Dave Truesdale reviews Apex Magazine and is absolutely appalled by the sight of a feminist authoress releasing her rancid, overstuffed bowels all over a classic fairytale:
Rachel Swirsky’s “All That Fairy Tale Crap” gives us another female author who is, let’s say…severely disgruntled at stuff she cannot change in the real world. Her focus here is the “ideal” female as portrayed in fairy tales who make it impossible for the contemporary woman to live up to such high standards—the fairy tale of Cinderella being the chosen target here and which seems to be the one getting the author’s panties in a twist.
Rather than acknowledging that such models of purity and innocence as Cinderella might be something toward which to aspire, or look up to as an ideal, the author has decided to destroy that which she cannot attain in real life. Envy? Jealousy? A desperate, angry attempt to knock from her pedestal a fairy tale princess realizing such is not to be in her own life? Just another writing assignment for an anthology to make a buck or two and let’s take a contrary viewpoint and run with it? Anyone’s guess. But the lashing out at the seeming unattainable, to make mockery of the ideal, to bring down to one’s own level rather than striving to raise one’s own station is something the immature adolescent is prone to do, not the mature adult….
Sadly, there are those who lash out and can think only low thoughts of mockery or destruction, the cutting down to size those who profess or portray what we might be, or become, because they have, in one way or another, given up on themselves and wish to destroy that which gives others inspiration or hope. Tis a pity their glass of Life is always half empty and at every opportunity they feel an unrepentant urge to share their from-the-heart (“There! Take that!”), disappointment-with-life vision with those who strive to set their sights higher.
“All That Fairy Tale Crap” is a fine example of this view and is more likely to find its target audience among an uncritical, morally ambivalent adolescent crowd (if not adolescent by age, then by psychological maturity). In this respect I give it a Well done. Stories like this, in the final analysis, reveal to the careful reader more about the author than anything worthwhile to be revealed or added to the canon of the fairy tale itself.
This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong and evil and degraded about SF/F today. Then realize that the authoress is the Scalziette who was elected to the SFWA Board by the pinkshirts earlier this year. Rachel Swirsky happens to be the vice-president of the SFWA.
Perhaps Swirsky believes she is “subverting” Cinderella. If so, that would only serve to demonstrate the lack of talent in modern SF/F. This is how you subvert Cinderella if you have genuine literary talent. Swirsky has less story-telling ability than the average porn director shooting four films in an LA mini-mansion rented for the day.
There is no getting around it. The SFWA is run by a group of fat and freakish losers who write mediocre fiction about soldiers swapping blow jobs and Cinderella going down on her stepsisters. If you didn’t believe me before when I said I didn’t mind being kicked out of the organization after my failed attempt to salvage it, perhaps you will now.
UPDATE: I am informed that when she’s not writing poisonous crap, Swirskyella enjoys sock-puppeting her own Wikipedia page. As my emailer noted, these people are charlatans down to the bone.