After beating up on both politicized literary pretenders and McCreepy, the Master Monster Hunter is temporarily even more hated in SFWA circles than Orson Scott Card and me combined. He responded to Jim “McCreepy” Hines:
This is gonna be a long one.
Not really. He mostly hits and runs and does some check listing. I’m the long winded one.
The backstory: Author Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote an article called Post-Binary Gender in SF: An Introduction over at Tor.com, calling for “an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.”One week later, author Larry Correia wrote a response to MacFarlane’s piece, called Ending Binary Gender in Fiction, or How to Murder Your Writing Career. (Side note: you’ll probably want to avoid the comments on that one.)
That last part is very interesting. You’ll probably want to avoid the comments… Why? Because I don’t edit them in anyway or “massage” them? Between the blog post and the corresponding Facebook post, I’ve got a few hundred comments. Of those, there are a handful that are very mean (this is the internet) but most of them are reasonable, and interestingly enough I’ve also got homosexuals and transsexuals who posted in the comments who thought the original Tor blog post was as ham fisted as I did.
I tried to ignore it. There’s no way I’m going to change Correia’s mind about this stuff, any more than his post changed my thinking. But of course, there are a lot of other people lurking and participating in the conversation,
He’s correct. Arguing is a spectator sport. You don’t waste your time on the already decided, you convince the undecided, and give ammo to your side. If there isn’t an audience, don’t waste your time.
and while I know this is going to do bad things to my blood pressure, I think it’s a conversation worth having.
Heh… My blood pressure is fine. Arguing with lefties on the internet is what I do to relax. In my last fisk, I talked about how the blog post was angsty emo bullshit.
I wonder which is more angsty … an author calling for our genre to move beyond binary gender, or another author spending 4000+ words about how people like MacFarlane are symbolic of everything that’s wrong with the genre, and are destroying fun.
The original. Obviously. Nice check listing though. I wrote lots of words, ergo, that’s angsty… Or it could just be that I’m a WRITER who averages 3k of paying fiction a day, I threw that thing together while I was waiting for the matinee of I Frankenstein to start. Considering half of those words were a cut and paste of the original Tor article… Man… That means Jim Hines just wrote SIX THOUSAND WORDS to respond! Holy shit. That’s hard core!PROTIP: Your editor does not like to pay you for the words you cut and paste from other people’s blogs. 🙂
Destroying fun? Quite the contrary. If you’d bothered to read the comments then you know my readers have had a whole lot of fun with this. Oh! You mean destroying the fun of reading sci-fi and killing off our slowly dwindling genre. Well, yeah. That’s sort of the point. I wrote my post for the aspiring authors who might read Tor.com and think that Ending Binary Gender in Sci-Fi was good advice. I pointed out that when you write with the goal of checking boxes to satisfy the cause of the day, your writing will probably suck.
I agree that if you’re writing a story with the kind of checklist Correia describes, you’re probably going to get a bad story.Yep. But I said it in a mean way that hurt their delicate lilac scented feelings.
As Larry correctly points out, he’s the type of man who teaches women to defend themselves so they aren’t victimized by criminals. McCreepy is the type of cismale who likes to listen to crying women tell him about getting raped and console them when he isn’t dressing up in women’s clothing and taking pictures of himself. Is there anyone who would be even a little surprised if McCreepy turned out to have a complete Buffalo Bill-style dungeon under his garage?