My mother's third husband was a total bastard. He was useless, critical, jobless, conservative, misogynist, and a homophobic. He used to torment my little brother by calling him the N-word. He would do this over and over again, to the point that my brother cried. It was a way of training my brother to see that as the worst thing someone could be. That, oh my brothers and sisters, is how you teach hate.
Despite all of this, he had great taste in books. This step-father was the one who got me started reading scifi/fantasy. He was a total asshole bastard, but he did have that one really good quality. And as much as I disliked him in every other way, the fact that he brought this love to my life (beyond my mother's reading Tolkien to me as a small child) is something I will always be grateful for. Even though we couldn't agree on anything else, books were the one place where we could find common ground.
So for most of my life, the books I read for entertainment were a place where personal identity politics didn't have a place. Yeah, sure, a lot of scifi/fantasy writers pepper their works with their political beliefs, but not everyone did. The point of SF/F is that you can create whatever world comes to mind. And yes, sometimes those worlds were problematic to me. A good writer, however, could transcend the identity politics and tell a very good story. At the end of the day, the love of the genre brought people together. Or, at least, it used to.
This year, a group of conservatives (mostly men) who call themselves the Sad Puppies hijacked the voting system of the Hugo awards to reflect the kind of books they enjoy reading. This was in retaliation to the fact that more and more women, people of color, and people of various orientations won most of the awards the years before.
My initial reaction to this, and still a great deal of my reaction to this is that it's wrong. Just because THEM OTHERS are suddenly winning the awards you see as 'yours' doesn't mean you should freak out and exclude people. This is what I always think when people bitch about 'why do they have black awards and Latin Grammies?' Okay, the Latin Grammies one is really stupid. Latin music is a GENRE of music. You can be as white as paper and win a Latin Grammy if you do Latin music.
Anyway, as I read further into the controversy, one of authors who is responsible for the Sad Puppies started talking about his own experience when he was nominated for an award at Worldcon. He is a conservative person and owns a gun shop. His politics skew right. Even before people read his books, they were talking about how much his politics angered them and how they would NOT read his work because of it. When he went to the con, he says he was treated poorly.
I have to say, this actually angers me as much as the Sad Puppies sabotaging the nominations. Is this what we have become as a people? That our politics are so important to us that we won't even give someone else's writing a CHANCE? This is for entertainment. This is the genre we love. This is the genre we all gravitated toward because we all wanted to explore other worlds. Will we limit that now? Worse, will we be assholes to people just because they think differently than we do?
Like I've written before, I think there was a lot of wisdom in how people used to not discuss politics, religion, and so forth in public. It was seen as rude. It put everyone in a bad mood. It's bad business. And it halts communication. And yes, I know I'm just as bad about this as everyone else. I won't go into Hobby Lobby because of politics.
It saddens me though. It saddens me because identity politics has become our religion. It guides our every move. It even alters how we would see a book. It makes us turn away from bands or even walk away from people. And while I get it, especially if the people you walk away from are wishing you harm or want to limit your freedom, I think it's sad that we're so divided.
Seriously. That step-father was the biggest, most horrible asshole ever, and even WE could find common ground in SF/F. I guess these days, we couldn't.
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