A Rabid Puppy responds to David Gerrold
This is an open response to Mr Gerrold’s heart felt facebook post. This post represents the Rabid Puppies official position on the matter. Word for Word. Mr Gerrold’s words will be in italics. The Rabid Puppies response will be in bold. It is my sincerest hope that this dialog will provide some insight to those who seem so confused by the Rabbid Puppies actions.
I’m going to get very personal and candid here.
We don’t care.
In 1995, I won a Hugo award for “The Martian Child.” The story was about how much I loved my son. Because so much of the story came from him, the award was his to share, so he came up on stage with me to hold it proudly. That award meant a lot to me. It still does. It was a validation of that thing we say — writing is easy, sit down at the keyboard and open a vein. That’s where that story came from. And that’s one of the reasons why I hold the Hugos in such high regard — it was a joyous validation of what for me was not only an ambitious experiment, but also a personal breakthrough in my own storytelling. It went someplace I didn’t know I could go. It went someplace I didn’t know a science fiction story could go.
We don’t care.
To me, the Hugo has always meant excellence, but since then I think it also had to represent the most ambitious efforts to stretch the genre in whatever direction an author wants to soar. This is a unique genre. It’s the only genre that asks, “What does it mean to be a human being?” It’s the only genre that reaches for the stars and asks, “What’s next? What are the possibilities in front of us?” It’s the only literary form that functions as the Research and Development Division of the human species. So the Hugo is special.
We don’t care.
Yes, I would say that pretty well sums it all up.
This is an interesting exercise in rhetoric. Mr. Gerrold clearly wants us to be very impressed by his feelbads, and thereby convinced of the pure and utter evil of those who would cause such feelbads.
With all due respect, Mr. Gerrold, you’re not exactly convincing anyone. We’ve read STARTREKSHIRTS. We’ve read “If a Dinosaur Had a Cookie, My Love”. We’ve read “I am Chinese and I am Gay”. We’ve read LOOK MA, I CAN DO WHAT DAVID SILVERBERG DID NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO. The only soaring that is taking place here is the Muse of Science Fiction leaping out the window in protest.
More interesting is Mr. Gerrold’s threats of unpersoning and banishment from that fine community of SF fandom, which of course proves exactly what we’ve been saying from the start.
But the one thing that is growing more and more likely … the architects of this squabble will have indelibly damaged themselves in the eyes of the SF community. There are invitations and acknowledgments that will never be offered — not because it’s a blacklist, but because nobody wants to hang out with assholes.
And if that’s “unpersoning,” then it’s self-inflicted.
Whine all you want, Brad. It won’t work. I learned it by the time I was five. I never got anything I wanted by whining — so I stopped wasting energy and learned how to work for results the old-fashioned way.
This can’t be repeated enough: we don’t care.
We know the SJWs in science fiction are influential and have been actively acting as ideological gatekeepers for the last two decades. We know that there are invitations and acknowledgements that will never be offered – and we know it is a blacklist because people who are most certainly not assholes are treated as badly, if not worse, than those who are.
We know we will never belong to David Gerrold’s little club. We know we never have.
We don’t care.
We’re not wasting energy. We’re not whining. We are working for results in ways that Mr. Gerrold and his little tribe do not, and perhaps cannot, imagine. And I tend to expect they are going to like those results even less than they are enjoying the 2015 Hugo Awards.