An SF Award Controversy

As I noted in Monday's blog, the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday afternoon. I watched the webcast and was somewhat taken aback by the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Jeanette Ng, who started her speech by calling Campbell "a fucking fascist". Needless to say, this was somewhat controversial.

Had it been me receiving the award (which technically is not a Hugo), I don't think I would have started my speech that way, although I might have referred to Campbell's politics and controversial ideas. Ng did say that the field has moved on from Campbell's tutelage, and she is certainly right in saying that and that it's a good thing.

If you want a better idea of what Campbell was like, see the book Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee. Based on what I read in the biography and what I've read of Campbell's own writing (both as an author and an editor; I've probably read hundreds of his editorials in Astounding/Analog), calling him a fascist is accurate (though he was not a Nazi supporter).

For more about this see Cory Doctorow's comments on Boing Boing.

So when Ng held Campbell "responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists," she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We're trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We're trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

And this from John Scalzi:

 And what I think is: Hey, you know what? Campbell, aside from everything else he might have been, was a racist and a sexist and as time went on pretty deeply way the hell out there, and from his lofty perch he was able to shape the genre into what he thought it should be, in a way that still influences how people write science fiction — for fuck’s sake, I write science fiction in an essentially Campbellian manner, and it would be foolish for me to suggest otherwise.

Do those bigoted aspects about about Campbell make him an actual fascist? Well, I wouldn’t have characterized him as such, but then never thought to think of it in those terms, so there’s that. Now that I have been made to think of it, I know that the people and organizations I would have unhesitatingly called fascist actively incorporated the mechanisms of American racism into their worldview. It’s not exactly a secret that the actual Nazis looked to the United States’ “Jim Crow” laws for inspiration and justification for their own racism and, ultimately, genocide. American racism — the racism that Campbell both actively and passively forged into the structure of the science fiction genre — is at the very least an ur-text to fascism, and of course racism is so deeply ingrained into fascism today, and vice versa, that you couldn’t separate the one from the other without killing both, which, incidentally, is a very good idea.

Both authors, incidentally, are past winners of the Campbell award.

And a late addition, here's a Twitter thread from N. K. Jemisin, winner of the Best Novel Hugo award three years in a row.

::rubs eyes, sighs:: White supremacy *is* fascism. End of day, the goal is to empower an authoritarian caste-based system of governance, in part by scapegoating black& brown "enemies of the state." For fuck's sake, people, we're *living* it; come on, keep up.