I started reading the last story, found it insufferable (review to follow), and stopped halfway through because I was heading out of town to do fun things with fun people for a few days. Which started me meditating on the concept of “fun.”
On one side of my personal Venn diagram of reading material is the fun stuff – books like Dungeon Crawler Carl that I’ll stay up late to finish. Or read multiple times. Or recommend to others. Or actually purchase.
On the other side are most of these Hugo nominees. Right next to the DMV manual, prep materials for the notary license exam, AI slop about inspiring moments, fan fic based on unfamiliar IPs, and all the other documents in the world that I really don’t want to read. And wouldn’t, aside from a compelling reason.
Such as “I originally signed up for this because I thought paying $200ish for this year’s cream of the crop science fiction might be a good deal but now I have buyer’s remorse so I’m forcing myself – Alex in Clockwork Orange style – to read all of these remarkably unlikable stories so I can render a cogent vote on which of them I dislike the least in order to mislead other prospective readers and encourage the authors of this sort of thing to crank out even more.” I even had to set up an elaborate self-administered reward system to incentivize myself to finish the task.
Occasionally I’ll see a thread on Reddit about popular books that some readers disliked. It’s always interesting to find books I enjoyed dismissed as horrible unreadable drivel. As far as the reverse, people celebrating books I couldn’t get into at all … that would include Lord of the Rings. And I made it through the first Dune but saw no reason to go back for more. And I disliked Harlan Ellison’s fiction so much I made a point of only reading his non-fiction, from library or used copies so as not to encourage him by giving him money.
So yeah, I grok the concept that people like different things. Still, that area of intersection between writing that evokes positive emotions in my subjective little brain and writing that feels like homework keeps growing smaller.
Moreover, I’m in the legalese industry, and my threshold for “dreary unreadable document” might be even lower than the norm. I’ve authored a few fascinating deep dives into such areas like “discovery response incongruities” or “discrepancies between the two lease agreements at issue” that would probably inspire most readers to suddenly remember a pressing errand.
And notwithstanding the hereinabove, there’s a culture gap between me and people who appear to really enjoy reading modern science fiction. When you’re a prospective writer, you do this thing where you befriend a bunch of writers – other prospectives as well as established – on your social media, and they befriend you (at least until you say something problematic), but they unfollow you, because they are mostly interested in having an audience for their own opinions and book advertisements, and they really don’t care about your new haircut or what you had for lunch.
Anyway, one of them (whom I won’t name because he’s going through some health distractions that provide most of an excuse) posted about discovering some science fiction person he disagreed with many years ago is schizophrenic. He crowing along the lines of he always suspected there was something wrong with him and now the mystery was solved! And he elaborated about how terrible it is that people who suffer from this “disease” can just go around saying things.
And I’m more aligned with the newfangled neurodiversity concept. I’ve known a few people with schizophrenia that are extremely intelligent and creative. It’s considered to be one of the many conditions under the umbrella of neurodiversity, along with autism, ADHD, giftedness, bipolar, Tourette’s, and others. My lay understanding of schizophrenia in particular is that the person’s brain cells transmitting thoughts are a bit more porous, and sometimes they get this effect that’s like old school AM radio, where the waves would travel a lot farther at night, and you’d be able to tune in stations from farther away. Sometimes you’d be listening to one song and then suddenly you’d be tuned into another station playing something entirely different.
Understandably, people with leaky shielding must question their reality far more frequently than most of us, but they’re not inherently dangerous. It’s an innate thing, not a disease you can catch. It can be managed but not cured.
And there’s a cultural aspect. Schizophrenics are happier in cultures that don’t consider them to be dangerous and contaminated.
If I were to extrapolate further, I might mention that the science fictional subculture is full of closeted neurodivergents, most of them older and coming from a world where people thought about mental health in different ways. Probably because psychology, along with many other kinds of medicine, has been going through lots of rapid change as new information is discovered and old information retired.
You can make a pretty good guess at a person’s age by learning their personal view of mental health, which tends to intersect with what they were taught as a young adult.
Some people seem to get mental health confused with dental health and assume mental illness strikes lazy people who didn’t do the equivalent of brushing and flossing.
Other people have a ‘ 70s style magical child approach, and think all mental health issues stem from developmental trauma. There are entire krunchy-kwak paths along these lines focused on avoiding exposure to various modern things: lurid fiction, over the counter medicines, video screens, processed food, autotune.
The more modern view is that people have a remarkable range of diversity. Some people are just autistic, schizophrenic, gifted, challenged, queer, creative, depressed, anxious, inclined to suddenly shout bad words. These cognitive differences relate to anatomy; they show up on imaging and aren’t subjective fallacies that people can be dominated into changing. They can be managed but not cured,
Quite a lot of speculative fiction tippytoes around these kinds of ideas, with space aliens, uplifted beasts, robots, elves, ogres, and other fanciful beings standing in for the general concept of “other humans whose brains process information differently than the author.”
I think it’s fair to say that an impartial observer with a background in mental health might think quite a few members of the speculative fiction writing community are closeted neurodivergents. The older members of it grew up in a world where concealing any potential clues that you were suffering from a “disease” was a matter of self-preservation. Anyone with any mental health issues at all was deemed “crazy,” thought to be capable of committing all the worst crimes, and needed to be either killed or confined for life.
That comes from a legal understanding. According to the legal standard, if you’re crazy, you don’t know the difference between right and wrong, which has led to occasional situations like murderers trying to escape accountability (see “Twinkie defense”) based on convoluted and trendy theories.
Anyway, after reading this old man’s diatribe my heart sank – for the schizophrenic writer, who had worked so hard wearing a mask, for something like half a century. Only to have a colleague who has known him, worked with him, and apparently never liked him turn on him and denounce him as though he were guilty of a felony.
There’s a lot of incentive to write about characters who are on the borderlines of what society considers sane, but lots of writers don’t do continuing ed so much as plumb new discoveries for ways to catastrophize about them in an engaging manner which hopefully will sell. They’re not as interested in that editor working diligently to hide his schizophrenia for decades, what’s interesting to them is insane serial killers, because books about them sell lots more copies.
Right now a lot of them are upset about AI. For a lot of well-founded reasons. And what are they doing about it? Constantly flooding my timeline with essays in which they present a dramatic closing argument, addressed to some invisible judge, about why AI is a bad thing, and everyone should hate it.
And here’s where I can’t stay in their ranks. Because my opinion about AI, or any other newfangled invention, for that matter, but especially those that present potential danger, is that we humans have a responsibility to come together and establish governance, guidelines, regulations, permitted and unlawful use. For example, in many countries that aren’t the US, the government Data Authority oversees things like collecting user data on websites.
If I ever saw one of these essays arguing that “AI is not going away so let’s establish some coherent guidelines,” I might share it, but instead I just see a lot of the same old bad closing argument cosplay I see on social media. “Agree with me, or I shall raise my voice.”
Americans are at a place where we can’t quite reach consensus about what responsible adults do anymore. Instead of working together to pass buckets and fight fires, we’ve got a bunch of people arguing about which bucket distribution diagram is best (or stealing and re-selling the buckets) while the building burns down.
And lots of these proposed bucket networks are grounded in that old school way of looking at mental health. Variance is a disease; a crime against authenticity. A dishonest kind of humanism, in my opinion. It requires ragebait if it’s going to get any clicks.
Which is kind of related to my dislike for murder mysteries, where some cheerleader for the author's favorite flavor of rationality seeks out the aberrant element so that society can continue functioning. I'm more of a horror fan -- the irrational is out there and it wants your blood, and you're not going to reason it away, so be careful.
Lots of rage vampires are out there these days, and there are also lots of AIs emulating them, with those soppy stories people keep sharing. In fact, it does seem that AI is far better than journalists when it comes to keeping the casual cortisol junkies among us jacked up on a permanent outrage buzz.
I feel like Goldilocks. I originally got into the Hugo Awards because people were complaining about too much papa bear energy. Now I’m stuck in this mama bear world where everyone’s trying to select books they can accessorize with their Compassionate Caring Person of Love persona.
Meanwhile, I just want to stay up until weird hours devouring page turners. So I’m wondering why I’m interfering in the bear family’s domestic struggle. The bear parents’ world tends to despise the kind of crowd-pleasing lowest common denominator stuff that I enjoy, Project Hail Mary and DC Carl and K-Pop Demon Hunters and all the rest.
If I can find one common denominator in those three, uh, works of art, I’d say they reflect this vision of extremely different people working together. A kind of non-toxic humanism that would look at a writer who is dealing with schizophrenia and think it might be interesting to hear their story arc.
The Hugos crowd is slowly working its way toward being more like that, and I’m seeing bright spots of light like T. Kingfisher (who seems done with the cozy trend, whew – really can’t wait for that to be played out) and Nnedi Okorafor and Isabel Kim. I can see them writing something that would keep me up until 2am. Something exciting, fierce, strong.
As for the rest of it … the fact I had to put that world on pause so I could focus on having a good time is telling.
