Sarah Hoyt explains both the short-term triumph of the SJW pygmies and their eventual return to insignificance, particularly in science fiction:
No elite that is as schizophrenic as they are can long stay in power. Their narrative being so anti-reality requires those seeking to join them to abase themselves to such a degree (like some gang members who have to commit a heinous murder to join) that the only the most craven will do so. These are also, for whatever reason, often not the most competent at whatever the field is.
They’re not often, like Chelsea Clinton, so guppy-stupid that even all the attempts to advance them and hand them “accomplishments” for existing fall flat (as did her career in TV.) But as generations go by and each generation picks the new luminaries based ONLY on loyalty to the party line, the quality of performance and competence keeps going down.
Take New Wave in our field. Its practitioners often held strange views of life, strange enough to repel the hoi polloi and those who bought the bulk of the books, but by and large, I challenge you to read them and not see the craftsmanship and the talent (with a few exceptions, of course.)
However those who came after them were a little less talented and trained. This was the period back in the nineties when I considered myself fortunate for finding writers who weren’t actively off-putting, and could only ever find one or two that I considered to rise above . And the current crop of establishment darlings, particularly the young ones (again with one or two exceptions) are cringingly bad or at the very best cringingly trite (which would be endurable without the encomiums to their Earth shattering originality.) Even the establishment can find no better reason to shower awards on them than the oft-repeated claims of vague discrimination and saying that women are overdue for recognition.
Like any elite that is incompetent at what its supposed to do, this means that they create a crisis that invites their replacement. In science fiction, where I’m concentrating because I know it better, (though arguably parallel processes are taking place in all other fields) they might have tottered on another generation or two, with each selling less, until the advances for first novels were zero and publication meant nothing except to the academics who need publication.
Fortunately Kindle intervened. Because indie publishing came into a vacuum and served underserved readers, it’s blooming against the wilting of traditional publishing.
The New Wave writers were intentionally pissing on their forebears, but in the process they were creating yellow art in the snow. Their work was, of course, ephemeral, insignificant, and devoid of any meaningful commentary on the human condition or long-term value, but the pictures were pretty enough until the snow melted, at least if you ignored how they’d been created.
Their descendants only saw that their forebears were urinating, and quite wrongly concluded, “hey, I can do that!” They promptly did the literary equivalent of unzipping, cutting loose, and shouting “look at me, I can haz pee!” Or in the case of McRapey, “look at me, I can haz blow job! Because ground forces!”
The diversity crowd is even more pathetic. They can’t even manage the literary equivalent of unzipping first, instead they just wet their pants then give each other awards for their incontinence, crowing: “I is womyn! I is black! I is queer! I make water too!” And, as John C. Wright notes, they actually take pride and pleasure in taking their golden autoshowers:
If you are looking at a landscape covered with a thin gruel the hue of oatmeal, gray, tasteless, neither cold nor hot, dripping over telegraph wires, leafless trees, dusty lanes empty of traffic, collapsed houses, and the corpse of a small dog, and seeing a group of deformed pygmies and midgets decreeing immense victories and accomplishments in the fields of civic engineering and architecture, you would assume them to be an enemy of whoever once lived in the now ruined landscape. You would not assume they lived in that landscape and wanted it gray. And your assumption would be wrong.
There are few things that I find more amusing than looking at the Amazon rankings for the award-winning SF novels of the recent past and comparing them to the winners from 30 years before. Guess which novel was published in 2013 and is the most-awarded novel in science fiction history, and which one was published nearly 50 years ago.
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#14,910 Paid in Kindle Store - Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,757 Paid in Kindle Store
Book 1 is Ancillary Justice, “a story about pronouns and modern feminist piety, utterly unimaginative and bland”. Book 2 is Dune, “a story about messianic politics, ecology, expanded consciousness, genetic destiny and the role of man in the universe.”
And just because I am a cruelty artist:
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#16,680 Paid in Kindle Store - Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#19,115 Paid in Kindle Store
One is the recently published sequel to the landmark, award-winning novel, that was described by one enthusiast as “the most important book Orbit has published in ages.” The other is the recently published Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War.
Mrs. Hoyt is absolutely correct about the pygmies’ poor long-term prospects. No one outside their weird little cult wants to bathe in their stinking urine.