Dead Horse Press

Thank you for so generously supporting my interns’ unauthorized goof-off project.

Life is unique, we might say, in its resistance to death.

In general, histories of a genre can’t be written by looking at a list of award winners. Most awards are decided by committee, and consequently, they represent nothing so much as the taste of a few people. By contrast, the Hugos are awarded by a much larger group of people that anybody can join: WorldCon.

Sadly, Space Raptor Butt Invasion wasn’t nominated based on its literary merit. Its inclusion on the Hugo slate was a joke, one meant to protest the failure of the previous year’s Sad Puppies nominees. Beginning as a blog post in 2013 where Larry Correia suggested bloc voting as a way to get his own works nominated, the Puppies quickly ballooned into full-on fandom warfare, with hotly contested battle lines and objectives. For Correia and like-minded Sad Puppies, the Hugos were unjustly favoring “literature” over “pulp,” the latter of which is the true sci-fi.

Other political actors were perfectly willing to use the Sad Puppies movement as a pulpit for unabashedly right-wing politics. I am referring, of course, to Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day. Like Correia, he benefitted personally from voting slates, ones he promulgated under the moniker Rabid Puppies. Unlike the more moderate Sads, Beale was and is quite forthright about his alt-right political views. He embodies the ironic racist channer routine we’ve all come to detest encountering online. Perhaps the most notable quote from the previous link is his defense of Anders Breivik:

Five years later on one of his blogs, Beale praised Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik’s “highly effective blow against the political machine,” and wrote that he could be considered a “hero.” Conceding that Breivik “did a terrible thing” by murdering 77 people, mostly children, Beale then argued that the children weren’t innocent, but “larval” politicians akin to Young Republicans or Hitler Youth. “In any event, my expectation is that if the West, and Norway, survive the ongoing clash of civilizations, Breivik will be considered its first hero,” he writes.

This is one of the few moments in the profile where Beale expresses any genuinely-held beliefs without the defense of irony. He began the piece by saying he identifies as Native American and therefore a description as “white supremacist” would be culturally insensitive, but that’s only the foot in the door.

He has to boil the frog. Even a clicks-driven business like The Daily Dot wouldn’t continue profiling a proud racist after he admitted it in 2020. He has to play coy, to act like he totally doesn’t want the attention a profile in a respectable publication will bring him, so that he can give the real pitch to as many listeners as possible. The pitch: you can be a hero. If you help me push non-white degenerates out of the public sphere, then, when we win, everybody will know your name.

This is the sort of future-forward thinking we should expect from any sci-fi author who wants their work to age well. At present, that calculus is deeply political, and perhaps it always was.

I’m lifting weights, listening to my buddy Marcus talk about judgement, decency, the place of mankind in the universe. I nod and think, my God, he’s talking to me. He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking, putting my own unspoken musings to words, to reality. My mind is connected to thousands of years of the tradition of human thought and wrestling with the divine. I put the weights down, look up. A 20-something young woman looks back at me from the gym mirror. In my ear, Marcus remarks on how glad he was that in his youth he resisted the urge to rape his slaves. Gee, Marcus, I guess I’m glad about that too. He says, “Consider the deformity of these characters, […]the effeminate, the savage, the beastly, the childish, the foolish, the crafty, the buffoonish, the faithless, the tyrannical.” I consider it.

I go on to read The Odyssey and The Illiad. I get invested in characters that periodically squabble about the women they’ve taken as war prizes. I open a random short story submitted to a fantasy fiction contest on Substack about a warlord raising the son of his enemy. The man’s going against tradition by not killing the child, and he’s venerated for it in the narrative. A passing sentence mentions his bedslaves. In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, I don’t resent this. I understand the context in which these stories written. I will not cancel Marcus fucking Aurelius, but nor will I ignore ideas in his work because they are inconvenient. I understand and interpret them as part of the whole.

So please don’t lecture me about all writers being “of their time.” Consider, instead, the simple and horrifying truth that every woman, and every slave, through all of history, has been exactly as human as you and I. They have been exactly as capable of intelligence, honor, strength, and creativity as any person in the modern era. No matter how “of their time” a writer was, this has always been true. Always. It is a difficult fact to comprehend, because comprehending it opens a vast pit beneath your feet into which you must fall, a pit of suffering — suffering, that is, of intellect, of creativity, of philosophical principle — on a scale you are not equipped to comprehend. But it must be comprehended. It is a logical truth.

When I read, despite all the castles of spiritual and natural wonder being built around me, I am periodically punted back into my own body with the realization that this is not about me. This is not for me. I am not a player in this. I am not the intended partner in this conversation. My engagement with these ideas on equal terms is explicitly precluded.

The best evidence available to me is my own experience, and I know that I am a woman, and I am human. I am thus aware, by my existence within my own consciousness, that women are capable of ambition, intelligence, and spiritual depth, such a large blind spot tends to call into question everything else that a work, fictional or otherwise, is trying to say about human nature or the natural way things are. If someone starts their treatise on meteorology by saying that the sky is green, one would naturally have some doubts about what follows.

Perhaps the great strength of womanhood is that it never, ever allows you to take things at face value.

And, eventually, I incorporated a lot of the ideas I discovered there into my own creative work. Peeling back the skin of a particularly bad story and pointing out all the flaws is a great way to teach someone how stories work. Eventually, this no longer suffices as creative education, and the student has to start looking for good examples to emulate, rather than bad examples to avoid (A Black Fox Running is one of those brain-stretching good examples).

However, once you actually start recommending a book, telling someone to actually seek it out rather than to avoid it, the question of spoilers comes into play. Now, this is a tricky subject, and I think my opinion on it differs from the mainstream one. Many people covet the unspoiled experience of a story, and I understand that. However, there have been multiple times in my life where the only reason I approached a story in the first place was because I stumbled upon a massive spoiler and thought hey, that sounds awesome, I’ll check it out! (this was the case with my favorite show, Black Sails, and one of my favorite books, Monstrous Regiment). Often, it’s knowing that there will be a big payoff to come that keeps me engaged with a work. It also helps to keep my attention when someone has already highlighted certain strengths of the book to me before I read — for instance, “the prose-style emphasizes the role of the environment in a really interesting way” or “I’m obsessed with this character.” That way, I know it’s worth continuing to invest my time and attention (I’ve been burned many times before).

Additionally, I think the best stories are able to hold up to multiple readings — ie, that they have more to offer as a whole even when the reader knows the linear events of the plot. Essentially, spoilers aren’t a major concern for me unless they make me think things are going to turn out shittily on a craft level, in which case I’m less likely to open the book at all.