Tag: Pink SF

The Inutility of Hate

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.

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Sort of Fantasy Women’s Association

That’s what SFWA has been reduced to. The idea that Nancy Kress is a “Grand Master” of science fiction would be downright hilarious if the science-fiction reading public actually knew who she was or had read any of her books.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Nancy Kress its 43rd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master on Friday, announced during a Fireside Chat at Worldcon in Los Angeles. Kress has six Nebulas and a pair of Hugos to her name, most for novellas on genetic engineering and biotech ethics, but she is hardly the genre-transforming type picked before the 2020s. Her most popular novella, Beggars in Spain, is simply a political argument with Ayn Rand shoehorned into a story, not offering much more than a repudiation of Rand’s ubermensch. More notable is that, by SFWA’s count, she is the eighth consecutive woman to receive the honor in a streak that runs back to Lois McMaster Bujold’s selection in 2020.

Not one man has been named since William Gibson in 2019…

I can’t believe John Scalzi still hasn’t been given an SFWA participation award yet. This is what happens when an organization lowers its standards in order to permit the third-raters to enter en masse. The third-raters eventually let in the mediocrities, the mediocrities let in the wannabes and the nonentities, and it’s not long before there are no more standards and the entire purpose of the organization has been destroyed.

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It’s Not Happening

Now George RR Martin can’t even write blog posts without help because he’s depressed.

George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his recent difficulties in his first personal blog post for almost six months.

“This year has been … stressful, to say the least,” he wrote in a post titled Better Late Than Never. “So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming. Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come.”

He explained that posts published on his website since February had been written by his assistants because he had continued to fall behind despite their help.

Martin, who turns 78 in September, also reflected on ageing; “getting old is no fun”, he wrote, although he added that the year had contained “amazing times” alongside its difficulties.

“I suppose that’s just life. Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”

Among the year’s highlights, Martin noted that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel based on his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, had received nine Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series.

His comments come amid continued speculation about The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth and penultimate novel in A Song of Ice and Fire. The book has been in progress since the publication of the fifth instalment, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011, and has become one of the most eagerly awaited novels in modern publishing. No publication date has been announced.

Yet another sound reason to support the Byron AI…

Because once he’s gone, there is no way whomever turns out to be his literary heir doesn’t sell off the rights to a corporation that will finish it.

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The Freaks of File 770

The celebration of Pride Month with the arrest of yet another SJW is fitting, but it’s no surprise, and is just one of the many reasons I’ve never granted any legitimacy to the Social Justice freakshows who always attempt to posture as if they’ve got the moral high ground in response to things like Rabid Puppies, Comicsgate, and everything else that threatens their relentless degradation of the cultural milieu.

Andrew Farago, the curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and one of the more prominent progressive voices in the organized comics community, was arrested June 3 on 20 counts of invasion of privacy after secretly recording birthday party guests using the bathroom at his Berkeley home, according to court documents obtained by The Berkeley Scanner.

The allegations date to May 23, when Farago co-hosted a birthday party at his South Berkeley residence. During the party, a woman found Farago’s cellphone concealed and recording video in the bathroom. The phone contained footage of Farago himself setting up the recording, according to police, as he had hidden the device under a towel and positioned it to capture guests’ genitalia as they used the restroom. Party guests included both adults and children.

When the woman confronted him, Farago made admissions and stated he had deleted the videos from his phone and the cloud, according to Berkeley police. Officers subsequently obtained an arrest warrant, arrested Farago at his home on June 3, and served a search warrant seizing approximately a dozen electronic devices…

He spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter pre-Elon Musk takeover, harassing artists and professionals such as Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who put up with his relentless attacks for years. Van Sciver reacted to the news, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone who mercilessly worked to ruin my life and career, and the careers of so many others who loved to make comic books, but were political conservatives or followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, trespassed on the sacred privacy of the friends and guests he invited into his home. Andrew Farago represented so many pillars of the mainstream comic book industry, like The Comics Journal, San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics, Hachette Group Distribution, and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He even wrote a book about Snoopy. His behavior, which involved hiding his cell phone under a towel in his guest bathroom in order to film the genitals of his party guests, is emblematic of the sickness that lurks in mainstream comics, where evil is welcomed and feted, and traditional American values are hunted and despised. I hope he finds Jesus Christ through diligent prayer and bible study should he be sent to prison, where he belongs.”

EVS is right. This sort of behavior isn’t sickness or even personal weakness, it’s a systemic spiritual state in which they all wallow with literal pride.

Speaking of Pride and predictability, the UK’s first gay adoptive parents were just arrested and “charged with rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.”

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A Deep and Debilitating Dive

Our old acquaintance Dr. Sandifier, whom you may recall from our John C. Wright vs Iain M. Banks debate has penned an astonishingly deep dive on the works of Neil Gaiman. Pace yourself and brace yourself, it’s longer than you would ever imagine, and enter at your own risk.

Indeed, the idea of predation lurks throughout The Doll’s House. In the first half Rose’s brother Jed is kept a prisoner by his abusive foster parents, who are in turn being influenced by one of the escaped dreams, the duo Brute and Glob, who are using his dreams for their own schemes. The second escaped dream, meanwhile, is the Corinthian, who’s become a serial killer and is at the convention. It’s also an obvious component of the prelude about Dream and Nada. This isn’t quite enough to be called a theme, especially as it’s not especially present in the arc’s denouement, but it’s still clearly, and frankly understandably, on Gaiman’s mind. Certainly it’s a more substantial unifying element than hearts or whatever.

Perhaps the most interesting instance of predation in the arc comes in a two page sequence in the Cereal Convention issue where Rose is told the “original version” of Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf has Red Riding Hood undress, telling her as she takes off each garment to “throw it on the fire; you won’t need it any more”—a beat that foreshadows her assault by Fun Land. Gaiman clearly means to position this story as a kind of ur-myth underlying all the subsequent serial killers. But it’s notable that in 2004 he wrote a blog post about his own identification with the wolf, arguing that he “represents an awful lot of stuff—the danger and truth of stories, for a start, and the way they change; he symbolises—not predation, for some reason—but transformation: the meeting in the wild wood that changes everything forever,” and notes that “when I was a boy, when I grew up I wanted to be a wolf,” before concluding that “The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she’d just be another girl on her way to her grandmother’s house. And she’d leave her goodies behind, and come home, and no-one would ever have heard of her. But he’s not just her wolf: he’s all the wolves on the edge of the world, all the wolves in all the stories, all the wolves in all the dreams of wolves; flashing green eyes in the darkness, dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.” Even leaving aside his dubious assertion that the wolf is not a symbol of predation—certainly that’s how he uses it in The Doll’s House—this is striking in its apologism, particularly in its frankly alarming claim that the wolf is in some sense doing Red Riding Hood a favor by making her into a story.

All of this hangs uncomfortably over the first issue of Dream Country, a set of four stand-alone stories between The Doll’s House and the next arc. Called “Calliope,” the issue focuses on a writer, Richard Madoc, who, stuck and flailing on his second novel, makes a deal with Erasmus Fry, an aging writer, to acquire the muse Calliope, who Fry captured in the 1920s and had been using to fuel his own career. Madoc uses Calliope to catapult himself to an immensely successful career across numerous media and genres, ignoring her tearful pleas to be set free. Eventually Calliope contacts Morpheus, her ex-lover (as with Nada and, it will eventually emerge, literally every single romantic relationship over the course of Morpheus’s billions of years of existence, it ended badly), who frees her by cursing Madoc with an uncontrollable flood of ideas that drives him mad.

In 1990, this looked an effective horror story—enough so that DC included the script for it in the Dream Country trade paperback. With hindsight, however, what proves most unsettling about it is the degree to which the story prefigures so much of Gaiman’s own story. It’s not just the basic dynamic of a writer and a young, beautiful woman he treats as his muse while simultaneously abusing—a phenomenon that is hardly unique to Gaiman. It’s the specific details, from the way Madoc flits among genres and mediums to the way he insists that “I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer” to the detail of Erasmus Fry insisting that the captured Calliope call him “master.” Gaiman even sent artist Kelley Jones photos of his office to use as reference for Madoc’s.

What’s crucial to note is that this is not Gaiman telling on himself. It’s not just that Gaiman was still a decade away from the sort of outright abuse being allegorized in “Calliope”; the story is plainly aware of the horror of its subject… No, “Calliope” is far more disturbing than the comic book equivalent of that monologue from the serial killer who started following women around with a knife in his pocket before escalating. It’s a warning of what’s to come, yes, but the warning is not a comment on the author’s private fantasies; it’s a comment on the degree to which he fundamentally failed to understand the magic he was taking hold of, and what its consequences might be. He understood the broad strokes—that if he could survive the tightrope grind of monthly comics for long enough and create a work of sufficient quality and impact he could change his life decisively enough to get him fully out from the towering shadow of his upbringing. He understood that writing this story, about the King of Dreams and his tragedy, would allow him to also rewrite his story—to become Neil Gaiman instead of David Gaiman’s son. But he did not understand what that meant.

Sandifier is an excellent literary historian, but the one thing I find genuinely surprising about this section of what is intended to be a larger book about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, is the way in which Sandifier clearly recognizes Gaiman’s penchant for ripping off literally anything and everything he can get his hands on, and yet seemingly fails to grasp that Gaiman is, at heart, nothing more than a glib and talented charlatan. He rightly condemns Gaiman for his sins, but not for his fraud.

I also find it a little curious that everyone still just accepts the idea that Gaiman is a legitimate bestselling author despite his close and obvious connections to another “bestselling” science fiction author whose massive sales over the years were, to put it mildly, orchestrated. He may be, but I suspect an in-depth investigation might reveal some level of similar orchestration.

Ironically, The Cuddled Little Vice is one of the few Hugo-nominated works that would have been worthy of the award back in the days when the Hugo actually meant something.

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The Academy Unleashes The Gay

That certainly didn’t take long. It’s not as if they actually fooled anyone:

Fans have been wondering when the woke shoe will drop even further with Starfleet Academy, but now it’s revealed that the characters played by Gina Yashere and Tig Notaro are going to be lesbian in a new interview with the cast members.

I haven’t seen it. I’m entirely confident that I will never see it. But when someone told me that at least Starfleet Academy wasn’t pushing Pride, I told them, “yeah, give it a week or two”.

Every. Single. Time.

No worries. JDA and I have something very, very cool in the works that will be coming much, much sooner than anyone imagined.

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The Man Who Made John Scalzi

The Tor editor who first published John Scalzi, then handed him a 13-book contract in order to – I don’t know, prevent him from taking all those nonexistent offers from other publishers? – has retired.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my friend and also my editor at Tor Books, is retiring. He steps forward from a career that includes editing hundreds of books, including twenty of my own, and a ridiculous number of professional awards and achievements, including several Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy award. In addition to editing, he was (and continues to be) a notable figure in science fiction fandom, helping to run conventions, having been guest of honor for several, and got his first Hugo nomination for the fanzine Izzard back in 1984. He also teaches, including a long stint at the Viable Paradise writing workshop.

The short version of this is, he’s one of the editors most responsible for how the science fiction and fantasy field looks today.

Wow, that’s pretty harsh! Damning words indeed! If he’s one of the editors most responsible for how the science fiction and fantasy field looks today, he’s got a lot for which to answer.

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Baen is the New Tor

We’re seeing the old aphorism about conservatives being liberals from 20 years ago play out in the science fiction genre:

Earlier this year, Fandom Pulse reported how Larry Correia saw the writing on the wall at Baen Books, a company that’s struggled to retain its identity in science fiction ever since the Sad Puppies controversy of the Hugo Awards in the mid-2010s. While corporate wanted to distance themselves from the event as much as possible, the fanbase actually loved it.

A seminal event in Baen history was when Toni Weisskopf actually shut down the forum “Baen’s Bar” for a time after serial trolls from the mainstream publishing industry were talking about how they might have “liability” because of January 6th, a false flag operation where the left claimed Trump supporters were rioting, but as we now know was an FBI-coordinated psyop.

Since this point, the company seemed to lose its identity and what made it what it was. Baen Books was seen as the alternative to much of the Pink Sci-Fi of the mainstream industry being put out by Tor Books and others. However, their staple of male-driven military science fiction quickly got eaten up by the Amazon algorithm riders who topped charts with rapid-release books that an old publishing company couldn’t compete with.

The company didn’t really develop a next generation of stars to take over from their aging stable of John Ringo, David Weber, David Drake and others. While several of their authors sadly passed away, the company mostly milked their remaining living authors and attached younger co-writers to projects. These books invariably don’t sell as well as the main series, but they also didn’t really bring forth any stars who could sell on their own right.

The result was the state the company is now: their biggest star author flirting with other companies, while they’re trying their hardest to keep the co-written books going. Newer authors tend to be pushing toward the exact Pink SF that Baen Books used to be the alternative to, as increasingly the Baen catalog is publishing exactly that.

It doesn’t get much more turn-of-the-century Tor than publishing a) Catharine Asaro and b) Mercedes Lackey ruining an Ann McCaffrey franchise. At this rate, Baen will be publishing John Scalzi before 2030 rolls around.

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Correction

The LA Review of Books simply doesn’t know how to read and doesn’t know what it is talking about.

The Far Right believes that the future belongs to them. In much reactionary discourse, only white men have any meaningful ability to imagine the future. According to this worldview, white people possess a racially unique capacity for speculation, including rational planning, counterfactual imagination, and inspired innovation. At the same time, the Far Right claims that only white men have the discipline, intelligence, and foresight to realize this future. This ideology holds that whiteness is a potential for greatness, including the inborn ability to build a high-tech society. In other words, whiteness is speculative to the alt-right: it possesses a promissory value far in excess of any white men’s actual achievements. Some fascist thinkers have gone so far as to suggest that science fiction is an inherently white genre. For example, Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), the leader of the Rabid Puppies fan group, claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre because, in his view, people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Despite the widespread success of speculative authors of color in recent decades, there are fascists who hold that nonwhite people are genetically incapable of imagining and inhabiting science-fictional futures.

  1. The future does belong to the so-called “Far Right”. The Left and the Center-Right subscribe to observably and objectively false beliefs, don’t have enough children to replace themselves, don’t have any lasting principles, and can’t even tell the difference between a man and a woman anymore. Their ideas and philosophies are not only bankrupt, they are literally dying out.
  2. The entire history of the world clearly demonstrates that only European people create and maintain European-style societies and civilizations. Any Post-European North American societies will bear as little resemblance to America as America did to the pre-European native tribal societies. This really isn’t that hard. That being said, the future is actually much more likely to be dominated by a Chinese “Far Right” than a white one given the military, industrial, and technological trends, mostly because China is not infected with either Enlightenment values or a satanic elite. The dirt is not, and has never been, magic.
  3. Science fiction is, and has always been, an inherently white male genre. There were virtually no female authors who qualified to join SFWA until the bylaws were changed to permit fantasy authors to join it. Diversity and inclusion have devastated the science fiction world, to the point that none of the current nominees for the various science fiction awards even qualifies as science fiction of any kind. There is nothing wrong with the fantasy romances that female authors prefer to write, but they aren’t science fiction even if Tor or some other former SF publisher attempts to market them as such.
  4. I claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre and I have been proven absolutely correct. There is no objective metric by which it can be claimed that diversity and inclusion have improved it in any way. Fewer readers, lower average advances, fewer book sales, fewer authors published by publishers, fewer bestsellers, and so forth. Diversity and inclusion are not the only cause of the decline, but they have observably contributed to it.
  5. It is not my view that people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Whether people of color can understand those achievements or not is irrelevant, the point is that they are not interested in replicating them. It is, however, my observation that N.K. Jemisin, the affirmative-action author donated multiple Hugo awards for Best Science Fiction novel for her remarkable feat of writing while black and female, declared “Speculative fiction is at its core syncretic; this stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere. And it certainly didn’t spring solely from the imaginations of a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys in the 1950s.” Perhaps, but science fiction definitely isn’t springing from the non-white, non-male, diverse authors of the 2020s because they prefer writing non-science fiction works. Are we seriously supposed to pretend this wasn’t obvious from the start?
  6. Also, I’m not a fascist. If I were, I very much doubt I would be a welcome guest on CGTN. I’m not a communist either, but one could at least produce a modicum of evidence for that.
  7. What widespread success? If all of these award-winning authors of color are so successful, why are they constantly crying about their lack of book sales on social media?

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Owning the Alphas

McRapey shows his fellow Gamma males how it’s done.

Take that, all you status-anxious males. Feel the burn! Feel the rage! Of course, he’s not projecting at all. No, there isn’t a man on the planet less anxious about his status than John M. Scalzi. So stunning. And brave.

Please clap.

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