I woke up at two o’clock this morning and started thinking about fiction. (This is normal behaviour for a writer.) In the nonlinear way that brains work at 2am, my brain came up with a metaphor that I’d like to explore here.

Of the several ways in which fiction can be satisfying, here are two:

A. Events have an impact on characters.

B. Characters have an impact on events.

Those aren’t at opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re like sliders on a mixing board, which can be moved up and down independently. Let’s call them treble and bass, respectively.

underwhelmer / Foter / CC BY

Here’s a theory. The “sad puppies” (if you don’t know who they are, rejoice, and bail out now, because this post won’t make a lot of sense to you) are all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. (I’m generalising and exaggerating for the sake of a point; fair warning, I’ll be doing a lot of that, so take what I have to say with salt to taste.)

My speculation is that in the brief interval before they decided to engage in a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics, and then got hijacked by the king of the haters, the puppies may have thought, “We, and everyone we know whose opinion we respect, like fiction with lots of bass, and don’t care much about treble. These Hugo-winning stories have too much treble, and not enough bass. Since no right-thinking person would actually like them, there must be a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics! That’s so wrong! We should do it too!”

Incidentally, in my view the short stories–not so much the novels–that have won Hugos in recent years do tend to emphasise treble a lot more than bass, reflecting a wider trend in the pro magazines and anthologies. The novels have more of a balance between the two–at least, the ones I’ve read.

I personally prefer a balance: both treble and bass. I find bass-only stories as unsatisfying as treble-only stories. But let’s think about why people might write stories that are strongly one or the other. Wild speculation, OK? I could be completely wrong here.

Let’s say you’re a member of a historically disadvantaged and disempowered group (for our current purposes, any such group will do). What’s your experience going to be? Might it possibly be that you experience being impacted by events more than you experience impacting events? And might your fiction reflect that experience?

And if, by contrast, you’re a member of a historically advantaged and empowered group, won’t you tend to experience, and think in terms of, your actions impacting events? And (here the speculation goes completely wild) might there be reasons that you don’t want to think too hard about how events impact people? Why you might want to live in a universe where everyone is stoic and unmoved, and nobody’s life is defined by things that happen to them without their consent? Particularly if your group’s experience of unquestioned power is waning, and is now being constantly challenged, with questions being raised about whether your advantage over others is a good thing, even whether it will continue to exist?

Now, I want to live in a world where everyone can experience both bass and treble. I think that world is coming, but it isn’t here yet. During such a transition, fiction becomes a zone of conflict, because fiction is inherently political, because it’s a cultural product produced by people, who can’t help being political even if they think they aren’t.

And that is all I have to say about puppies.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

 | Website

Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.