JDA attends Worldcon, writes a convention report, and filed it on File 770. This did not go over well with those who style themselves the Haters of Hate.
On Saturday, I published a report on World Fantasy Con for File 770. The convention was well run, the panels were good, and I found a few rare books for my collection. Within hours, commenters demanded that I be kept out of every convention in the country, and the pile-on moved to Bluesky, where the language got worse. All of this over a convention review that said the con went well.
Science fiction and fantasy has a hate problem. In my experience, it does not come from the right and never has. Most of what you see on the right is just want to be included and be aloowed to exist peacefully. It comes from a left-wing establishment that spent years pushing out anyone who disagreed with it on any topic, then grew so used to total control that it forgot the people it targeted were people.
The genre’s gatekeepers say “diversity” and “inclusion” constantly. Look at who is in the room. You will find one set of opinions, repeated by everyone, and a standing threat for anyone who voices another. A community with no room for a dissenting view is a monoculture with branding that makes them feel good about themselves. What you’ll find is complete intolerance coming from them.
I get death threats and hate on a regular basis, along with people flinging so much hate my way it would break most people and cause them health problems, which is the intention of the mob to do. They want to hurt or kill those they hate from the power of their own keyboards. I have been hesitant to attend conventions because of it. The people who pile on are the same ones who tell us, correctly, that harassment and threats of violence can destroy a person. They say we should stand against it. They often point to my criticism of different cultural pieces as justification for it, which should not be the case. Criticism is a time-honored tradition in our culture and helps hone things to be better. Their personal attacks are just about destruction.
The mob is angry because it lost a little power this weekend. World Fantasy Con did not ban me. File 770 reported on the convention and let me do the reporting. The people who wanted me gone found they could not do anything substantive about it. Both organizations put their love of the genre first, and I am grateful to them. Mike Glyer deserves love for what he’s got, and it’s my understanding the hate and pressure he received was so overwhelming he’s taking a couple of days off the internet. One has to remember he’s an older gentleman; this level of abuse is something he’s probably not used to and can cause real harm, something the mob does not consider. I read File 770 regularly for genre reports, and he finds a great number of things that are interesting, and does some good work. That site does not get advertising nor subscribers; he does it completely for free.
I, for one, don’t care one way or another. I’ve never been part of fandom, I wasn’t published by a genre publisher, and except for being able to talk with John M. Ford for about an hour, I didn’t enjoy the one convention I attended. But I do think that the SJWs who drove out everyone to the right of Barack Obama out of professional science fiction and fantasy are beginning to realize the permanent damage they have done to the various institutions of the genre as well as to the genre itself.
The world is changing. Kindle Unlimited is far bigger than any SF/F publisher has ever been. I believe that within three years, Castalia Unlimited will be bigger than any other SF/F publisher, not just in terms of annual titles published, but in terms of total revenue and pages read too. We’re at 63 titles already, 23 of which have never been seen in English before. We expect to be at 150 by time of launch, 275 by the end of the year, and 1,000 English titles alone by the end of next year.
So it doesn’t matter if they want to freeze us out or not. They have Hugo Award winners. We have the guy writing the #1 movies at the box office and the guy for whom the Japanese literature awards are literally named. They have their artisanal wokeslop, we have groundbreaking science, philosophy, and high-quality history. There isn’t a single book that has been published in the genre in the last five years that can begin to compare with The Book of the Black Death or The Midnight Mayor. And the Unlimited library is growing daily in no less than six different languages.
I think it’s great that men like Mike Glyer and JDA are reaching across the philosophical divide. It was a stupid and harmful construction from the start, and now it has been extended into a technological divide as well. But for me, any “science fiction” that stands against artificial intelligence is not worthy of being called science fiction at all.