There’s one more story with between five and ten recommendations on the Nebula Reading List. This is “The Continuing Saga of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet” by James Van Pelt, published in Analog. I gather from other reviews that this is an entertaining read, but it’s not available online so I’ll have to defer comments. That’s means I’m done with this set of reviews and ready to sum up some thoughts.
As I expected, the message fiction thinly disguised as SFF dropped off as I got deeper into the list, to be replaced with the usual highly sentimental stuff that all the pro magazines publish these days. There’s heavy emotional content in every one of these stories. Limited themes. Four of the eight are about abused children, and one more is about elderly dementia. That suggests the Nebula is a competition to see who can provide the biggest emotional whallop.
Other than that, science fiction in general is clearly in trouble here. The two stories that might be SF only use that as a framework to present the story—it’s not at all necessary to the plot. There are no serious questions or ideas offered up, no real predictions of where we might be going in the future. I have to conclude that science fiction, what Pamela Sargent calls “the literature of ideas” is dying. Instead, people want to cry about something.
So why is this happening? Some of it is social trends, of course. People may be just less interested in questions and ideas these days and more interested in emotional chills. But there’s something else, too, which is that this is how people are now taught to write. Last year I meant to comment on this, and I located this quote about teaching methods for children: “…an emphasis on emotions and feelings and ‘expressing’ them. This pressures children to produce work that is cathartic and trite—a very bad combination—and puts the teacher, to say nothing of the classmates, in the position of acting as an untrained, ersatz therapist…”
Unfortunately the link I have for this now seems to be bad, meaning it may have been taken down. More fortunately, there are other sources available. For example, Advanced Writing: Fiction and Film by Wells Earl Draughon offers advice on how to get started on a successful story. Draughon suggests that opening with a character is dull and boring unless some kind of suffering is also attached. This hook attracts the reader and produced sympathy for the character that will lead into the story. By definition, this emotional hook has to be trite or “stock” in order for the reader to quickly understand it. Everyone now expects this. So, in order to get your story published, you have to sift through all the trite trigger situations out there and try to find a creative way to incorporate some overused theme, i.e. child abuse, into your story. If you’re really good at it, then you can be a star writer.
But where does this leave SFF as a genre? As a potential reader, I end up with a choice of the same stock situations used repeatedly as themes because they’ve got great emotional hooks. As a writer, I’m limited in what I can present because I have to stick to these strict requirements to capture an editor’s attention. Add to this the apparent trend to progressive message fiction in the pro magazines that the top of the Nebula list indicates, and you’ve got content that’s restricted to emotional, hot-button issues with no new ideas, and heaven forbid that there be any actual science in there. It’s too cold and clinical for a story to actually ask questions about space travel or the future of the human race.
Is there any hope for change on this?
Lela E. Buis 
Feb 06, 2017 @ 00:34:34
In every decade since the forties written science fiction has been steadily nudged in the direction of more onerous rules that yield narrower and narrower audiences.
There is hope for change, but it requires ignoring deadweight editors and instead breaking the rules that got us to this dead end.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 21:58:34
Thanks, Jeffro. In this case, SF seems about nudged out of existence. I’ll wait for the nominations to come in for further comment, but so far the results aren’t promising for a SF nomination.
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 00:54:46
The solution is to stop reading Nebula nominees. I the big publishers fail to satisfy don’t buy their product.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 21:59:03
Likely a good suggestion.
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 00:58:20
Not in the Nebulas.
Not in the Hugos.
As you say, science fiction is being relegated to settings rather than stories. We see this when stories are sold as “romantic science fiction” when they are, in reality, science-fictiony romances. The “highbrow” science fiction, that which aspires to be literature and win awards, has actually become lowbrow: cheap emotional manipulation with technology thrown in.
I believe the tribal consensus has trapped everyone involved in a vicious cycle of expectations. This kind of fiction “should” be written and is “supposed” to win, therefore it does, because people are “supposed” to vote for it.
Contrast this to the Dragons…
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 09:57:45
Something I have been trying to tell authors, particularly of short fiction, is that they need to bypass the process altogether and start their own zines.
There are three options, really:
1)Try to find an existing outlet that’s similar to what you want to write. This can be hard, especially at the pro-level, because a lot of the markets seem to be kinda trash.
2)Start your anthology/zine series, publishing your own pieces in it when you can. This works if you’re not as concerned with big upstart investment costs and want to retain a greater degree of editorial control over what your own stories will be appearing with.
3)Find fellow authors who would be willing to start a regular zine with you. This is a great way to increase the readerships of all contributors, and with some sort of co-op system agreed upon, there is less overhead than taking upon oneself the responsibility of editorship. Each writer may take a turn at the helm or pick one from amongst them whose judgment everyone trusts. The trick is making sure that everyone gets their cut in a manner that they can be happy with and no one feels shortchanged.
I went with option 2, because I like the degree of control it gives me over what I publish. I don’t think I have the accounting chops to handle something like 3, but for those who do, that may be the best option.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 22:02:30
Another good suggestion. It looks like the SF crowd has already looked at the situation and come up with solutions.
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 10:02:03
Across the ,a href=”http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2016-ytd-by-magazine.html”>eleven magazines I review, emotional stories are very, very rare. Maybe one or two in a hundred. I value a story with an emotional punch, provided it earns it. David VanDyke’s “What Price Humanity?” has such a punch at the end (not counting the framing story).
But 98% of SFF stories today have zero emotional punch, often because they have lifeless characters. Lots and lots of stories are all idea, zero characterization, and minimal plot. That SFF tradition is alive and well. If aspiring writers are being told to put a cheap emotional hook at the start of their stories, all I can say is, SFF writers aren’t doing it.
The Nebula suggested reading list is just that–a list of stories that SFWA members (of any level–even I get to add to the list) have suggested people look at before nominating. It’ll be interesting to see what the actual nominations look like.
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 13:42:04
Thanks for the props. Emotion has its place; in fact, it’s essential. But most of us recognize sappiness and manipulation when we see it. I cringe anymore when otherwise good fiction head straight for the cheap tropes.
I think the question Lela raises is this: why does mostly that kind of fiction seem to get nominated and win awards? I don’t think it’s because it’s better. I suspect there’s a measure of “supposed to” here, and even more “not supposed to.”
So we have the vast majority of sci-fi, like Greg cites, and then we have the stories that are “supposed to” win awards–just like with the Oscars, there are great movies that will never win anything more than some ancillary award, such as for special effects or sound or editing–never Best Picture of Best Actor/Actress. Those are reserved for certain approved styles of tug-the-heartstrings dramas.
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Feb 06, 2017 @ 16:50:34
The problem seems to be confined to just the Nebula list, though. Most of the short stories at the top of the Nebula Suggested Reading List are ones I haven’t read or else didn’t much like for other reasons. The novelettes and novellas look much more like what I’d expect them to. There is something strange about the Best Short Story list. I’ll be interested to see if that carries over to the actual nominations.
The previous two years have been very distorted by the slating campaigns and by the WSFS members’ response to those campaigns. If you look at my organic estimates for the 2016 Hugos, you’ll see none of the short stories is what I’d call sappy (two are horror, in fact). Two of the novelettes are moving, but not what I’d call sappy. (Silly is a different matter.) Two of the novellas are moving, but, again, not sappy. (Bad is a different question.)
Again, we’ll see what the actual nominees and longlists look like, but I think you guys are generalizing from just a few examples. It is certainly very easy to read a story that moves you to tears and reflexively want to score it very highly, and that’s going to affect any awards system. However, I don’t see that it has very much of an effect on the Hugos and Nebulas.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 22:14:12
David, it leaves you wondering how we got to this point.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 22:13:12
Greg: Definitely the results will be interesting. My point with this blog post is that the Nebula and its reading list are the product of the SFWA, the professional organization that professes to represent science fiction writers. You can make excuses for the Hugo Award, which boils down to a fan popularity contest, but the SFWA are industry professionals. Members should be recommending well-written stories that would reflect well on the Nebula Award if nominated. The lack of support for science fiction stories in these recommendations is definitely troubling.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 22:30:31
But only the short stories. Not the novelettes, and not the novellas. I’ll be interested to see what impact it has on the actual Nebula list.
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Feb 09, 2017 @ 23:21:26
Greg: I suspect the difference you’re seeing in stories (emotional vs. lifeless) is in the education of the writers. I’m starting to suspect that writers that come out of MFA programs or graduate from professional workshops go for strong hooks and shun science. People who are just interested in science or science fiction and want to write struggle with the literary aspects. There’s not much middle ground, it seems.
(Oops. Thank for correction from Greg Hullender.)
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Feb 10, 2017 @ 12:45:04
I’ve heard that theory from various sources, but, in my own reading (5.5 million words of short SFF in 2016, 818 stories, including every story in the top 11 magazines and the top 11 anthologies) it’s just not what I’m seeing. Lots of stories have bad science AND bad writing. (Sturgeon’s Law has not been repealed.) Stories that look like an MFA (not MBA–I think those stories would be REALLY dull!) who hates science wrote them are very, very rare. Nor do they turn up in recommendation lists.
When I see what I think of as “undeserving” stories that got recommended anyway, it is always for one of two reasons: Most commonly, there is some really cool idea in the story that was enough for the reviewer to overlook the poor quality of the writing. Less commonly, the story makes some really strong political statement that the reviewer apparently loved so much that he/she couldn’t see past it.
Emotion does matter, but only, I think, at the last stage. People love a story that has strong enough characters that we care about them. “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” was an example of an insubstantial story with a very silly “what if” but it had a strong message and I suspect the emotional punch is what put it over the line. But the same story with a guy and a girl would have had zero support–emotion or not.
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Feb 10, 2017 @ 13:58:27
Here’s a blog post that adds a little illumination:
http://www.castaliahouse.com/guest-post-by-karl-gallagher-genre-and-emotion/
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Feb 10, 2017 @ 17:59:11
Interesting piece. Thanks for linking to it.
Where he goes wrong, I think, is where he tries to define genre as a tag that tells the reader what sort of emotional experience to expect. That doesn’t work well for mainstream (“sorrow” really?) and it breaks entirely for science fiction.
Instead, I think genre tells the reader a) what setting to expect and b) what sort of action to expect. A Western will take place on the US frontier in the 1850s-1870s. It’ll involve conflicts with sheriffs, ranchers, and desperadoes. A Civil War novel is going to take place during the US Civil War and it’ll involve soldiers, slaves, refugees, etc.
Science Fiction is broad, so we need sub-genres, and it’s arguable we haven’t named those very well. (E.g. “planetary romance” supposedly describes an adventure in the solar system beyond the Earth, but who actually uses that term?) ” “Hard SF” tells you that the action will involve a real problem in science or technology. “Soft SF” doesn’t tell you anything, but notice that almost no one ever uses it to describe a particular story.
But trying to drag in emotion is a big mistake. For a story to have an emotional impact (other than a cheap one), it has to have strong characters. Most writers cannot write strong characters to save their lives. If this were what SF depended on, it would have died a long time ago.
I do believe that the writers who can write strong characters, really do deserve to win the awards–provided the rest of the story is up to snuff. It’s how I distinguish a 4 from a 5-star story, for the most part. I agree that that’s a debatable point, though.
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