Musings on the Campbell Awards Kerfuffle

As per usual,
please keep disagreements (and there will be some) calm and reasonable.

I’ve got a habit of trying to avoid jumping to
conclusions, posting commentary and generally taking the first reports too
seriously, whatever happens, because the first reports are – at best – often
lacking in context.  I find that waiting
often adds context, allowing me to
see a fuller picture of what actually happened
and, slightly less importantly, lets me see what other people (for or against)
have to say about it.  These days, you
just can’t trust anyone to present a full picture in the expectations you’ll
make up your own mind.  People have a
nasty habit, now, of trying to serve as ‘thought leaders’ rather than trusting
their readers.

In this case, events moved on more than I had
anticipated, although I suppose I should have expected that.  The Campbell Awards have been renamed, with
the response ranging from ‘about time’ to ‘yet another craven surrender to the
social-justice bully mob.’  The idea of
renaming the Hugo Award has been ruled out (for the moment).  Another award has been renamed.  And there is, as always, much bad feeling on
both sides. 

For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:

I have never (knowingly) met Jeannette Ng.  I have never read any of her books.  I don’t have any real feelings, positive or
negative, for her.  That said, I do think
it’s rather cheeky to accept the award, on one hand, while bashing the award’s
namesake on the other.  It would have
made a much greater impression on me, I admit, if she had declined the award
because she didn’t care for its namesake. 
Instead, she seems to have wanted to have her cake and eat it too. 

Personally, if I knew the award’s namesake (who died
eleven years before I was born and therefore couldn’t have voted for or against
me) would have hated the idea of me winning the award for things beyond my
control, I might have indulged in a minor gloat.  But that would have been pointless.  The people who voted for or against me (and,
in the real world, for or against Jeannette Ng), were not chosen or directly
influenced by Campbell.  The award has
not only outlasted him, it has outgrown him.

It is a fundamental fact of history that all of the
greats, men and women alike, have feet of clay. 
We now know that JFK and Martin Luther King were womanisers.  We now know that Nelson Mandela flirted with
communism.  We now know that Abraham
Lincoln had some repressive instincts, that George Washington owned slaves,
that Bonnie Prince Charlie was a drunkard and a wife-beater, that … I could
go on and on.  Go back a handful of years
and you’ll discover that people who were ‘woke’ for their era are nothing of
the sort for us.  But does this mean that
we should reject what they did?  The greatest people of history are not
weighed down by their sins.  They manage
to rise above them.

John Campbell was not, even in the view of some of his contemporaries,
a very nice man.  He seems to have been
one of those people who was either loved or hated, with very little middle
ground.  (I never met him).  By modern standards (and even by some
contemporary standards) he was a racist. 
He was a sexist.  He may have been
a fascist.  (I’m reluctant to say
anything definite about that because ‘fascist’ is one of those words that has
lost a great deal of meaning through overuse.) 
This is not easy to deny.  I’ve
read a handful of his essays and some of them made me uncomfortable.  But then, Campbell would hardly be the only
writer to make me uncomfortable (and some of them are contemporary
writers.) 

At the same time, John Campbell was also one of the
founding fathers of science-fiction.  It
was Campbell who recognised the talents of people like Heinlein, Asimov and
many others.  It was Campbell who gave
them a platform and a chance to make their names.  Without Campbell, would we have Heinlein, Asimov, et al? 
Would we have a community that has – as I said above – outgrown its
founders?  Would science-fiction as we
know it today even exist? 

There seems to be an unspoken and thus unchallenged
assumption amongst many of the ‘erase Campbell from history’ commenters that a
community without Campbell would have embraced a golden age of ‘woke’
science-fiction, in which authors of colour and gender would have been
appreciated for their talents instead of being unfairly excluded.  But is that actually true?  The history of racism and race relations in
the United States is a great deal more complex than such assessments
suggest.  Real-life Benny Russell
characters faced more problems than just a single bigoted editor.  Campbell believed that their work wouldn’t
sell and he might have been right – I say might
because I don’t know.  Campbell’s job was not to purchase works
merely on their merits, but purchase works that would sell.  Publishing a story
that might not, for whatever reason, sell would be a misstep, one Campbell
might not be able to afford.  Could he
take the risk?

This was more pervasive than one might expect.  Heinlein, who was pretty much the figure in science-fiction in his
later years, had to use a number of tricks to obscure his early non-white
characters.  Mr. Kiku from The Star Beast is very clearly
non-American, for example; Rod Walker of Tunnel
in the Sky is black, but written in a way that allowed Heinlein to claim
plausible deniability if this blew up in his face.  (He did this so well that his editor raised
suspicions of an interracial romance (miscegenation, in the parlance of the
times).  And while one may make sharp
remarks about Sixth Column (written
by Heinlein, following a plot heavily influenced by Campbell), it should be
borne in mind that the crimes of the Pan-Asians of the novel pale in comparison
to the real-life crimes of Imperial Japan.

Campbell was not perfect. 
Far from it.  But his contribution
to the field cannot be denied.  It is
certainly far in excess of the contributions made by his detractors.  And yes, I feel we should not forget the good
he did, as well as the bad.

A number of commenters have claimed that POC authors feel
uncomfortable accepting awards named for people who would have rejected them,
for publication, on the grounds of skin colour. 
I don’t know if this is true.  (Jeannette
Ng accepted the award.)  I do know that I
don’t feel that way.  The award has
outgrown its namesake. 

To put this in some context, consider this.  The Order of the Garter is among the most prestigious
honours Britain can bestow.  And yet, it
was established by Edward III, who believed in a number of things I find
offensive.  He believed in the divine
right of kings, England’s (i.e. his)
right to rule France, strict social hierarchy and many other things I don’t
like.  And he wouldn’t have liked me either.  A middle-class author with ideas above his
station, daring to criticize the divine right of monarchs?  Off with his head! 

But you know what? 
If I was offered an Order of the Garter, which isn’t likely to happen, I
wouldn’t say no. 

I don’t think there’s a single person writing, these days,
who will not be judged harshly in the future. 
Depending on how things go, I’m sure there will be reviewers in 2100
who’ll sneer at me for being married when everyone knows marriage is an
outdated social construct … or, even worse, reviewers who will accuse me of miscegenation.  Judge not, least you be judged, is not always
good advice … but it is in this case.

But there’s a second major issue that should also be
taken into account.

I am a nerd.  Like
most nerds, I was nerd-shamed at school. 
I was bullied and mocked and generally humiliated for being a nerd.  And I was, for most of my teenage years,
utterly alone.  There were no other
book-readers in that hellhole, the comic-readers weren’t inclined to befriend
me and, while there were a couple of other Star
Trek/Babylon 5 fans, they weren’t inclined to befriend me either.  (The only nerd-show that was genuinely
popular was The X-Files.)  I spent longer than I want to think about
being mocked for reading, as if there was something wrong with reading.  That
sort of treatment – which appears to be common for nerds – leaves scars.  It makes it hard to empathise with others who
have their own problems, but – to us – appear to have it all their own way.

And so we cling to our nerdy status because it is all we
have.  Heinlein, Asimov and Campbell –
yes, even Campbell – are part of our community. 
To erase them is to erase our history. 
And we see that as a direct attack on us, particularly when it is
strikingly clear that the attackers have either missed the point of the story (The Cold Equations is rather more than a
“parable about the
foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold,
hard facts of life”) or taken it out of context. 

The reformers, call them whatever you like, say they are improving science-fiction, that they’re
making it more inclusive.  But others – nerds like me – see it as the
popular kids imposing their will on the social outcasts.  We hate and resent it, because it brings back
memories of being bullied for being nerds. 
And, on some level, we don’t see it as much-needed reform.  We see it as nothing more than an excuse for
bullying.

To put this in some (more) context, there was – at one of
my schools – something called gay-bashing. 
The bullies would beat up kids they believed to be gay, on the grounds
that they were gay.  I don’t believe that most of them knew what
being ‘gay’ actually meant – our sex education was very poor – and, to be best
of my knowledge, no one at that school was actually
gay.  (And if they were, I would not
have blamed them for remaining in the closet and keeping the door firmly
closed.)  The gay-bashers didn’t
care.  It was just an excuse to beat up
on people and feel righteous while doing it.

I have the same feeling, sometimes, whenever someone
pokes their head into my community and insists that something must change, immediately.  As a mature
adult, I can understand that people might reasonably argue for renaming the
award, but the bit of me that was traumatised by endless bullying makes it hard
to believe.  People who demand an immediate response make
it impossible to calm down and consider their reasoning logically.  I’ve found that anyone who pushes for immediate
action does not have my best
interests in mind. 

I’m not the first person to compare this to schoolyard
bullying.  I will not be the last.

There may have been a case for renaming the Campbell
Award.  But it should not have been done now, not when a sizable percentage of
fandom would draw the wrong lesson from the kerfuffle.  From what I’ve heard, there are people who
argue that pressure campaigns work; they should do more of them.  And, on the other side, there are people who
are even more determined to resist next time,
even if they’re dying on a hill no rational person wants to die on. 

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone … and,
looking back from a (relatively) short space of time, there is no one who was
perfectly innocent at the time, but – now – is a criminal beyond
redemption.  Standards change, people
change; can you, can anyone, look me in the eye and say they will never be accused of being
‘un-woke?’  That, ten years from now,
they will be attacked for something – in or out of context – that is no longer
acceptable.  It is terrifyingly easy to
look at a handful of modern-day writers and craft narratives that bash them,
that make them out to be things
they’re not … is there anyone, realistically, who wants a world where
this is a thing? 

Frankly, we – the community – have far more important
things to worry about.  The Hugo Voters
(everyone who votes, from Sad and Rabid Puppies to SMOFs) are a tiny percentage
of science-fiction and fantasy fans.  I
don’t believe they’re even 1% of fandom. 
The more people go on about diversity and inclusion, the more harm they
do to diversity and inclusion … because the people pushing diversity and
inclusion don’t really grok humans.  Conventions are becoming less friendly to
fans and more commercialised, people are being hammered and blacklisted and
disinvited for daring to disagree with the ‘woke’ … I think, I really think,
that we shouldn’t be tearing ourselves apart and beating each other up …

After all, if there’s one lesson every nerd learns at
school, it is that there is always someone else
willing to do it.