into ever more intricately tuned relationships. Let’s suppose, just for instance, that so-called literary works no longer reach dissenting audiences, and so only serve to reinforce the values of readers… That precious few of us are being challenged anymore—at least not by writing. The communicative habitat of the human being is changing more radically than at any time in history, period. The old modes of literary dissemination are dead or dying, and with them all the simplistic assumptions of our literary past. If writing that matters is writing that challenges, the writing that matters most has to be writing that avoids the ‘preference funnel,’ writing that falls into the hands of those who can be outraged. The only writing that matters, in other words, is writing that manages to span significant ingroup boundaries. If this is the case, then Beale has merely shown us that science fiction and fantasy actually matter, that as a writer, your voice can still reach people who can (and likely will) be offended… as well as swayed, unsettled, or any of the things Humanities clowns claim writing should do. There are a number of problems here. First, Bakker assumes (or wants us to assume) that the so called “literary works” aren’t reaching audiences. This is easy to refute by looking at the mountains of so called “literary writers” whose works appear on bestseller lists or are invited to give talks in performance halls fit for a thousand or more people. The challenging works of the “literary” form are already reaching audiences. Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, Karen Russell, and on and on and on and on. This is, after all, what we are concerned with, no? Challenges to our literary and personal sensibilities. Within science fiction and fantasy, that becomes much more difficult to measure. What constitutes “reaching an audience”? Bestseller lists? OK. If so, then we might as well assume that sf/f is utterly stagnant, since its most compelling and memorable work isn’t hitting those lists, which is a problem too complicated to explore here. I am, of course, setting aside the reality that “literary” doesn’t exist in any realistic grouping. As a genre, it is even less well-defined than science fiction, which at least has identifiable traditions. What I will say is this: while Bakker seems to view people like me as clowns, we do have a significant hand in what continues to be discussed as “significant” in the sf/f field. What I teach when I teach a science fiction class influences what thousands of everyday people think of when they think “science fiction and fantasy.” There are thousands and thousands of teachers just like me, and thanks to a massive shift in public and academic interests, we’re now teaching sf/f more than we used to. And what I teach isn’t going to be the repetitive, stagnant sf/f of today. Why would I teach an sf/f adventure novel from 2005 which offers nothing new when I can teach its more compelling predecessor from 1895? When I teach my space opera course in the fall, I’m not going to teach contemporary works which read like E. E. “Doc” Smith. I’m going to teach Smith. I’m not going to teach Heinlein pastiches. I’m going to teach Heinlein. And when it comes to the contemporary writers I want to explore, it will be Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias Buckell, and so