The Goodreads Sci Fi List, the Good Old Days, and Campbell's Shadow

[owlmoose]

It's been awhile since I looked at the gender and race balance of a book list, and a couple of months ago, one caught caught my attention: the most popular science fiction books on Goodreads. So I decided to run the numbers on gender and race representation and see how they looked. And I wrote up a whole post about that topic, the percentages and how they looked, and what it all might mean... and then the Hugo Awards happened. Two events connected to the awards gave me pause: John Campbell winning the 1945 Retro Hugo Best Editor award, and George R. R. Martin's choice to focus on a very particular version of fandom history (i.e. white and male) while hosting the ceremony for the 2020 awards. One comment that especially got me to thinking was this Tweet from Alasdair Stuart, co-owner of the Escape Artist podcasts and a finalist for fan writer this year:

Campbell's specific definition of what SF he wanted didn't just shape a 'golden age' it shaped the critical criteria we use to assess what's good and what isn't. If you don't think that's intensely damaging and we're still paying the price for it, then look up Tiptree's career.

I highly recommend the whole thread, which discusses Campbell as well as H.P. Lovecraft (who won the Retro Hugo for Best Series), and the shadow that both of these figures still cast over fandom... and, from my perspective, into this Goodreads list.

So we'll start with the post as-written before August 1st, and then I'll get into my thoughts on Campbell's shadow, and the problems with a particular way of looking at our history.

In the beginning were the numbers. A couple of caveats: I definitely recognize the issues inherent with treating gender as a binary, although as far as I know, there are no out non-binary authors on this list. Corrections on this point are definitely welcome! Also, authors also do not necessarily go public about whether they identify as people as color, so some assumptions on that point are necessarily involved. (I initially planned to check for LGBTQIA representation on the list, but I had even less hard data on that and decided it was better to skip it than to make further problematic assumptions.) But even with these limitations, I still think there's value in looking at representation by the numbers in lists presented as a source of sharing books with potential new readers, as long as we're upfront about what those limitations are.

So, how are those numbers? Well, they're not great.

• Books by men: 78
• Books by women: 21
• One book co-written by a man and a woman
• Books by white people: 89
• Books by people of color: 10
• One book co-written by a white man and a woman of color

Of the 75 authors of the list, 18 (24%) are women, of whom 14 (78%) are white, and 57 are men, of whom 52 (91%) are white; in total, 88% of the authors are white. And there is no Latinx or Native representation at all. One Asian man (Ted Chiang) and one Black woman (Octavia Butler) have more than one book on the list, with two apiece. The three white women with multiple books on the list also have two apiece. The person with the most books on the list is John Scalzi, with four; seven white men have three books on the list and five more have two. It's something I've noted before when writing about lists like this: white men get to be recognized multiple times, while white women and people of color are allowed one entry, maybe two if they're lucky.

So, not great. But this list is a little different than ones I've examined in the past, because it's not presented strictly as a best-of list. Instead, it's described as a list of the "most popular" science fiction books on Goodreads. Here's how they describe their methodology:

To create our list, we ran the data to reveal the most reviewed books on our site. Additionally, each title needed at least a 3.5-star rating from your fellow readers to join this list. And, since science fiction is known for its continuing voyages, in the case of multiple titles from the same series, we chose the one with the most reviews.

This clears up a few things I thought were strange at first, like Shards of Honor as the sole representative of the Vorkosigan Saga (not that it's a bad book, by any means, but I don't think most fans of the series would call it the best). Also, since Goodreads has a strict (and sometimes arbitrary) definitional split between science fiction and fantasy, there are some authors missing, like N. K. Jemisin and Anne McCaffrey, whom I would otherwise expect to be here, and in my experience books defined as "science fiction" skew even more white and male than books described as fantasy or that straddle the borders of genre.

The rankings being based on sheer volume of reviews might also help explain why it feels so much like an American high school reading list. Over half the books in the top ten (seven) are books I read for a class in junior high or high school (mostly English classes, although I read 1984 for American government). One of the others is Ender's Game, which I believe also made it into school curricula after my time (although I hope not anymore). Many of us have read these books because many of us were required to read them.

On the other hand, there's a bit of a recency bias in the back half of the list, particularly the bottom ten titles, which were all published within the last five years. Here are the books grouped roughly by decade:

• 19th century: 5 books
• First half of the 20th century: 5 books
• 1950s: 9 books
• 1960s: 13 books
• 1970s: 9 books
• 1980s: 8 books
• 1990s: 9 books
• 2000s: 8 books
• 2010s: 34 books - over a third of the list

Are sci-fi books better than they used to be? I think there's a fair case to be made that they are. But there's also the fact that Goodreads has only been around since 2007, and it didn't really go wide until Amazon bought them in 2013. I'm sure there are people who went back into their reading history and added books they read before they started using the site, but I have to imagine they're a distinct minority. (I've done a little of that, but my own Goodreads library is nowhere near comprehensive.) So what books get added to the site in large numbers? Perennial classics, like the high school reading list titles I mentioned above, a handful of golden age giants, and new books. And guess who writes the perennial classics, and who gets to be considered the golden age giants? That's right: white dudes. (And presumably mostly cis straight white dudes, although as mentioned above I don't have hard data on that.)

And this is where I get to Campbell and the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony. Not, I hasten to add, the 2020 Hugo Awards themselves! The ballot was an excellent one, full of worthy finalists and with some great representation. All of the Best Novel finalists were women - I believe mostly (all?) queer women - and many marginalized groups represented across many categories. Chimedum Ohaegbu, managing editor of Uncanny Magazine, was the first Black woman to win in the semiprozine category; Ana Grilo of The Book Smugglers was the first Brazilian to win any Hugo Award, ever. Heck, two of the finalists (finalist novel Gideon the Ninth and winning novella This Is How You Lose The Time War) are on this very Goodreads list. But the Retro Hugos and the ceremony for the 2020 awards, as conceived and executed by George R.R. Martin, were very much a celebration of white dudes: many of the white dudes who are heavily represented on this very list. Consider the authors with more than two entries on the list; you might notice something (beyond the fact that they are all white men):

• John Scalzi
• Arthur C. Clarke
• H.G. Wells
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Neal Stephenson
• Phillip K. Dick
• Ray Bradbury
• Robert A. Heinlein

Wells predates John Campbell, and some of the others didn't start writing (and, in at least one case, wasn't even born) until after Campbell's heyday, but he famously helped bring Clarke and Heinlein to prominence, and his taste as an editor helped shape the world where authors like them (including, I would say, many of the other authors listed here) could gain longstanding popularity. Why are we still reading the work of these particular authors who debuted almost a century ago, while other names have faded into obscurity? Why did George R. R. Martin mention Heinlein dozens of times during the ceremony (sometimes referring to him as "the dean of science fiction" multiple times in one anecdote), while thousands of other writers didn't merit a mention? Because the books on this list are better than the ones that aren't? Or because these authors' writing -- and Campbell's influence -- defined what science fiction "means" to generations of other writers and fans? In her 2019 acceptance speech for what is now known as the Astounding Award, Jeannette Ng reminded us that Campbell was “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.” Not just by the authors he chose to publish, or by his infamous editorial decisions like influencing an author to kill a female character in the short story "Cold Equations", but by the authors he chose not to publish: white women, people of color, LGBTQA authors, anyone who didn't fall in line with his worldview. And I think this is what Alasdair Stuart means by Campbell's shadow. It's both light and darkness, forcing some names to stay current in perpetuity while others were either forgotten or, when they are remembered, are thought of as somehow "lesser." And that shadow also fell into the Hugo Awards ceremony, as Martin repeatedly praised Campbell, referring to him as "the greatest of all", acknowledging neither the award's name change nor Ng's speech, which itself won a Hugo for Best Related Work.

Are things changing? Maybe, slowly. It's a stretch to say that Martin's Hugo Award MC performance was met with universal horror, but it got a lot more public pushback than it might have a few years ago. And if you run the numbers on the 42 books published in the 21st century, the picture is a little better: 13 books with a woman author or co-author (31%), and 9 books with at least one author of color (21%). Will any of these books stand the test of time? Will we still be reading them and sharing our love for them in fifty years? More than one person has described the last five years or so as a new golden age of science fiction and fantasy. And new books are getting more diverse, with a broader community of authors being published and a wider variety of books getting publicity and good word of mouth. Don't get me wrong -- there's still a long way to go. Those numbers are nowhere near 50%, and who's to say we shouldn't push to get them even higher? But it's progress. And what's brought that progress is pressure: pressure to get these books published, to read them, to share the word. To give them awards and recognize their authors publicly. To look forward into the future instead of back into the past. So we need to keep that pressure going, not just on publishers and awards but in the wider SFF culture. Talk up your faves, from this year and from years past, to keep them alive in people's memories, and help create the classics of the future. Because isn't creating the future supposed to be what science fiction is all about?