Mailvox: Arthur C. Clarke: Predator or victim?

TS objects to the inclusion of Arthur C. Clarke among the pedophiles of science fiction:

I just finished reading “Safe Space as Rape Room” and I’m disappointed that you continue to include Sir Arthur Clarke in your list of child predators.  Following up on our earlier email correspondence I spent time over several days looking at everything I could on the Internet about this.  And no, I did not go to Sri Lanka.  What I found during my research satisfied me that he’s innocent of the charge.

Clarke denied (on multiple occasions) that he ever said what was alleged in the Daily Mirror.  He is also on record saying that pedophilia is wrong.  None of his writings give any hint whatsoever that he favors pedophilia.  When Sri Lankan police and Interpol asked the Daily Mirror for tapes of the interview, they were not produced.  The Sri Lankan authorities are on record as saying that Clarke “has been cleared” of the pedophilia charges against him.  Why do you believe the Daily Mirror’s accusations but not Clarke’s denials and the Sri Lankan authorities?  And, and I think this is very telling, why did no one come forward after he died and accuse him of sex abuse (ala Jimmy Savile)?

I think you are seriously wronging Sir Arthur.  Please don’t put him into the same category with Kramer, Delaney, Zimmer et al.  He doesn’t deserve it.

Why don’t I believe Clarke’s denials? Because most criminals are not prone to openly confessing to criminal activity. Why don’t I believe the Sri Lankan authorities? I do believe them. But they did not clear him of the pedophilia charges made against him, they simply stated the fact that no actual charges had been made.

National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) chief Jagath Wellawatte said there was no case against the writer, who captured the world’s imagination with 2001: A Space Odyssey and visions of extra-terrestrial civilisations.

“We had no case against Clarke and no one had come forward to say they were abused by him,” Mr Wellawatte said.

The agency was established under new child protection laws enacted after the allegations against Clarke surfaced.

“We have not had any formal complaint or testimony from anyone saying they were abused by Sir Arthur,” said NCPA investigator WTD Wijesena. “We cannot go on the basis of rumours.”

That is not an investigation and exoneration. That is simply an absence of a victim willing to testify against a powerful and influential man. Furthermore, there is documentary evidence that the media went to some lengths to look the other way.

The News of the World spiked an exclusive story exposing the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke as a paedophile, according to a new book about life inside the newspaper whose closure was announced a year ago today.

Can we say for certain that Clarke was a pedophile? No, not at this point. But what we can say is that the claims, by Clarke and others, that he was “celibate” and “unable to engage in sexual relations” for decades sound eerily like the same claims about Walter Breen’s impotence that were made falsely by Marion Zimmer Bradley before he was convicted of molesting children.

Mailvox: Safe Space as Rape Room

Reactions to the fourth installment of Daniel Enness’s Safe Space as Rape Room: Science Fiction Culture and Childhood’s End at Castalia House.

I just wanted to thank you guys for talking about this. I myself am a
survivor and have no Earthly idea why this stuff isn’t talked about by
the other “side” in this. It makes me a bit sick to talk about it or
read about it, but given the kind of fiction I enjoy reading it always
sort of worms its way back into my attention. I also get a sort of
garbage feeling if I say nothing or at least don’t voice my support for
people speaking out.

Granted, I disagree with a lot of what you guys have to say a lot of
the time, but bless you for saying this and I happily defend and support
your right to say the rest. I’m very sad of late to see that ideas are
now held as either dangerous or above reproach. As if we are all not
made poorer by the silence of a refusal to debate. I hold your
willingness to talk about this as proof absolute of the necessity of
maintaining diversity of ideas so that there are always people around to
call out other people for doing horrible things. The other “side”
deserves to be called out on this and I thank you for continuing to do
so.
– Andrew

This article in general – and Dozois’ comments in specific – helps me
understand why I no longer purchase modern SF: perverts and enablers
have gained publishing power, and have turned the genre into their
personal playground. When I tried to get back into SF in the mid-2000s,
I started off with Dozois’ yearly collection … and was promptly annoyed
at how the pacing of stories would be ruined by the seemingly
obligatory insertion of “non prudish” (to paraphrase Dozois) elements
that were irrelevant to plot or character development. These
distractions make the collection as a whole read as amateurish with a
light creepy undertone. I shifted over to Hartwell’s yearly collection
and found the selection a bit less annoying, but the overall quality of
both of those collections remained poor. Hartwell’s collection is
apparently no more, and I couldn’t care less if Dozois goes away.

If
there is going to be a renaissance of quality SF, it will have to come
from publishers with a mindset that the sort of writing represented by
Delany’s doesn’t have any sort of merit other than that of studying a
deranged mind. It is beyond me how anybody can read his work and not
get creeped out and repulsed; to praise such an author’s works makes me
seriously question the mental health of the persons quoted above. The
overall trend of SF sales now makes sense: most readers don’t want our
SF with a serving of creepy pervert.
– Hohokam

WARNING: The linked post deals seriously with child sexual abuse  in
science fiction and extensively quotes from the work of a science
fiction author who endorses, and is believed to have engaged in,
criminally abusive sexual behavior. Not for the faint of heart; contains
vulgarities, obscenities, and descriptions of extraordinarily deviant and
disgusting behavior. It is a grim, but factual description of the
depravity that is not only tolerated, but actively celebrated in the science fiction world.

Readers under the age of 18 should not, under any circumstances, read the linked post as it juxtaposes various comments about the SFWA Grand master and suspected homosexual child molester Samuel Delany with quotes from Delany’s own work, which is considerably more depraved than the average individual is likely able to imagine. This warning is not a joke. You won’t enjoy it. You won’t find it titillating. It will simply sicken you and hurt your soul. This is something you need to leave to the adults.

And yet, the adults must deal with it. The rock must be overturned. The evil must be exposed and the rot must be excised. The science fiction world has continued to avert its eyes from Delany’s behavior for decades, just as it previously averted its eyes from the behavior of known child molesters in their midst, such as SFWA members Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ed Kramer, until well after they were safely dead or imprisoned.

As for the SJWs and fandom, while you may not like the source, the fact of the matter is that because we are the outsiders, we are the only ones with the courage to confront the evil that lurks among you. Even if you hate us, even if you hate what we stand for, you should hate what the monsters in your midst are doing to your children and to your community even more. If you can’t find common ground with us in actively opposing the molestation of children, how on Earth can you expect us to be interested in finding any common ground with you at all?

George Martin loftily announced the following in reference to the Sad Puppies: “When people behave badly (in fandom or out of it), or do things that I
find immoral or unethical, I reserve the right to speak out about it, as
I did about Sad Puppies 3 last year.”

So, what are we to make of the obvious fact that he has been in fandom for literal decades, but has never found any of the behavior of the various child molesters of his acquaintance to be worth speaking out about?

Epistemic closure at Tor

Tor.com is now closed to the unelect:

Since its inception, Tor.com has prided itself on the strength of its original short fiction. For a long time our unsolicited submissions formed the backbone of our catalog. We’ve found some of our favorite, most innovative, and most surprising stories through slush. However, in recent years we’ve found that more and more of our stories have been coming to us from different sources. As more of our stories are being brought in by consulting editors, fewer slots on our schedule can be filled by submitted stories. As such it’s time for a change.

On January 7th Tor.com will close its short fiction submissions system. Our dedicated editors and readers will read through and respond to everything that is submitted up to that point, but we do not plan to reopen in the foreseeable future. We are thankful to the authors who submitted stories to us, and to the readers who read those stories, always looking for the next great undiscovered work.

Translation: the short fiction market is rapidly approaching the terminal point. It costs less to simply let the “consulting editors”, who are mostly Tor writers using Tor.com as a marketing platform, to bring in short stories from their friends and publish them there. Where else are they going to publish them, after all?

(And before anyone declares this is a great opportunity for Castalia, I reiterate: the short fiction market is dying. No one wants to pay for the required vehicles; even a phenomenal collection like There Will Be War Volume X, with rave reviews, superlative non-fiction pieces, and some of the biggest names of the last fifty years of science fiction on the cover, won’t sell one-twentieth as well as a Larry Correia novel. While both mil-SF anthologies do well enough to justify their existence, I don’t see any convincing rationale for developing a short fiction site at this time.)

This closure to the unsolicited means that Tor is, to a certain extent, doubling down on its commitment to Pink SF and the SJW vision of its inner circle, as without a sufficiently close relationship with a “consulting editor”, you’re not breaking in via that particular short fiction market anymore.

However, based on my experience with both RTRH and TWBW, this is unlikely to harm them much. The slush readers for the latter went over hundreds of submissions and found us precisely two new writers, Shao, and Newquist, while Cheah was the only new writer discovered in the process of producing RTRH. Now, the effort was worthwhile in the end, considering that two of the most popular stories in Volume X turned out to be the Cheah and the Shao – “Flashpoint: Titan” is easily my favorite in the anthology – but it was an awful lot of work for everyone involved.

(And Vol X slush readers, I have been remiss in not sending you your copies yet. If you already bought one, email me and I’ll send you your choice of an earlier volume or the forthcoming Volume IX.)

This change isn’t going to affect Tor much, nor does it indicate anything terribly important about Tor having to cut costs due to its declining sales. It’s not as if they actually paid their slush readers. Its significance is in the hardening of the battle lines that it represents, and the way in which the SJWs at Tor continue to gradually cut themselves off from the traditional science fiction that they’ve always hated anyhow.

So, in the end, this is just another example of social justice convergence in action. Boycott Tor Books!

NFL Week 16

It’s championship week in a lot of leagues. Good luck, if you made it. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Vikes need to make a two-game run to take the NFC North back.

Science fiction’s smiling sociopath

One of the things that has always bothered me about John Scalzi’s bizarre public confession concerning his sexual predilections is the same thing that has caused many people to ask the question: why on Earth would John Scalzi openly confess to being a rapist who enjoys sexually assaulting women?

On the one hand, if he was a genuine rapist, why would he ever publicly admit to it? On the other, if he was not, how could he seriously think women would find it funny to hear him declare, in his self-styled “satire”: “I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women without
their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”

Who could possibly think that is either clever or funny? What sort of person writes that in the first place? Well, now we know, thanks to Cory Doctorow, who after 12 years of acquaintance with Scalzi has warned the public that the Tor Books author is very far from neurologically typical. Scalzi simply doesn’t care about anything; in Doctorow’s terms, he has absolutely “zero fucks to give”. John Scalzi just doesn’t care that you know that he’s a self-admitted rapist.

John is limbically atypical. Having watching him mix it up online and face-to-face, I think he’s just wired up different. I think that he really, actually, no-foolin’ gives no fucks at all. All our human traits are arrayed on a bell-curve, I think, from the length of your fingers to your autonomic nervous system’s response to jerks. John is a four- or five-sigma outlier.

This explains a lot that is confusing about the man’s behavior. I’ve heard from numerous people who have encountered Scalzi about his tendency to engage in socially inappropriate behavior towards others in public, whether it is leaping into the arms of someone who barely knows him to playing “hail-fellow-well-met” with authors he has repeatedly and virulently attacked. I’ve also heard from reliable sources that he goes from overly warm to dead-eyed cold in an instant, depending on whether he believes the person to whom he is talking is of immediate use to him or not.

At various conferences, attendees have reported that Scalzi was “weird”, prone to laughing at his own jokes, and totally unable to talk about anything but himself, even when he was supposed to be discussing the work of others. This is five-sigma narcissism, not necessarily malignant narcissism, but certainly a pathological form. And there is a word to describe a narcissistic outlier who lacks empathy: sociopath.

A reporter from the New York Times appears to have subconsciously picked up some signs of this in his interview with Scalzi, as he delicately described the Tor Books author as being prone to smiling and giggling and “someone who is comfortable with the business of promotion”, even as Scalzi blatantly lied about his site traffic in the interview.

Psychology Today lists the signs of a sociopath, and it’s quite clear that even in the eyes of his friends, Scalzi fits them like a glove, like a glove custom-made in Ohio from the tanned flesh of missing teenagers:

  • Superficial charm and good intelligence
  • Unreliability
  • Untruthfulness and insincerity
  • Lack of remorse and shame
  • Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
  • Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
  • Pathologic egocentricity
  • General poverty in major affective reactions
  • Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations

We already knew about the first seven traits. We knew that Scalzi is a habitual liar, that his egocentricity reaches pathological levels, and that he is unable to learn from experience. But we did not know about the two latter traits. And yet, what are “wired up different” and “five-sigma outlier” other than the layman’s way of describing “general poverty in major affective reactions” and “unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations”?

It was clear that the time Scalzi spent in a wheelchair in his youth had a significant effect on his socio-sexual development, but now it is apparent that the wheelchair, plus the absent father, also affected the way in which he developed psychologically. The question now may not be whether science fiction’s smiling sociopath is another abusive sex criminal in the mode of Walter Breen, Ed Kramer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gian Gomeshi, and Samuel Delany, just to name five of whom we are already aware, but rather, how many bodies are buried somewhere underneath that broad expanse of Ohio lawn?

And the gift of an empty mason jar is particularly troubling, as it can only make the astute observer wonder what sort of ghastly little trophies are intended to go inside it.

Manning and the HGH accusation

It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that Peyton Manning resorted to desperate measures in order to get back on the field after losing his entire 2011 season. But the fact that his arm strength never returned would appear to be evidence against the accusation that he was using a banned substance as part of his recovery:

As part of the investigation, Collins connected with Charlie Sly, a pharmacist based in Austin, Texas, who worked at the Guyer Institute, the Indiana-based anti-aging clinic, in 2011.

Manning missed the 2011 season, when he was a member of the Indianapolis Colts, after undergoing neck surgery. In the documentary, Sly tells Collins, who is taking secret video of his interactions, that he was “part of a medical team that helped [Manning] recover” from the surgery. Sly alleges that the clinic mailed growth hormone and other drugs to Manning’s wife, Ashley Manning, so that the quarterback’s name was never attached to them.

“All the time we would be sending Ashley Manning drugs,” Sly says in the video. “Like growth hormone, all the time, everywhere, Florida. And it would never be under Peyton’s name, it would always be under her name.”

Manning and his wife also came to the clinic after its normal business hours for intravenous treatments, Sly tells Collins on the undercover video.

Manning left the Colts after the 2011 season to sign with Denver. The NFL banned human growth hormone as part of its 2011 collective bargaining agreement with players, but did not begin testing for it until 2014. No player has ever tested positive.

Full disclosure. I am now on a program of ingesting strange nutritional supplements myself. After spending an evening with Mike and Shauna in Spain, Spacebunny now has me drinking weirdly colored liquids that reportedly contain unfamiliar substances such as “beets” and “spinach” on a daily basis. I don’t know if they’re actually illegal or not, but they probably should be.

Volume X favorite story

It should be interesting to see what the favorite story in There Will Be War Vol. X is around these parts; as with Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat” in Riding the Red Horse Vol. I, I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about a contribution by one of the junior authors.

And if you haven’t gotten There Will Be War Vol. X, what on Earth are you waiting for? It’s every bit as good as the reviews are saying.

  • I own all of the original There Will Be War series from when I
    bought them new. They were all excellent. This follow-on, after a long
    series hiatus, is every bit as good. New names, old names, great
    stories, and thought-provoking essays. 
  • Volume 10, the latest There Will Be War, is worthy to stand with the best of that series. Mil-sf doesn’t get better than this.
  • This volume represents a long
    overdue return to the series, and is as timely and pertinent today as
    the originals were in the 80’s.
  • Since Military SF’s value is to provide a means to understand future threats and solutions, this volume is a treasure.

 I
personally don’t think any of the fiction quite rises to the level of
“Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg or “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen”
by William F. Wu, both of which appear in There Will Be War Vol. II, but  I would argue that the non-fiction is actually better. Still, even if Volume X is only the second-best in the series, that is a remarkable accomplishment after a 25-year hiatus.

The results here.

Mailvox: the burning shame

Gammas never know when to stop. They always think that if they can just figure out the perfect thing to say, if they can somehow formulate the ideal insult and drop it at just the right time, they can completely flip the situation around and triumph like the secret kings they believe themselves to be.

By which I mean HS, or “Harry Savannah” as he calls himself, couldn’t
even flounce away properly. After loftily announcing that he
would let me “take the last word… like an obnoxious child demands,” he couldn’t quite manage to do so and emailed me a sixth time.

Did I say 16 yrs. old? Overestimated. Make that 13…Gamma.

I figured you’d be back again. You are such a Gamma that you can’t even flounce away properly. You see, when you talked about what an obnoxious child demands, that was a psychological tell. You were emotionally projecting. That’s why you’re trying to use my terms now, because you think they will hurt me the way they hurt you. But they won’t. They don’t apply.

I understand that it stings to know thousands of people are laughing at you. But that’s what happens when you are foolish enough to take on your intellectual and social superiors. Now, you can either learn your lesson and stop here, or you can keep digging yourself in deeper.

Your behavior is not Christian in the slightest, in fact, it makes Christians look more than a little bit crazy. You really should stop this now.

This is where the similarity between the SJW mindset and the Gamma mindset can be seen; both SJWs and Gammas believe that if they fake it long enough, their declarations will somehow magically come alive. It’s a sort of intellectual cargo cult; it certainly involves magical thinking.

UPDATE: Harry just. keeps. going.

You are a study, Junior, in adolescent tub-thumping. You know nothing about me but offer this blunderbuss: “…your intellectual and social superiors.” Are you for real? Can you actually be this intellectually pubescent? Also this teenage piece of work: “…that was a psychological tell.” Riiiiiiiight, Junior, that’s EXACTLY what it was…a “psychological tell”. Now I’m actually curious – how old are you?

Just a little piece of advice, lad, because I’m beginning to feel embarrassed FOR you. And it is just that. You seem to be without a capacity to feel embarrassment. Call it extreme adolescent hubris. Call it moronic, but for heaven’s sake take some adult advice at long last. Am I asking too much here?

I have warned Harry that if he persists in attempting to harass me, his email address is going on the blog. I don’t think it’s necessary to turn him over to the VFM, as he’s just an annoying Gamma male, not an SJW in attack mode. I get the feeling that he is an older individual who doesn’t really understand how social media works.

Just like a control-obsessed overweening bully – you make a threat. Very
good, the mask comes off. You persist in asking why I don’t stop
emailing you. Yet you do not seem to see that you do exactly the same.
Remarkable obtuseness. This could have stopped several steps ago in this
exchange. But, of course, you must have the last word – only to make a
threat after you’re wearied with it. But it is true that I offered to
give you that last word. So I am obligated to do so.  Let me finally say
that it is my judgment that you are a fraud as a professing Christian, a
disgrace – not even identifying as a believer a single time in this
exchange and engaging in a thoughtful manner anything of the substance
of my initial query, but preferred to petulantly complain about my being
“impolite.” Which, considering all the badinage in this tennis
exercise, seems down-right ridiculous in the end, no?

This is the second time he has implied he would stop. We’ll see. It’s really remarkable the way Gammas always seem to want to jump in, lecture you, and then have you obediently accept their very important message without saying anything.

How can I fear my enemies…

When I have supporters like this?

By posting this video… I make no commentary on the quality… or
political implications of this video.  It is here solely for
informational purposes.

I’m not sure which is more horrifying, the video itself or the knowledge that certain SJWs will be watching it over and over again on a repeating loop.

“This is our home”

The post-Paris attacks responses continue to intensify:

Up to 600 French protesters desecrated a Muslim prayer hall in Corsica in a revenge attack prompted by the wounding of two firefighters and a police officer.

The furious mob smashed the prayer hall’s glass door, ransacked the interior and left around 50 partially-burned Korans littering the street overnight.

Chanting ‘Arabs get out!’ and ‘This is our home’, protesters marched through the streets of the French Mediterranean island’s capital, Ajaccio.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the attack on Twitter as ‘an unacceptable desecration’, and branded the violence towards the firefighters as an ‘intolerable attack’.

The violence began on the night of December 24, when two firefighters were ‘ambushed’ by ‘several hooded youths’ in the low-income neighbourhood of Jardins de L’Empereur.

It escalated when several hundred people gathered in front of police headquarters in the capital city, before marching through the streets to the housing estate where the attack on the firefighters took place. They then launched the violent assault on the local prayer room.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazaneuve insisted the perpetrators of both incidents would be tracked down and arrested, adding that there was no place for ‘racism and xenophobia’ in France.

As I have said, it will take two election cycles before the situation stabilizes. The current French government, like the current German government, Swedish government, and US government, are all actively taking the side of the invaders, against the nation, and therefore they are totally unable to bring a peaceful end to the situation. If we’re all lucky, they will accept being voted out and seeing their handiwork methodically undone.

If we’re not, there will be civil war throughout the West. It is eminently clear that a sufficient number of young Europeans have now concluded that they will no longer endure Muslim attacks without reprisals.

The governments can’t stop them. Are they going to arrest the 1500 young nationals in Holland? The 600 young nationals in Corsica? And they can’t even hold the threat of disemploying them over their heads, because the youth unemployment rates in Europe are over 50 percent. The die is cast, and most of the current governments have foolishly bet on the side that is destined to lose.