B D McClay asks “when exactly was science fiction [literature] about jacked bros in space“, and concludes that the answer is quite possibly “never”—or at least “not back in the Golden Age, despite claims persistent over decades that it was”.
McClay thinks that this metanarrative has a lot to do with the long-standing resentment of sf lit for cinema and TV, which was always seen as cheapening the public perception of a genre whose fans considered it a signifier of their thoughtfulness. She notes also that Golden Age stories certainly displayed a sexism that was very much in keeping with the period, and raises the well-worn examples of Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” and Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, only to point out that the sexism in question is far more nerdy than bro-y.
Now, you definitely find a long run of the Campbellian Competent Man trope, of which “The Cold Equations” is an early and formative example, and the influence of Heinlein sustained that trope for a long time. But again, it’s not particularly macho, because the focus is competence—and, for Heinlein at least, a sort of frontiersman generalism (this being the guy who once said “specialisation is for insects”).
That competence might extend to being handy in a scrap from time to time, but my own (admittedly limited) familiarity with the canon doesn’t enable me to recall many examples of serious two-fisted tough-guy stuff. Later on, the likes of Niven and Pournelle in the Eighties foregrounded an ugly sort of hard-right politics, and there was a persistent Cold Warrior approval of civilisational struggles in which the winning side was the side of Markets and Freedom… but the point is, the politics of the fiction reflected the politics of the period, because d’uh, of course it did1.
What’s interesting is McClay’s identifying the retroactive monstering of what went before as a way of framing one’s newer work (or one’s new favourite author) as innovative and revolutionary, and seeing this as a sort of yin to the yang of the more nostalgic/reactionary “back when sf was still good” discourse; in both cases, the past being pointed to is at best mischaracterised, and at worst almost completely falsified.
This twigged my interest because I’ve noticed for some years now a discursive tic in what little fannish media I still consume, in which reviewers rehearse a catechism along the lines of “minority representation in genre literature, both at the level of characters and the level of authors, has always been and still is terrible”. To which my response is increasingly “… have you actually been in the sf/f section of a bookstore during the last decade?”
I’m not going to try to pretend there wasn’t a problem with representation in genre fiction—though I’m increasingly of the opinion that it wasn’t that much worse in sf/f than it was in publishing more broadly.
I should also note that I took the progressive side in the long Blog Wars of the late Noughties and Teens, and do not regret having done so—though I do regret my conduct at some moments in that conflict. As I put it in a comment on a recent post by Paul Kincaid, “the house badly needed to be cleaned, but a whole succession of babies were lost with the bathwater, if you’ll forgive the horrendously mixed metaphor.”
The really enduring frustration, however, comes from the sense that the victorious progressive side still believes itself to be fighting the last war, tilting at a windmill of a predominantly-straight-white-dude genre fiction scene which simply isn’t there any more. McClay’s insight that this has something to do with marketing is on point, but there is also a dynamic of social belonging involved: believing genre fiction to be a pit of grimdark macho heteronormativity is the core shibboleth of contemporary fandom, and to the extent that there are some corners and niches that cling to aesthetics of that sort, they are (I suspect) sustained as much by reaction to the dominant aesthetic as to any sincere philosophical position on the part of authors or fans.
I’d even go so far as to say that the Puppies movements of the Teens were only as successful as they were because they were able to leverage a genuine sense of being the underdogs in a changing scene, and that the manner of the conflict as conducted by the progressive side sustained it for far longer than it might have lasted had it been shrugged off and/or more gently mocked. Yes, there were some genuine assholes in that movement, some of whom definitely had ulterior motives—but it’s always amazed me that a culture that makes “bullied nerdy kid” such a crucial part of its origin story has consistently failed to learn that bullies thrive on attention.
So there’s a double irony here: I think you could argue that the Puppies have in a real sense been the dominant formative influence on genre literature as it currently stands2, in that its dominant aesthetic and concerns have formed and been overamplified in furious reaction to what was, for the most part, a small group of grumpy nostalgics. Those nostalgics had a persecution complex; their legacy lies in their having passed it on to those who defeated them.
Again, for the avoidance of doubt: I believe that greater diversity in authors and the sorts of stories published is a good thing! But that’s not actually what we’ve ended up with. Far more so than I, Paul Kincaid has done (and still does) the reading required to make a grounded claim that genre literature has become incredibly samey; he has not (to my knowledge) suggested that the sameness is in large part due to the scene having become narrowly obsessed with issues of representation and political axe-grinding to the detriment of originality and good storytelling, but I will.
To be completely clear: I am genuinely happy to see better diversity in both authors and fictional characters! But I am totally exhausted with stories in which diversity is the central concern. I’m not saying they shouldn’t exist; I’m saying that it can feel a lot like nothing else exists, particularly when I encounter yet again the catechismic yet demonstrably false claim that genre fiction is terribly non-representative.
If nothing else, it’s a sign that the contemporary scene is just as myopic and navel-gazey as its antecedents; the content has changed, but the social form has stayed the same. The scrappy young punks become the new stadium acts, but still see themselves as rebel upstarts… which is usually an indicator that something new is about to emerge, and treat them as the stodgy hidebound establishment that they have become.
- To acknowledge this is not to endorse or “give a pass” to the politics in question, and I am very tired of the specious claim that it is. ↩︎
- I’ve actually been making a weaker version of this argument for quite some time, it turns out. ↩︎
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