Tag: Pink SF

Brad Torgersen breaks the narrative

As you might expect, Brad Torgersen’s response to the Toad of Tor and the carnival of the grotesque on display at Making Light is considerably more polite and measured than mine. But it is equally dismissive in substance:

We’re about a week out from the release of the final ballot results, for the 2015 Hugo awards. These results will determine which picks are available for your choosing when it comes time for you to cast your ballot. Best Novel, Best Short Story, etc. Already, the critics of Sad Puppies 3 have been laying the groundwork for de-legitimizing SP3. To include statements which completely misunderstand the point of Sad Puppies. Some of it is innocent. Not everybody’s had time to do a deep-dig on the history of Sad Puppies, nor to be able to discern that each iteration of the project has tended to assume its own personality. What they’re hearing about SP3 is probably hear-say from friends, and much of that is at least one to two years out-of-date. And even then, many of the “facts” put forth are demonstrably wrong.

But other commentary is not so innocent. There are people who find the very existence of Sad Puppies 3 to be an affront to their personhoods. A sinister outside force come to trouble their precious genre and its establishment. For the people deliberately misconstruing the purpose and thrust of Sad Puppies 3, it’s all about getting out in front and shaping a narrative. They’re smart. They know that truth can be overwhelmed with lies if you just spin your narrative adroitly, and with enough volume.

Thus the charges, in no particular order.

● SP3 is a trojan horse effort conducted by and for the benefit of authors who cannot earn a Hugo award the honest way.

● SP3 is just ballot-stuffing, which ought to be disallowed according to precedent and the rules of ballot-counting established through WSFS.

● SP3 is artificially trying to warp the Hugos out of true; an outside effort conducted by and involving people who are not real fans.

● The SP3 slate works are substandard based on (insert garbledy-garble talk about taste here.)

● The SP3 slate is just a bunch of right-wingers who should go set up their own awards, and leave the Hugos alone.

● SP3 is not legit because its participants were drafted for the effort, and are not willing participants.

● SP3 is not legit because Larry Correia is a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is not legit because Vox Day is also running Rabid Puppies and everybody knows Vox Day is also a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is a trojan horse for GamerGaters, and all real fans hate and loathe GamerGaters.

● SP3 is just a bunch of straight white guys who are terrified of women, gays, trans, and folks with brown skin.

● SP3 would never happen in the first place if (resurrected conservative editor of the past) could lecture them about their wrongdoing.

● SP3 is a fringe minority faction that does not represent the “main body” of real fans.

● SP3’s slate selections are not the “natural” selections of real fans.

There’s more, but I think you get the gist of it.

Much of this is simply the “in” crowd reacting badly to watching the “out” crowd take a seat at the lunch table. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, according to the dyed-in-the-wool denizens of WSFS and Worldcon, a “real fan” is defined as someone who has been attending Worldcon (and other cons) for a long time, has been properly inculcated into the specific culture of Worldcon and con-going fandom, is someone who volunteers time and effort to cons, generally makes Worldcon (and con-going) a “family” affair, etc. So if you don’t go to Worldcon and you’ve not been part of that culture for a number of years, you don’t qualify as a “real fan” in their definition. And they resent the hell out of anyone who is not a “real fan” showing up to vote on the “real fan” award.

Imagine that, an SJW trying to deceitfully shape the narrative in her favor. Keep in mind that Brad is addressing those who are still running around saying demonstrably untrue things like “Vox Day is the originator of Sad Puppies” and “Spacebunny does not exist”. These SJWs are not so much insane as willfully delusional. I have no doubt that I could show up at Sasquan with Spacebunny and some of them would claim that I somehow managed to find and hire an escort who happens to look just like the model whose pictures I’ve been using to make it look as if I am married to a slender and attractive woman. Because #GamerGate. And also, raciss.

Of course, they know better, but they’re perfectly willing to lie for rhetorical effect. Which raises the question: once you know that, why would you believe a single word that comes out of their mouths? The good thing is that it is easy to destroy their narrative. Because it is false, all that is necessary to do so is to relentlessly tell the truth.

Since 1986, Tor Books has 84 Hugo and Nebula Best Novel nominations. In 2014, Tor.com had 50 percent of the short story nominations, 40 percent of the novella nominations, and 20 percent of the novelette nominations. Tor has also won the Locus Award for Best Publisher for 26 straight years, beginning in 1988.

Keep that in mind when you read the Toad of Tor’s claims about people being afraid of losing their privilege.

“It just makes sense”

Parody is the homage rhetoric pays to dialectic:

Star Wars is getting its first lesbian character. Paul S Kemp has revealed that he is adding the mystery woman to his upcoming novel Lords of the Sith, the next instalment in the official sci-fi canon due out on 28 April.

Little is known about her, but “nerd news” blog Big Shiny Robot has dropped a few hints about what fans can expect.

“Moff Mors is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes, but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure,” a recent post reads. “She also happens to be a lesbian.”

Shelly Shapiro, editor of the Star Wars books, explaining that including a lesbian character “just makes sense”.

“There’s a lot of diversity…there should be diversity in Star Wars,” she said. “You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.

And yet, we won’t find any Muslims in Star Wars despite there being a billion of them. We won’t find any Christians in Star Wars despite there being nearly two billion of them. How many Chinese, serial killers, and Green Bay Packers fans will we find? But More Muff (how very clever) just happens to be a lesbian.

It certainly didn’t take Disney long to gay it up. I’m very glad that I lost all interest in Star Wars about ten minutes into The Phantom Menace. If there is one thing you can count on, it is that once SJWs get involved in something, it’s just a matter of time before it is ruined. At this rate, they’ll have Han Solo transitioning in the second new film and we’ll learn that Luke and Leia got married despite knowing they were brother and sister.

Pink SF’s 2015 business plan

The pinkshirts have revealed their clever plan to deal with technology, reader disinterest, and Blue SF cutting into their increasingly declining sales:

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has reportedly paid University of Oregon “poet” Amanda Powell to translate a 2005 science fiction novel promoting “a straightforwardly queer approach to sexuality.” Powell, whose poetry has appeared in the anthology This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on Teaching, reportedly was given a $12,500 federal grant to reword the book by Uriel Quesada, El gato de sí mismo aka Cat on His Own Behalf, from Spanish into English. (The novel is currently holding down an Amazon Best Sellers Rank of #6,737,114)

On a scale of 1 to 100, my level of surprise is about minus 20. Lefties ALWAYS eventually turn to the government for handouts. They have no choice, they’re parasites. They are the Grasshopper People. Without forced consumption, bait-and-switches, begging, or funding from industry and government, they can’t survive because no one actually wants to buy what they’re selling.

Why we fight

Because this is what happens when you don’t:

Karen Memery (like memory but with an e as she explains), is just such a seamstress. She is the titular narrator of Elizabeth Bear’s latest steampunk adventure, Karen Memory (with an o and not an e). A prostitute at the Hôtel Ma Cherie, a high-class bordello in Seattle Rapid City in the late 1800s, Memery is dissatisfied with her job and her johns, longing for the prairie life she gave up when her father died….

Bear also gleefully subverts gender roles in Karen Memory. Not just with Karen and Priya’s lesbian relationship. She also introduces Crispin, the gay bouncer at the Hôtel Ma Cherie, and Miss Francina, one of the seamstresses who has a select client base. As Karen puts it:

    “…the thing about Miss Francina is that Miss Francina’s got a pecker under her dress. But that ain’t nothing but God’s rude joke. She’s one of us girls every way that matters, and handy for a bouncer besides.”

So not only do we have three prominent gay characters, including the main protagonist and her love interest, but we also have a transgender character — the first I’ve run into in a 19th Century setting. And Karen’s plainspoken acceptance of Miss Francina, and those other societal outcasts who gravitate to the Hôtel Ma Cherie is probably the most refreshing part of the book.

Indeed, one of the major themes of Karen Memory seems to be the subversion of the dominant white male paradigm. Bear puts a variety of alternative lifestyles and minority role models on display, and fervently asserts that they too can be heroes in a fantasy novel. Madame Damnable in her quest for leadership of Seattle Rapid City against Bantle; the African-American Marshal Reeves, who has risen to a place of leadership despite his race (and actually Madame Damnable as well – Karen makes it clear that the powerful madame is also African-American by blood, if not by appearance); and Priya and Karen’s blossoming relationship, forbidden both as same-sex and interracial, are all examples.

Does that sounds like “loads of fun” to you? Because reading about a dissatisfied whore while being subjected to a sermon on the importance of diversity in sexual orientation, race, and transgenderism sounds about as much fun as listening to to SJWs drone on NPR about intersectionalism. I would genuinely rather read an IMF paper on the monetary policy of Zambia  or Newton’s Principia. In Latin.

Loads of fun. That’s what they want to bring to the game industry too. Loads of fun. Now, you can either submit to this SJW shit, or you can help us keep it out of games and take back science fiction. What will it be?

UPDATE: Bandai Namco sensitively responds to SJW concerns by providing new armor for female characters Ivy and Amy. Happy now?

No, apparently not.

Men in women suits

Silvia Moreno-Garcia says no to strong female characters:

I was not a fan of The Book of Life. I will not elaborate too much on this point except to mention that when I watched it I recalled a bit from an article by Sophia McDougall published in The New Statesman:

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.

“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say.

She rolled her eyes. “All the princesses know kung-fu now.”

I thought the same thing about the heroine of The Book of Life. She knows kung-fu and she spews the kind of “feisty” attitude we must associate with heroines and she is therefore strong and everything is kosher.

In an effort to get a wider variety of women in movies and books, we have often heard the mantra that we need more strong female characters. However, as some commentators have noted “strong” has often become a code word for a very specific kind of character. The kind that must demonstrate her chops via feats of physical strength. So, for example, in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 the heroine Elizabeth Swann has now acquired fencing skills. This serves as a credential for her “strength” even though the character had demonstrated “strength” of another type already in the first movie: she was smart, even devious, managing to wriggle her way out of more than one situation.

Shana Mlawski did an interesting study of male and female characters a few years ago. The main question she wanted to answer was whether male characters are more immediately likeable than female characters. Her conclusion:

All of the above data suggest to me that we (or at least the critics at EW) like a wide variety of male character types but prefer our women to be two-dimensionally “badass” and/or evil.

That means that badasses like Sarah Connor and villains like Catherine Trammell could be palatable to audiences. Male characters, however, were allowed to come in a wider range and still deemed likeable. Men, Mlwaski, writes, could be “passive” characters. Women? They could blow stuff up or kill people….

In fact, a couple of weeks ago I watched the 1980s adaptation of Flash Gordon and
was mildly delighted to see that Dale Arden was “strong” too! Despite
the cheesiness and bubbly sexism Dale kicked ass! She was for the
duration of the film most interested in exclaiming FLASH! but at one
point she took off her heels and beat about half a dozen guards. Strong
woman, indeed.

And that, I guess, is my point. We really haven’t gotten that far from Dale and her display of 1980s strength.

Sarah Hoyt says much the same thing in passing while writing about Portugal:

In the same way the ten-thousandth Empowered Woman Defeats Evil Males saga might posibly contribute to the self-esteem of some severely battered woman who SOMEHOW managed to avoid all other identical tomes rolling off the presses for the last twenty years at least.  For me they are just a “oh, heck, yeah.  Go sisterrrr.  YAWN” as I toss the book aside. 

I have three main objections to strong female characters. First, the basic concept is a lie. Barring mystical powers or divine heritage, the strong female character is simply nonsense. They don’t exist, they aren’t convincingly imagined or portrayed, and they’re essentially nothing more than token feminist propaganda devices. Freud would, in this case correctly, put the whole phenomenon down to penis envy.

Second, it is tedious. As both women note, strong female characters are neither new nor interesting. If you’re blindly copying a trope that hasn’t been new for three decades, you’re just boring the reader. And third, it is dreadful writing. Most “strong female” characters observably are not women, they are simply male characters dressed in female suits. They don’t talk like women, they don’t act like women, and when we’re shown their interior monologues, they don’t think like women either. They’re about as convincingly female as those latent serial killers who like to wear those bizarre rubber women suits. They are, in fact, the literary equivalent of those freaks.

I’m not the only one to notice this. Carina Chocano observes: ““Strong female characters,” in other words, are often just female characters with the gendered behavior taken out.” In other words, they’re one-dimensional men in women suits.

Ironically, men tend to write more interesting “strong female characters” because
at least they know what men think like when they are writing about men
in women suits. When women do it, they’re writing what they imagine the
man the female writer is pretending is a woman would think like. It’s
convoluted, it’s insane, and it should be no surprise to anyone that most stories based on
such self-contradictory characters don’t turn out very well.

On a tangential note, McRapey was bragging about how people couldn’t tell if the protagonist of Lock In was male or female throughout the entire book. He even had two separate narrators, one of each sex, for the audio book. Now, not only is that silly stunt-writing, but think about the literary implications. It means the behavior of the character and its interior monologue is so haplessly inept and unrealistically bland that the reader cannot even ascertain something as intrinsically basic to human identity as the mere sex of the character.

Can you imagine if you couldn’t tell from their behavior if Anna Karenina was a woman or if Aragorn was a man? Would that inability improve or detract from the story? Strong female characters are bad enough, but the occluded sex of Lock In marks a new depth in bad science fiction writing.

The Lord of Hate engages

This may explain why the pinkshirts are so remarkably shy about engaging with the Evil Legion of Evil:

Dude, please. You’ve got 45 fucking Hugo nominations. Disqualify would be saying your opinion doesn’t count because you are a white male and have privilege. Shit. Looking at that picture you’ve got Santa Privilege.

Instead the fact that one dude has 45 nominations is a pretty damned good indicator that your little pond has gone stagnant. That isn’t disqualification. That is stating the obvious. I said you guys were a tiny little clique, but I didn’t realize it was that inbred. That is something so absurd that when I learned your blog had 28 it blew my mind. It was so ridiculous that when somebody else pointed out that you actually have FORTY FIVE in total, I didn’t believe them. I scoffed at first. Even me, the guy who started this big open public conversation we’re finally having about the Hugos being broken, thought to myself, naw, that’s impossible. There’s no freaking way they’d give some individual 45 nominations and 9 Hugos.

Nope.

So, then when a guy with 45 Hugo noms writes about me, what… What are you up to now? Six? Eight articles about Sad Puppies? And in said articles misconstrues damn near everything, and repeatedly assures his readers, don’t worry, comrades, the system is fine, system is our friend, and only bad people work outside of system… Well, that’s just fishy.

It isn’t disqualification to note that somebody benefiting directly from a broken system might be in favor of said system. In your case it is just extra pathetic and kind of sad. It also explains why you seem to actually believe that I’m driven by a desire to get a trophy. I really don’t want your people’s approval and I truly don’t give a shit about me winning (and don’t worry, if I’m nominated again, I will prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt).

“No wonder you won’t engage”

Engage what? You specifically? Your bullshit is no different than the other narrative bullshit, so I respond to them in mass. Honestly Glyer 45 Hugos, internet arguing is a spectator sport, frankly your 28 Hugo Fanzine doesn’t have enough traffic for me to justify the time responding there (Which is why, I’m going to cut and paste this response over to Facebook when I’m done).

I’m kind of busy engaging the entire SJW internet to spend much time worrying about your bad Shakespeare. But it shows what an interesting selective memory you’ve got there. I’ve written in depth and rather openly about what I’m doing. You write about it and make shit up to explain to your clique what their narrative should be. I’ve repeatedly written since clarifying things, but you just ignore, and make more shit up about what I *really* meant.

And I didn’t bother with your last one, because I don’t think Dogberry was compiling links to actual quotes of his opponents being assholes.

But while I’m thinking about it, here is an interesting thought on “engaging”. Do you realize that in all this time, and all this controversy, not a single one of my opponents has actually taken the time to contact me to speak about this directly? I’ve been contacted by a bunch of people who are secretly on my side, and I’ve been contacted by many moderate fence sitters and people genuinely concerned for the future of the Hugos. But the side opposed to what I’m doing? None. None of the interview places, none of the award winning fanzines, none of the SJW bloggers with their fingers on the pulse of fandom. Zip. Zero. No engagement, just ignore what I actually say and do, and make up bullshit instead.

Now, I’ve talked to Mike Glyer via email and he actually strikes me as being on the saner and more reasonable side of Pink SF. I may not share his taste in authors, but he does a credible job of keeping fandom informed of what is going on in the science fiction world. Nothing wrong with that. He doesn’t have 45 Hugo nominations because he lobbied for them, but because people in fandom liked what he was doing. Unlike the Scalziettes, he clearly recognizes that Brad wants to save the Hugo Awards from themselves and that I could not be any less interested in winning approval from the SF rabbits.

And therein lies the problem. If even the more reasonable and clear-sighted people on the other side, even those among the very few willing to communicate directly with us, are unable to see what we, and a considerable number of science fiction and fantasy readers, very clearly see as a genre-killing cancer at work, then there isn’t any form of rational compromise possible.

Which, of course, may well be the case. If so, time and technology are on our side. It’s not going to be us eradicating them, but rather, the fact that the gatekeepers who formerly enabled them are going out of business. We’ll know the game is over when those who attacked us as vile and so forth come crawling to us, hat in hand, begging for the opportunities that they denied us when they were in power.

Not that it is all about revenge. I’ve never cared about cons and fandom. It’s not my scene. And perhaps that is what many of them hate most about us. We legitimately don’t care what they do, what they think, or what they say.

UPDATE: We have detente! Larry has come out firmly in favor of reading books for which one votes and Mike concurs:

I don’t have to say this but I think he means it. If the rest of the people behind Sad Puppies 3 take his statement to heart, and don’t just treat it as some kind of dogwhistle, they will end up enriching the award’s representation instead of merely doing a hack on it.

How fortunate that everyone supporting Rabid Puppies has read Tom Kratman, Steve Rzasa, and John C. Wright. And anyone who hasn’t, the situation is easily rectified given the links provided.

The invisible Voxemort

McCreepy repeats his Very Important call for guest blogs about representation in science fiction and fantasy:

Last year, I posted an open call for guest blogs about representation in science fiction and fantasy. The resulting essays were, in my opinion, both important and powerful. I was hopeful when I first put out that call, but the stories people chose to share exceeded my expectations in so many ways.

So I’m doing it again. Because, to quote from last year’s call, “it’s one thing for me to talk about this stuff. But let’s face it, it’s not exactly difficult for me to find characters like me in books, TV, movies, advertising, video games, etc. And there’s a painful irony when conversations about representation end up spotlighting some guy who’s part of the most overrepresented group in the country.”

Once again, I’ll be looking for personal, first-hand stories between 400 and 1000 words, talking about what it’s like to not see yourself in stories, or to see yourself misrepresented, or the first time you found a character you could really relate to and what that meant, and so on.

I have to admit, reading those personal first-hand stories did make a real difference to me. I had previously had some respect for Katherine Kerr. But after reading her stupid self-pity party, I have lost all interest in ever reading any more of her books.


“At 16, confused and vulnerable, I gave it all up. I took no more “hard”
science courses. I left the math classes to the boys, just like the boys
wanted.”

Yes, because as we’ve all learned, the ideal way to make sure people are able to accomplish difficult things is by making it easier for them. That’s why the Navy SEAL program is going to replace 24-weeks of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S)
school, a parachute course and the 26-week SEAL
Qualification Training program.with handing out ice cream cones and lollipops.

What I found very hurtful as a Native American was that Jim Hines didn’t feature any stories about my people. I will pen a personal and first-hand story about how terribly hard it was for me growing up Indian (feather, not dot) in a land full of pretty, blonde Scandinavian girls who had settled upon the ancestral lands of my tribal cousins, and I trust Mr. Hines will help the healing begin by including it in Invisible 2.

Meanwhile, speaking of McCreepy, this was amusing.

P.T. Barnumium #1041 ‏@PTBarnumium
@voxday are you Voldemort or something? Entire McCreepy thread where they’re contorting like maniacs to not mention you by name

How the Hugos became a battleground

Nero chronicles the politicization of science fiction and fantasy and explains the reason for the existence of Sad Puppies:

New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia told us that SFF is currently in the grip of a “systematic campaign to slander anybody who doesn’t toe their line,” which is breeding a culture of fear and self-censorship. “Most authors aren’t making that much money, so they are terrified of being slandered and losing business,” he says. The only exceptions are a “handful of people like me who are either big enough not to give a crap, or too obstinate to shut up.”

After years on the back foot, that obstinate handful are preparing to fight back.

Sad Puppies

To the outside world, the Hugo Awards are known as the most prestigious honor that a sci-fi or fantasy creator can achieve. However, inside the community they are widely seen as a popularity contest dominated by cliques and super-fandoms. This can be seen most clearly in the dominance of Doctor Who in the TV award categories. The show’s enormous fanbase has garnered 26 Hugo nominations in the last nine years. Episodes from the show triumphed in every year between 2006 and 2012, save one.

The Hugos have an advantage, though: they are difficult for a single group to dominate if others rise to challenge them. All one has to do to vote in the awards is pay a small membership fee to the World Science Fiction Convention. For the few who are brave enough to defend artistic freedom openly, the Hugos are a good place to make a stand.

That is precisely what is now happening. Ahead of 2013’s Hugo Awards, Larry Correia began making public blog posts about his nominations, inviting his readers to discuss and agree on a shared list of Hugo nominations, and vote collectively. The idea was to draw attention to authors and creators who were suffering from an undeserved lack of attention due to the political climate in sci-fi. The “Sad Puppies” slate was born.

(The original idea was to call it the “Sad Puppies Think of the Children Campaign” – a dig at those who take their social crusades too seriously.)

What began as a discussion among bloggers has turned into an annual event. Last year’s Sad Puppies slate was extraordinarily successful, with seven out of Correia’s twelve nominations making it to the final stage of the Hugos. Among the successful nominations was The Last Witchking, a novelette by Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day – a writer whose radical right-wing views had put him at the top of the sci-fi SJWs’ hit list. The fact that an author like Beale could receive a Hugo nomination was proof that SJW domination of sci-fi was not as complete as the elites would have liked.

In addition to humiliating the activists, the slate also triggered significant debate. Even Jon Scalzi, the privilege-checking SFWA President discussed above, was forced to admit that works of science fiction and fantasy ought to be judged on their quality, not on the politics of their authors. This greatly upset some of Scalzi’s more radical supporters, who openly called for exclusion on the basis of political belief. The debate also spread beyond sci-fi to the pages of The Huffington Post and USA Today.

Stirring up debate was, of course, precisely the point of Sad Puppies. As well as ensuring that quality works of fiction made it past the cliques at places like SWFA and Tor.com to be considered by the fans themselves, the Sad Puppies slate also forced radicals to show their true colours. Those who supported political ostracism were outed as a tiny but vocal minority. As Correia explained on his blog, the slate managed to expose the “thought police” of the community before votes had even been cast.

This year, the Sad Puppies slate returns once more, championed by Hugo and Nebula-nominee Brad R. Torgerson. Although run by conservative authors, it includes many authors and creators who are left-wing, liberal, or non-politically aligned. In this way, the slate hopes to protect what radical activists want to eliminate: diversity of opinion and political tolerance.

It’s rather amusing how what is obvious to a reporter has managed to escape the pinkshirts for over a year now. We’ve never been into thought-policing or preventing anyone from getting published. They care more about that than they do about the history of the field, its traditions, or simply writing straightforward science fiction and fantasy.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F 2

It was rather amusing to see some people attempting to shake off yesterday’s post on the decline in science fiction by pointing to the fact that overall print fiction had declined 8 percent, so the 7 percent decline in science fiction meant that the genre was actually outperforming. Never mind the fact that it had declined 21 percent the year before…. and after a little more research, I discovered that it had declined 21 percent the year before that as well.

In fact, SF print sales are now about half what they were in 2008. I don’t place TOO much confidence in this chart, because it shows around 4 million in 2012, whereas the PW numbers indicate they should be around 5.6 million. But it does suffice to indicate that what we are witnessing is a pretty serious trend and one that involves more than the mere shift to ebooks.

A decline from a combined 26 million in print sales to 12.7 million in only five years is bordering on the cataclysmic; remember, ebooks eliminate any need for the expensive structure of the mainstream genre publishers, a fact that has probably not escaped the owners of Tor and other imprints. I’ll put together some charts once I get some better numbers, but the point is that the anecdotal evidence of people increasingly avoiding the Pink SF produced by the self-appointed gatekeepers is supported by the data trend.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F

Publisher’s Weekly reports on the growth or decline of various categories in 2014:

Adult Fiction (unit sales, in thousands)
Genre20132014% change
Classics7,8177,578-3%
Fantasy8,6157,526-13%
Graphic Novels7,6598,66913%
Mystery/Detective14,88414,304-4%
Science Fiction4,4484,142-7%

Remember, science fiction was also down 21% in 2013, which means that science fiction unit sales have declined 1,488,000 in just two years. It’s down more than one-quarter in two years and is now only half the size of the Graphic Novel market, which is not only growing, but is presently dominated by men writing and drawing for male customers.

The “women destroy science fiction” meme isn’t even remotely ironic. Women, and the gamma males who cater to them, are literally destroying the adult science fiction and fantasy markets.

To put it in perspective, ONE edition of one of my games sold more copies than the ENTIRE science fiction market sold in print last year.