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This is an odd group of nominees, several of which appear to have nothing to do with Science fiction or fantasy, and as such hardly seem to qualify for a "Best Related Work category. Which is sad, because there was quite a variety of interesting and unquestionaly relevant works published this year. But this is what we have to work with.


“Why Science is Never Settled”, Tedd Roberts

Published in two parts on the Baen.com website, this nominated related work is in part a fairly straightforward description of the scientific process as performed in the modern scientific community, from the basics of the scientific method through to publication in peer-reviewed journals. The author states clearly that he, as a research scientist himself, agrees with the process. But. There's the other part to this, which I find myself a bit uneasy about in terms of how it's expressed even though I agree with it in both principle and fact.

The author is very concerned with what he fears is a general belief that science is "settled" - and that this is a problem both of the general public who don't understand that science keeps moving, that theories are tested and sometimes re-evaluated, and sometimes replaced with a theory that better explains the facts, and of the scientific community, which he suggests clings to consensus even when new theories are shown to be more effective in explaining phenomena.

Yes, both these things can be shown to happen, but putting too much emphasis on them also opens the door to the kind of thinking that says intelligent design should be accepted as an alternative theory to evolution because it challenges the status quo, or that the near-universal consensus on the human role in climate change means it's an outmoded theory that is only being held to because people fear change. I may be reading too much into Roberts' essay, but there it is.

Above and beyond that, I'm not sure that this is all that strongly related to science fiction or fantasy. Certainly there were a good many works published last year that were more closely related - the second volume of Patterson's biography of Heinlein, Jill Lapore's Secret History of Wonder Woman, critical looks at the fiction of Greg Egan and Robert Heinlein, the second volume of Jonathan Eller's study of Ray Bradbury, and critical essay collections by various people looking at sff, to mention just a few.



The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside

The hardest of hard sf writers and fans insist that sf should always be based on science that works. No transwarp drives to get us quickly to the action, no ansibles to give us faster than light communications, no transporters to mysteriously beam us up. It's not an argument I agree with, although I'm one of those who is comfortable seeing science fiction and fantasy as a continuum, with a great deal of material that one might label science fantasy in the rich, yummy middle. Ken Burnside starts from the premise that hard sf should conform to physics, and proceeds from there:
Ignoring thermodynamics is one of the cardinal sins of science fiction authors writing military SF; the same authors who wouldn't dream of saying that a Colt 1911A fires a .40 caliber bullet will blithely walk into even more galling gaffes through simple ignorance and unquestioned assumptions.
In this essay, Burnside takes on many of the "errors" made by science fiction writers who fail to appreciate the way that the laws of physics would shape travel - and war - in space: "As combat moves from the bosom of the Earth, and into orbital and interplanetary space, it will be limited by increasingly complex logistics and by thermodynamics."

He addresses such topics as the impossibility of stealth in space, the need for plausibility in propulsion systems (you can take off, orbit and land, or you can travel from orbit onwards, but you can't do both in one ship), and the weapons and tactics that would work in real space combat.

There's some interesting technical material here, and it clearly has something that some of the other nominations lack: actual relevance to science fiction or sff fandom.


Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright

In reading Michael F. Flynn's Introduction to Wright's collection of essays on science fiction and fantasy, one sentence leapt out at me: "He criticizes Pullman’s His Dark Materials in “The Golden Compass Points in No Direction”, less on Pullman’s atheism than on the failure of his art, where he sacrificed story in order to preach a sermon." The irony overwhelms - having read several examples of Wright's fiction in the past few weeks, I can think of no one this criticism applies to more than Wright himself.

The key essays in this collection make the same argument again and again, from different perspectives and with different examples. And the core of this argument is that modern speculative fiction, like many other aspects of modern life, is lacking in something valuable beyond imagining, and that something is the great mystery and truth of Christianity, particularly as taught by the Roman Catholic church.
You may think me blasphemous to use the Passion of the Christ as an example of drama, but not so: this is the one true story, the greatest story ever told, the tale of tales even as Christ is the King of Kings, and all truly inspired fairy tales and fiction have to contain some echo or reflection of the One True Tale, or else it is no tale of any power at all, merely a pastime.
- "John C. Wright's Patented One-session Lesson in the Mechanics of Fiction"
A secondary theme in this argument, which Wright also repeats in different ways, is the division of all that is wrong - that is to say, non-Christian - in life and fiction into four camps: worldliness, ideology, spiritualism and nihilism.
Christianity is the only religion that combines reason, ethics, spiritualism and individualism into one coherent theological picture of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Christianity is the center of the map of possible worldviews. Everything that deviates from it abandons one of these or the other in order to emphasize its opposite.
- "The Glory Game, or, The Bitterness of Broken Ideals"
Some of the essays also pass for criticism of various works, but as far as I can see, Wright's primary argument against work he feels compelled to criticise is that the author did not tell the story in the way Wright wanted it told. After arguing that the only real stories are those that embody the themes of the Christ story, he then calls out any story that does not in fact unfold in such a way as being no true story. Sometimes he even gets it right - for instance, when he excoriates the invented excesses in the second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug.

There is a great deal of unconscious irony in these critical essays. For instance, Wright devotes an entire essay to accusing Ted Chiang of intellectual dishonesty in his short story "Hell Is the Absence of God" for misrepresenting Christians, their beliefs and motives in ways that he insists are totally incorrect - and then proceeds in several other essays to fulminate against socialists, leftists, feminists for thinking and doing things that I as a socialist, a feminist, a leftist, have never seen other of my ilk say or do. It's kind of sad, actually, that he has so little self-awareness.

He accuses feminists, leftists, socialists, postmodernists and pretty much anyone he disagrees with of holding their values and beliefs - that life on earth can be improved - out of despair, because anyone who does not believe in the hope of salvation through Christ must, he believes, be racked with despair... even though it seems to me just as legitimate to argue that anyone who must believe in an invisible entity that will grant eternal life after death might also be responding to some existential despair.

Wright argues with passion, but more often than not he argues against straw dogs. One might wish for a little more intellectual honesty and a little less unthinking dogma in these essays. Perhaps even the notion that it's not that the Christ-tale is the one true story, so much as that one of the great archetypes that form the basis of our psychological being lends its power to the Christ-tale, as one of many such tales, just as the Ideal Form lends its power to the shadows on the wall of the cave.



Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli

The Hugo Voters Packet includes a "preview" of this book, which appears to contain roughly one-third of the material in the published version. My impressions are based on this truncated text.

Letters from Gardner is several things all at once - a folksy autobiography, a home for some early short stories that are, if they were ever published at all, not out of print, and some scattered advice on how to become a writer. Oh, and there's some correspondence with editor Gardner Dozois, hence the title.

Unfortunately, Antonelli is not really notable enough for anyone other than his fans, friends and family to find a memoir all that fascinating, the stories are, as early stories tend to be, somewhat lacking in many areas - not the least of which is female characters who are more than window dressing - the writing advice is pedestrian, and Dozois' notes to a promising novice writer are pretty much what you'd expect any editor to write under such circumstances. And - one of my personal pet peeves, having worked as a proofreader myself - the book is quite sloppily copyedited.


Wisdom from My Internet, Michael Z. Williamson

I am at a complete loss in trying to figure out what on earth this compendium of mostly unfunny one-liners has to do with science fiction or fantasy. Ok, he mentions Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and a few other sff texts that have become part of mainstream culture in North America, but I really don't think that's enough to justify the nomination.

And there's really not much more to say about it.

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