One of the chief targets of the SFWA pinkshirts corrects two misconceptions and explains a few things concerning Bulletingate:
A couple of corrections. I -asked- Laura not to get involved in this. I
know how much vituperation can get spewn by the hatemongers.Also, I had nothing to do with the Campbell Award. I never created it, administered it, or won it.
For
those who haven’t read the offending articles (in which case, you have a
lot in common with the screamers): in issue #200, at the request of our
(female) editor, we wrote a very complimentary article about editors of
that gender…but we had the temerity to call them “ladies” rather than
“females”, and to state that Bea Mahaffey, who edited Other Worlds 63
years ago and died a couple of decades ago (and was a close personal
friend of mine) was beautiful. Those were sins #1 and #2. After the hate
mail began appearing, we committed Sin #3 in issue #202: we defended
our right to call Bea Mahaffey beautiful, and our (female) editor’s
right to run a generic, non-naked, non-bare-breasted warrior woman on
the cover. They’re still screaming for our deaths by slow torture. 🙂It
got so bad that our editor, Jean Rabe, resigned, not just as editor but
as a member of SFWA. And for the record, I hired her as my assistant on
the Stellar Guild line of books 5 minutes later.
Corrections duly noted. Although one can only imagine the shrieks of outrage when Mr. Resnick’s shockingly sexist paternalism becomes known to the pinkshirts. I think it goes without saying that neither Jim Hines nor John Scalzi would ever be so appallingly sexist as to attempt to silence a woman’s voice in this oppressive and demeaning manner. They’re much more inclined to hide behind, or wear, a woman’s skirt than to protect her.
Mr. Resnick, on the other hand, is sufficiently old school to wish to shield his daughter from the hatemongering pinkshirts, for which one can only commend him. And his Stellar Guild line promises to be a significant step up for Ms Rabe from the Bulletin. The idea of publishing collaborations between established writers and their proteges is a good one and something I can fully support, having been the beneficiary of a similar collaboration with the Original Cyberpunk in the early days of my SF/F career.
It is amusing to note that despite SFWA being an organization originally founded to professionalize the relations between SF writers and SF publishers, this latter-day parody finds itself engaged in furious attacks on new model editors and publishers like Mr. Resnick and myself. One suspects that one factor contributing to the pinkshirts’ unmitigated rage is their shattered dreams, as Judith Tarr describes in the following manner:
Now, of course, there are so many more options. Chances are the
author will still go broke–all those stories of ebook gold mines are
exceptions, not the rule, especially for authors without large
followings or very up-to-date, popular, trendy subject matter. But the
books will see the light of day as ebooks, print-on-demand books,
audiobooks, even games or graphic novels. That doesn’t help the authors of ten or twenty or more years ago who
saw their hopes crushed, their dreams shattered, and their books
rejected by the one standard that validated them in publishers’ terms:
money and sales.
It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of SFWA members who Mr. Resnick describes as “screamers” are complete nonentities in the field, most of whom have published little more than the bare minimum to qualify for membership. They’ve taken over the organization just as it has become entirely irrelevant to the wider SF/F market.