It takes 10 nominations to make a story a Nebula finalist, so these five stories I’ve just reviewed look to be the ones with the best likelihood to make it.
Since I’m reading down the list, there are a few trends sticking out. As far as I know, only SFWA members can make recommendations. Because the listing has been recommended by professionals in the genre, I’d expect to get good quality on the list. These stories I’ve just reviewed have recommendations in the double digits, but I’m just not finding a lot of what I’d call substance in the content. I’m thinking all those people are clicking the “recommend” button because they want to affirm the message. If I’m looking for quality stories to nominate, does that mean I can put any confidence in the number of recommendations the stories have gotten at all? Hm. Maybe not. Does this mean the trend to sentimental stories has shifted and this year message fiction is the in thing? Hm. Maybe so. Hopefully there’s more substance further down the list.
Next, I’m seeing a lot of repetition in the names. Caroline Yoachim, for example, has 5 stories on the list; A. Merc Rustad has three; José Pablo Iriarte has three, etc. I’m not sure what to make of this, except that these people must be very consistently high quality writers.
Third, I don’t see any real, serious hard SF in the top five. I commented on this trend a couple of years back after the awards cycle, the fact that hard SF is in trouble, being replaced (this year) with somewhat humorous message fiction dressed up in a thin veneer of SF or fantasy. I have to agree that the stories are entertaining and fun and that the messages are progressive, but there are no fully developed short stories in this group of five with, for example, strong character development, great world building, vivid imagery, thoughtful themes and universal questions about the human condition. What’s happened? Is this the influence of “Cat Pictures Please,” last year’s Hugo winner? Or has pressure from the Puppies encouraged the SFWA to promote progressive political messages at the expense of well-developed, serious science fiction and fantasy stories?
One last observation is that just a few magazines seem to be dominating the list. For example, Lightspeed has 20 entries in the current list, Daily Science Fiction has 12, Clarkesworld has 10, F&SF has 10 and Strange Horizons has 10. Glancing at the titles, I don’t think hard SF is the reigning paradigm. This isn’t a new trend, either. Analog did make a better showing this year than it sometimes does, with 5 entries. Where should I look for stronger substance? Is Asimov’s still the indicator there?
Lela E. Buis 
Jan 14, 2017 @ 23:55:59
Reblogged this on David VanDyke's Author Blog and commented:
Unfortunately, I think Lela is right. The Hugos and Nebulas have become politicized to the point that message fiction is the only way to win, and the “progressives” still have the numbers. Those in the middle seem so afraid of the far left, or of being accused to being alt-right, that they think they have to vote for soft message fiction.
Adding to this trend is the “right flight” toward the Dragons and other, pardon the pun, alternatives to the Hugos and Nebulas, often leaving the field to the left and their kumbaya circle. I suspect awards will become increasingly balkanized, with little true, respected, fairminded middle ground for non-message fiction.
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Jan 20, 2017 @ 02:11:37
Thanks for the reblog, David. Have been out of town while the blog runs on autopilot. Appreciate the discussion, everyone.
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Jan 15, 2017 @ 00:50:53
The political right in America SF are definitely more open to a) entertaining writing without a political message and b) writers who aren’t right wing.
Or maybe I’m biased because I like stories where s**t blows up 🙂
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Jan 15, 2017 @ 23:56:44
Who blows up whose s**t and why is where the message is usually found.
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Jan 15, 2017 @ 12:39:19
There’s something abnormal about the short story list. Between five and seven of the top ten look (to me) as though they don’t really belong there. You should read the top five novelettes. They’re much more representative of the sort of good stories that were printed in 2016.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t fiction that has a message. Lots of great fiction has a message. The question is whether the story suffers because of that message. A bad story with a great message (i.e. “one I agree with”) is still a bad story. I suspect that editors might be more likely to let their love of a message sway them when it’s a 3000-word short story in a 6-cents-a-word publication ($180) vs. a 10,000-word novelette in a 10-cents-a-word magazine ($1,000). It’s also a lot harder to ignore 10,000 words of bad writing than just 3,000.
Anyway, the sort of message-dominated crap you’re talking about has been pretty rare this year–at least in the eleven magazines and the eleven anthologies I read and reviewed. It exists (search Rocket Stack Rank for 1 and 2-star reviews and you’ll see some) but it’s not more than a few percent of all stories. As to what wins awards, we’ll have to wait and see. The last two years, the slates have greatly distorted the balloting.
Viven: How could right-wing fiction be more immune to messages? If a story hasn’t got a strong political message, how could you even tell if it was right or left-wing?
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Jan 18, 2017 @ 14:12:00
You’re right that it’s Jemison spelt with an ‘o’ (i.e. astronaut) not Jemisin with an ‘i’ (i.e the author). There’s also a Wendig who I assumed was the author who wrote Star Wars tie-in fiction, although it may be a more common surname in the US than it is here in the UK.
I read the bit on Amazon again and it’s made clear that the problem is the decisions of one person (John) who chooses to put the race and sexuality of the astronaut above her competency. It says John was championing her throughout selection and implies her lack of competency was due to spending too much time on self-promotion. That isn’t white supremacy. That is a criticism of identitarian leftism.
You are correct to point out there are problems with the setup. So, for example, the story doesn’t tackle why NASA had such a poor selection of astronauts that John couldn’t find someone to promote who was both competent AND black. If you were uncharitable, you could argue (as you’re doing) that the logic of the story is all black astronauts are incompetent. I gave Nick Cole the benefit of the doubt.
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Jan 19, 2017 @ 01:30:32
It’s my experience that people can love space travel, but be skeptical about climate change. They see climate change as ‘fake news’ invented by activist scientists like Jim Hansen, but missions to Mars as having no political agenda. It’s hard to convince someone climate change is happening if they believe most climate scientists are bamboozled by incorrect groupthink, something like people used to be over the idea the sun revolved around the Earth 😦
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Jan 18, 2017 @ 14:19:32
Oops, I posted in the wrong bit. In answer to your question about right-wing fiction, in my mind, the group of authors who are infamously ‘right-wing’ tend to write pulp. The group of infamously ‘left-wing’ authors tend to write more high-brow fiction and there’s an expectation that will tackle big issues.
That said, military SF definitely has a political bias intrinsic to the writing. And, if the story doesn’t have a political message at all, you probably can’t tell the political affiliation of the author.
I’m going to guess though that there are certain underlying assumptions that identify the politics of the author. Being pro-gun usually means libertarian. Anyone who writes SF with human-induced climate change as part of the background probably isn’t the X% of older US Republicans who are skeptical about it.
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Jan 18, 2017 @ 15:44:34
I think very few SF readers are climate-change deniers. Why would you read SF if you hate science?
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Jan 19, 2017 @ 01:31:02
It’s my experience that people can love space travel, but be skeptical about climate change. They see climate change as ‘fake news’ invented by activist scientists like Jim Hansen, but missions to Mars as having no political agenda. It’s hard to convince someone climate change is happening if they believe most climate scientists are bamboozled by incorrect groupthink, something like people used to be over the idea the sun revolved around the Earth 😦
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Jan 16, 2017 @ 11:34:15
Our first two issues are free on our website. We have stories eligible for Short Story, Novelette and Novella.
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Jan 16, 2017 @ 12:14:07
Have you read Forbidden Thoughts yet? I found The Social Construct by David Hallquist in particular exactly what speculative fiction should be like… extrapolating from current realities. And it was really really disturbing.
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Jan 16, 2017 @ 14:49:30
Husband thought The Social Construct was crass message fiction featuring straw Democrats but agreed that, if the worldbuilding had been more believable, it would’ve been really disturbing. He also says no one sees dogs as commodities and he’s read that sort of story about dogs before.
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Jan 16, 2017 @ 18:23:14
I plan to read it eventually, but since it’s not relevant to the 2017 Hugos (it was published January 2), I’m not in a rush to get to it. From the bit that Amazon gives away for free (“Read Inside the Book”), it looks like the “message” in the first story is undisguised white-supremacy. I wonder, though, if even white supremacists will enjoy reading something that simply beats you over the head with the idea. A bad story is still a bad story, even when it’s delivering your message.
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Jan 17, 2017 @ 02:19:27
The Social Construct was, to my reading, about designer babies and the commodification of human life.
I read the first poem in the book as being about ‘virtue signalling’ and the main problem I had with the first story, Nick Cole’s story ‘Safe Space Suit’, was the petty naming of a character after Nora Jemisin (utterly unnecessary IMO).
Safe Space Suit itself was lampooning the idea of tokenism, i.e choosing people for what they represent rather than what they can do, and – without the Jemisin reference – worked as that. The only way that’s white supremacism is if you believe that the message of the story was black people aren’t capable of flying to Mars – unless I was missing something, that idea wasn’t in there. I think the tokenism idea might have worked better if he’d made it clear that the tokens were selected from a small cliche of people, rather than the population at large. Then it’s clearer that the problem is tokenism, not capability, but – to be frank – I think anyone reading the story probably had enough background to understand what he was getting at.
In general, I think there are too many accusations of ‘white supremacism’ flying around. If you start applying it to criticisms of the identitarian left, then you lose the specific language to describe the kind of douchebags who yell ‘white power’ out of car windows (see the David Eggers article about searching for the KKK https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/17/dave-eggers-the-day-i-went-hunting-for-the-ku-klux-klan).
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Jan 17, 2017 @ 11:38:40
The logic of the story is that NASA used affirmative action to select a black pilot. This means that instead of getting the best possible pilot, they only got the best possible black pilot. But black people are so inferior to white people that even the best possible black pilot is hopelessly incompetent.
This is straight-up, old-school racism. At least the modern racism accepts the idea that individual black people can be as good as white people; it merely argues that blacks are less intelligent on average.
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Jan 17, 2017 @ 12:32:20
I assumed, largely due to the Jemisin reference, that the Mars mission was a direct stand-in for the Hugos. The rocket being the silver prize rocket or some such.
Worldcon is a very white, middle-aged, male convention so the tokenism message isn’t the same as it would be for NASA. NASA has the choice of every black person in America. Worldcon intrinsically ends up going back to the same writers again and again because there aren’t many of them.
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Jan 17, 2017 @ 13:27:54
[I should add that I don’t agree with Nick Cole here, but that’s how I read the meaning of his story. I assumed it was about tokenism in the US SF community, but found the reference to N.K. Jemisin petty. I now realise that the only reason I assumed it *was* about the US SF community was because of the Jemisin reference so, if he wasn’t intending to be old-school racist, name checking a specific SF author was probably necessary].
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Jan 18, 2017 @ 12:58:00
Perhaps, but NASA actually does have a black female astronaut named Mae Jemison. I think the truth is that the author is enjoying the opportunity to write a story that expresses his racism without apology. There might be a connection to the Hugos (perhaps it’ll be very obvious when I can read the whole thing) but I dont see how that changes anything. This is quite literally a white-supremacist story, and it’s message is “Disaster follows when you don’t keep the [black people] in their place.”
I’m very surprised at some of the other authors who allowed their stories to be part of this volume. Many of them were people who were at pains to say “although we won’t denounce Vox Day, we’re not white supremacists.” This makes that claim very difficult to believe.
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Feb 28, 2017 @ 18:03:53
Internet sleuthing on the part of someone at File770 intent on proving I knew who you were brought to my attention that I never replied to you here (I missed the pingback or something). My apologies!
No, I have not read Forbidden Thoughts yet. It may end up on my Things To Read list at some point, but I’ve had a lot on my plate trying to keep up with my reading for my weekly column reviewing pulp shorts; plus we’ll be having submissions open soon.
An online acquaintance of mine, Rawle Nyanzi, savaged the collection a bit (though admitted he gave up on it after only the first few stories, that he felt were rather preachy message fiction), and that put a bit of a curb on what excitement I had to check it out. I may still give it a shot at some point in the future, but since I only read print (I sit at a compy all day to work, so I hate reading on a screen) and my SF spending money is limited, it may be a bit before I get around to it. I have heard, however, from a number of other folks, that the collection is solid.
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Mar 05, 2017 @ 04:45:38
Apologies. I was replying to Greg who reviews short stories on Rocket Stack Rank, but got the threading wrong. Sorry about that.
I reviewed Forbidden Thoughts on my website (link near the bottom). I thought Rawle was a bit harsh. There were some strong stories, but they were towards the end of the anthology.
You did encourage me to look at File770. I find it hard to believe that the regulars are talking about someone who posted three times (I think) about two years ago. Also that they think we must know each other. I guess that comes of a worldview that anyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, must be members of a tiny clique. It’s fascinating that they believe that after Brexit and Trump.
If SF&F writers were representative of the wider US population, 26% of them should have voted for Trump. That’s a lot of writers (and fans). I’m actually left-wing and would have voted for Bernie Sanders had I been in the US and that been an option. I’m beyond the pale to File770 regulars because I’m a political liberal, a mindset probably shared by 14% of any given population. Part of the reason I originally posted there was to ask the question, “How politically intolerant are the noisy bits of Worldcon-voting fandom?” The answer turned out to be ‘very’.
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Jan 17, 2017 @ 02:29:52
My big problem with the Jemisin reference BTW is that I know she can write. I enjoyed ‘Playing Nice with God’s Bowling Ball’ and – by the same token – she could fly to Mars just fine. So the story didn’t work with that message.
The more intelligent criticism of tokenism is that it hurts the people it hopes to help. They’re never sure they deserve to be where they are, and they never quite fit in either. There’s a separate issue that message fiction intrinsically has a small audience, of course, and that goes for many of the stories in Forbidden Thoughts too.
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Forbidden Thoughts, Dissident Minds - Futures Less Travelled
Jan 22, 2017 @ 04:57:19
Forbidden Thoughts, Dissident Minds – Futures Less Travelled
Jul 12, 2020 @ 12:05:26