[Warning: Spoilers for Too Like the Lightning]

What marks writing as amateurish (and whether “amateurish” or “low-brow” works are worthy of awards) has been a topic of contention in the science fiction and fantasy community for the past few years, with the rise of Hugo slates and the various forms of “puppies”.

I’m not talking about the learning works of genuine amateurs. These aren’t stories that use big words for the sake of sounding smart (and at the cost of slowing down the stories), or over the top fanfiction-esque rip-offs of more established works (well, at least not since the Wheel of Time nomination in 2014). I’m talking about that subtler thing, the feeling that bubbles up from the deepest recesses of your brain and says “this story wasn’t written as well as it could be”.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because about ¾ of the way through Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer, I started to feel myself put off¹. And the only explanation I had for this was the word “amateurish” – which popped into my head devoid of any reason. This post is an attempt to unpack what that means (for me) and how I think it has influenced some of the genuine disagreements around rewarding authors in science fiction and fantasy². Your tastes might be calibrated differently and if you disagree with my analysis, I’d like to hear about it.

Now, there are times when you know something is amateurish and that’s okay. No one should be surprised that John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series, books that he explicitly wrote for himself are parsed by most people as pretty amateurish. When pieces aren’t written explicitly for the author only, I expect some consideration of the audience. Ideally the writer should be having fun too, but if they’re writing for publication, they have to be writing to an audience. This doesn’t mean that they must write exactly what people tell them they want. People can be a terrible judge of what they want!

This also doesn’t necessarily imply pandering. People like to be challenged. If you look at the most popular books of the last decade on Goodreads, few of them could be described as pandering. I’m familiar with two of the top three books there and both of them kill off a fan favourite character. People understand that life involves struggle. Lois McMaster Bujold – who has won more Hugo awards for best novel than any living author – once said she generated plots by considering “what’s the worst possible thing I can do to these people?” The results of this method speak for themselves.

Meditating on my reaction to books like Paladin of Shadows in light of my experiences with Too Like The Lightning is what led me to believe that the more technically proficient “amateurish” books are those that lose sight of what the audience will enjoy and follow just what the author enjoys. This may involve a character that the author heavily identifies with – the Marty Stu or Mary Sue phenomena – who is lovingly described overcoming obstacles and generally being “awesome” but doesn’t “earn” any of this. It may also involve gratuitous sex, violence, engineering details, gun details, political monologuing (I’m looking at you, Atlas Shrugged), or tangents about constitutional history (this is how most of the fiction I write manages to become unreadable).

I realized this when I was reading Too Like the Lightning. I loved the world building and I found the characters interesting. But (spoilers!) when it turned out that all of the politicians were literally in bed with each other or when the murders the protagonist carried out were described in grisly, unrepentant detail, I found myself liking the book a lot less. This is – I think – what spurred the label amateurish in my head.

I think this is because (in my estimation), there aren’t a lot of people who actually want to read about brutal torture-execution or literally incestuous politics. It’s not (I think) that I’m prudish. It seemed like some of the scenes were written to be deliberately off-putting. And I understand that this might be part of the theme of the work and I understand that these scenes were probably necessary for the author’s creative vision. But they didn’t work for me and they seemed like a thing that wouldn’t work for a lot of people that I know. They were discordant and jarring. They weren’t pulled off as well as they would have had to be to keep me engaged as a reader.

I wonder if a similar process is what caused the changes that the Sad Puppies are now lamenting at the Hugo Awards. To many readers, the sexualized violence or sexual violence that can find its way into science fiction and fantasy books (I’d like to again mention Paladin of Shadows) is incredibly off-putting. I find it incredibly off-putting. Books that incorporate a lot of this feel like they’re ignoring the chunk of audience that is me and my friends and it’s hard while reading them for me not to feel that the writers are fairly amateurish. I normally prefer works that meditate on the causes and uses of violence when they incorporate it – I’d put N.K. Jemisin’s truly excellent Broken Earth series in this category – and it seems like readers who think this way are starting to dominate the Hugos.

For the people who previously had their choices picked year after year, this (as well as all the thinkpieces explaining why their favourite books are garbage) feels like an attack. Add to this the fact that some of the books that started winning had a more literary bent and you have some fans of the genre believing that the Hugos are going to amateurs who are just cruising to victory by alluding to famous literary works. These readers look suspiciously on crowds who tell them they’re terrible if they don’t like books that are less focused on the action and excitement they normally read for. I can see why that’s a hard sell, even though I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few Hugo winners³.

There’s obviously an inferential gap here, if everyone can feel angry about the crappy writing everyone else likes. For my part, I’ll probably be using “amateurish” only to describe books that are technically deficient. For books that are genuinely well written but seem to focus more on what the author wants than (on what I think) their likely audience wants, well, I won’t have a snappy term, I’ll just have to explain it like that.

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