OK, apart from his Hugo nomination a couple of years back, and the current brouhaha (I like that word. I'll try not to use it too much, though), I hadn't heard of Larry Correia. Fair enough. He is US-based and I'm not, which makes a difference - and, anyway, plenty of authors of all descriptions fly under my rather sporadic radar. But... Correia claims to be both a popular and a good writer, right? (Maybe not in that order.) So, there's something that should have happened, that hasn't.
None of Larry Correia's writing shows up in my Amazon recommendations list. None at all.
Is that strange? Given that I have spoken out (in a small way) against the Sad Puppies and their Hugo slate, then obviously I must be one of those elitist SJW types (I wish they'd stop doing that. Yes, I know it stands for "Social Justice Warrior", but it's also my initials, and every time I see it I wonder what I've done wrong this time), so I must clearly only read poetry about black disabled lesbian androids, ideally written by black disabled lesbian androids, and there is no overlap between Correia fans and that sort of literary pseudery, right?
Except... well... my tastes are not quite that rarefied.
Prepare for some tedium, now, because the only adequate way I can think of to demonstrate this is to go through what's on my Kindle, which has got to be a pretty good representation of stuff I've bought from Amazon. (It's not a complete guide to my taste - I bought a lot of stuff from Amazon before I got the Kindle, and I bought literally tons of stuff before Amazon was even thought of. But as a guide to what Amazon thinks I buy, it's got to be pretty good.)
So. Going alphabetically by author, the first thing on the list is Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, bought largely because of the brouhaha (sorry), and bloody good it is too. Not on the SP's list, though.
Passing on... we come to the first of the Wildside Press megapacks, to which I am seriously addicted. These dirt-cheap anthology packages give you a lot for your money. I have all nine of their "Science Fiction" volumes, three of the "Macabre" ones, four "Ghost Story" ones, one "Science Fantasy", one "Space Opera", one "Cthulhu Mythos", and one "Pulp Fiction" megapack full of splendid titles like "Blood-bait for Hungry Mermaids" and "When Super-Apes Plot". There are more specifically themed anthologies, like the "Utopia" and "Mad Scientists" ones, or the collected "Space Patrol" stories of Eando Binder. There are several devoted to individual authors - Lord Dunsany, Reginald Bretnor, Edmond Hamilton, A. Merritt, A. R. Morlan, Dashiell Hammett, John Russell Fearn and Arthur Leo Zagat are all present on my Kindle. The one which has set me off, though, is number 3 in their "Golden Age of Science Fiction" series - this one is devoted to the works of Poul Anderson. I have no fewer than fourteen of these "Golden Age" books, covering thirteen authors (Lester del Rey gets two volumes, if you were wondering.) Hang on. Isn't the Golden Age of SF something the Sad Puppies are supposed to be harking back to?
(Volume two in that Golden Age series, by the way, contains the works of Mark Clifton, the first guy to get a best-novel Hugo by logrolling tactics. He's remembered, and not particularly loved, for it.)
I sense that my lit-crit credentials may have taken a bit of a beating over that lot. The next thing on the list, though, is the complete poetical works of Matthew Arnold, so maybe I'm back on track. Maybe. Passing over a couple more megapacks, we come to "Six Centuries of English Poetry" and "The New Latin Grammar". La, gentles all, I am not only refined, but classically refined. Next up, two by E. F. Benson, complete collections of his ghost stories, and his "Lucia" novels. Oh my.
Then "Wreckage", a new novel by Emily Bleeker. Modern literature, or near as dammit. (A thriller more than anything, really, though.) Still, my literary credentials are improving, and the next one will surely be even more refined -
Oh. Wait. Guy Boothby's collected "Dr. Nikola" stories, and as pulpy a tale of dastardly villainy as you could find in a month of Sundays... at least until later in this list. I don't think Jacques Derrida has a single kind word to say about Boothby. Never mind. Nor is the French grammatologist lavish in his praise of Ernest Brahmah, John Buchan's "Hannay" stories, or Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian tales, all of which are, um, er, up next. Skipping another couple of megapacks, and we're on to Jeffrey Carver's "Neptune Crossing", and I don't know what's wrong with that.
Next up, though, we're into literary territory again, with "Journey to the West", also known as "Monkey", and one of the four great classics of Chinese literature. (In translation, because I'm not that literary.) The other three ("Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Dream of the Red Chamber" and "Outlaws of the Marsh") also make an appearance.
Then we're back on old SF again, with a short anthology edited by Chad Dembeck, "6 Rediscovered Vintage Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories For Hardcore Fans Only". Dembeck's put a bunch of these things together, with stress on how they're proper old-fashioned SF and so forth. I left a neutral review on Amazon over this one, because, well, the stories are OK but nothing special. Still... this one ought to be straight from SP territory, oughtn't it?
More megapacks. Three ghost stories by Charles Dickens. Yet more megapacks. Complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle. Even more megapacks.
Then, "Antrobus Complete", witty tales of absurdity among British diplomats by Lawrence Durrell. Maybe not your traditional skiffy there, right enough. Neither is a two-volume translation of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. (I like epic poetry. Sue me.) Among the next scattering of megapacks, we find Frazer's "Golden Bough" and a collection of the "Dr. Thorndyke" stories of R. Austin Freeman - which, come to think of it, are also available in the Wildside megapacks, only I haven't got those ones. Yet. (Why not? Because, by and large, I don't buy Kindle versions of things I have in hard copy already.)
Megapacks. Quick burst of Neil Gaiman, "Good Omens" (because I lost my hard copy, darn it all) and "Stardust". Megapacks. Run of not-megapacks, starting with William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (same problem as "Good Omens" there), Langford and Grant's disaster-spoof "Earthdoom", a big "pulp fiction" collection (mostly Jack London), a book on Norse legends, the Rig Vedas, another Chinese epic, and ending on Lafcadio Hearn's collection of Japanese ghost stories, "Kwaidan".
Following this, a run on a single author, namely Robert Holdstock, and his six "Nighthunter" horror novels originally published under the pen name of Robert Faulcon. I like these. Book four notoriously manages a body count well into three digits. I don't even want to think about what Derrida would say about it all.
By way of raising the tone, next up is a "Mythology" collection incorporating the standard classics - Homer, Virgil, Apollonius of Rhodes, all that shower.
There follows E. W. Hornung's "Raffles" stories in an omnibus. Another megapack or so. Collections of Robert E. Howard - Conan, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, all that lot. Derrida, who might've perked up at the Homer, would probably now be wearing a Gallic frown again.
Two Norman Hunter "Professor Branestawm" books. More megapacks. Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men on the Bummel". (Of course I have "Three Men in a Boat" in hard copy.) Colin Kapp's "The Unorthodox Engineers", as orthodox a piece of skiffy as ever let off loud explosions. Megapack. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Horror, "Endurance" by Jack Kilbourn. Instructional book on formatting ebooks for Kindle (yes, I have ambitions). Complete works of Rudyard Kipling, and if he's a black disabled lesbian android, he did a darn good job of hiding it. Legend of King Arthur. Megapack. Poetry by Edward Lear, how pleasant to know him, he has written such volumes of stuff. Two Murray Leinster compilations. Megapack.
Then the "Barbershop Seven", a bundle of all seven "Barney Thomson" novels by Douglas Lindsay. Not SF, not what you'd call respectable literature either. Whatever, I liked them. Megapacks, "House of Doors" by Brian Lumley, megapacks, Chinese epic... "Saga of Pliocene Exile" series by Julian May, another one where I can't find the original hard copies. Liked these, was less keen on the follow-ups. Complete "Bulldog Drummond" stories. More megapacks, William Morris fantasy "The Wood Beyond the World", more megapacks, Andre Norton back-to-back from Baen with a lousy title (the two books in question are "The Zero Stone" and its sequel "Uncharted Stars". I loved Norton as a kid, and still have a soft spot for her.)
"Dark Matter", a darn fine ghost story by Michelle Paver. More megapacks, and a couple of pulp novellas ("Unthinkable" and "Incomprehensible") by Rog Phillips. Translation of the Secret History of Procopius. I feel my literary respectability rising again -
Oh. Oh dear. The next three items are the first "Fu Manchu" novels of Sax Rohmer, absolutely rip-roaring reads, and rather less politically correct than Jeremy Clarkson. Much more of this and Jacques Derrida will deconstruct me where I sit.
Next up, "Speculative Fiction: The Ultimate Anthology" by one David K. Scholes, a self-published short story collection. Let's just be kind, here, and say that they might have benefited from the attentions of an editor. Embedded in the next wedge of megapacks is Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji"; the intricate psychological subtleties of this tale of court life in Heian-era Japan might perk M. Derrida up, except I think he's already given me up as a bad lot by now. After the megapacks, "The Stone Man", a self-published SF/horror story by Luke Smitherd, and a bloody good read. Self-publishing isn't an automatic sign of dreck, you know - at least, I don't think it so. "The Walking Shadow", by Brian Stableford. I was (and largely remain) a huge Stableford fan when I was younger, and the man himself put up with me gushing at him when I actually met him at a reading in Reading a few years ago now.
Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy". Ah. Now we come to something interesting - three novels from the "Noon Universe" sequence by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I'm guessing the "Best of Soviet Action Science Fiction" line won't turn the SPs on, much. Pity, really, the Strugatskys wrote some good stuff.
Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla" and "Prose Edda". Possibly not strictly SF, that. More megapacks, plus "The City of Dreadful Night" and "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle". Then, "Forbidden Books of the original New Testament" - more deuterocanonical than forbidden, really. Deuterocanonical is almost as good a word as brouhaha.
After that, the complete works of Edgar Wallace. Now that was one hell of a download, let me tell you.
Megapacks. Two early "Honor Harrington" novels by David Weber. A book on calculus, because my mathematical knowledge was all picked up in the gutter and I feel my ignorance keenly on this point. H. G. Wells' "The Research Magnificent" - I have a lot of comparatively obscure Wells, one way or another, but am always on the lookout for more. Wells wrote over eighty books, and when you consider all the affairs he had, you have to wonder how he found the time.
Megapack. Two by John Whitbourn, "A Dangerous Energy" and "To Build Jerusalem". T. H. White's "The Once and Future King", megapack, complete works of Oscar Wilde. Hmm. Wilde is maybe not from the heartland of Sad Puppy territory.
The next bunch, however, is. F. Paul Wilson's Adversary cycle, from "The Keep" through to "Nightworld". Contemporary horror-fantasy with, in Repairman Jack, a suitably square-jawed and self-reliant hero. What's not to like?
And we round off this whole sorry exhibition with David Wong's "John Dies at the End" (I bet you know how he feels), and the very last megapack, the Arthur Leo Zagat one.
So, what conclusion can we draw from this, other than that I am one of Wildside Press's best customers and editor John Betancourt is going to have to work harder if he wants to keep up with me?
Well... it's a pretty scatter-shot sort of selection, isn't it? Some of my biases are probably apparent. It skews heavily towards older work (either stuff I'm nostalgic for, or stuff which is cheap because it's out of copyright, you guess which). But isn't harking back to the glory days of SF what the Sad Puppies are supposed to be about?
I mean, OK, Procopius and Murasaki Shikibu, not the widest audience among SF readers there. And some Sad Puppies might disapprove of the Strugatskys on political grounds, or the Oscar Wilde collection on... other grounds.
But a lot of this stuff should be right up their alley, shouldn't it? F. Paul Wilson? David Weber? Those fourteen anthologies of mostly neglected writers of the Golden Age?
The thing is, because this list is so scatter-shot, it generates an immense variety of recommendations, across a wide range of writers and sub-genres. I can spend (and have spent) hours scrolling along it, trying to pick out things I hadn't seen before and that look like fun.
But Larry Correia isn't on that recommendations list. Neither are several other leading lights of the Sad Puppies.
Amazon's recommendations aren't based on any political or quality criteria. The actual details are commercially confidential, to prevent people from gaming the system, but the basic outline is clear enough; you buy a book, you get a list of other books bought by people who've bought that book. By now, Amazon's database is big enough that they can drop statistical outliers, of course, so you don't see absolutely everything - David Weber fans aren't going to be troubled by my deuterocanonical New Testament, for instance. (If there were a brouhaha about the deuterocanonical works, my joy would be complete.)
However, the only conclusion I can draw from this is that the Sad Puppies just don't read anywhere near the stuff I do. They pass over Oscar Wilde, they turn their noses up at Procopius, they don't even care for Weber or Wilson all that much. Brian Lumley's House of Doors is closed to them, and they care naught for what those super-apes are plotting.
But this is freaking weird... unless the circle of the Sad Puppies' reading is a tight and insular one, one which no piece of my scatter-shot has happened to hit. It makes perfect sense if the SPs are fans of a relatively small subset of SF/speculative fiction as a whole, and generally stick with reading roughly within this subset. Any ventures out into Procopius would be statistical outliers, and I wouldn't see them.
And this is fine. Everybody's entitled to their literary taste, or in my case lack thereof. But it completely gives the lie to the Sad Puppies' claim to be a broad-based grass-roots movement of ordinary SF fans everywhere. They're not. They're a fan sub-group, centred on writing with a limited appeal outside that group. They are no more the archetype of SF fandom than I am, and you don't see me stuffing the nominations to get Procopius a Hugo.
Again: they're a group centred around a limited subset of SF, and this is fine. They're entitled to like what they like.
What's not fine is that they're not extending the rest of us the same courtesy.
No one, to the best of my knowledge, is saying Correia et al. don't write "proper" SF... but the Puppies are insisting that theirs is the only "proper" SF, that the rest of us, when it comes to fandom, are Doing It Wrong, that we should be doing it their way and liking the stuff they like.
There are terms for this sort of behaviour. "Literary elitism" is one. "Snobbery" is another. Yes, the Sad Puppies are literary elitists. They set themselves up as arbiters of what is and is not "good", based on the literary theory that appeals to them. Their literary theory is the red-headed stepchild of John W. Campbell rather than Jacques Derrida, but it makes no difference that I can see. An inverted snob is still a snob. If anything, an inverted snob is sillier than one who's the right side up.
I don't hold with snobbery. And I especially don't hold with gaming the system in support of snobbery. (Yes, yes, I know, they have broken no rules, they have done nothing technically wrong.... I will repeat something I've said before: any time you find yourself saying "But what I did was technically within the rules", you know damn well you shouldn't have done it.)
Don't listen to the snobs, right-side-up or inverted. Listen out for recommendations, sure, but make your own mind up. Enjoy whatever you enjoy. Read whatever you like.
I do.
