George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe

Gwern Branwen · 28 Apr 2015, 16:31 · from 2015-April.txt.gz

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From: gwern at gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:31:47 -0400
Subject: (urth) George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <CAMwAopRKzmGf5Z4uTzjND29zwyBXET9gwpL-KWgFQTOsRLrOWQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAMwAopRKzmGf5Z4uTzjND29zwyBXET9gwpL-KWgFQTOsRLrOWQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAMwO0gyY2D0E+geyv5dAxYVkza2uK5hSSCPiiVi2q1KPpas4UQ at mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Nick Lee <starwaterstrain at gmail.com> wrote:
> They never bring up Wolfe, from what I've seen, and you would think he's the
> perfect example. He's obviously Catholic and conservative, to a degree. See
> arguments about this in the past of the List and recently on Reddit. He's
> never won a Hugo despite numerous other accolades. You would think he'd be
> their most damning evidence. So what gives?

I saw this anti-Puppy argument previously brought up in, I think, a
New Republic blog; they added on as another example R.A. Lafferty. It
doesn't work because of the timing: the politicization of the Hugos
and associated sites like Tor.com (still publishing a notorious
cyberstalker because her politics & gender are correct, incidentally)
only really starts hitting in force in the '90s and '00s.

R.A. Lafferty wasn't even writing at that point, having given up until
his unpublished stuff sold and then went to meet his maker, and Gene
has still been writing but as much as I love his books, I would have a
hard time making the case that any of _The Wizard Knight_, _Pirate
Freedom_, _An Evil Guest_, _The Sorcerer's House_ or _Home Fires_
*really* deserved to take home a Hugo for Best Novel. (Just compare
the level of discussion on urth.net of any of those novels to that of,
say, _Peace_ or even some of the short stories - having read through
all of the hits for both, I think it's entirely possible that there
has been more discussion here of the scant few paragraphs of "Suzanne
Delage" than of the entirety of _Pirate Freedom_.)
_The Long Sun_ was good and did manage to get some nominations, but
also finished in '96 - or 19+ years ago now.

Hence, Lafferty's and Wolfe's nominations and awards are uninformative
since they either were in time periods where the Sad Puppies see
minimal problems, or they are drawn from a time period where the
relevant works did not exist / weren't clearly deserving of awards.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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