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.


Oh shut up, Damo

It’s often enjoyable to see how little heat SJWs are comfortable taking. They can’t stand much in the way of criticism and they seem to spend a considerable amount of time monitoring what others think and say about them in order to quickly jump in and try to steer the narrative away from anything they think looks bad.

This Twitter exchange was particularly funny, given that Damien Walter is always quick to heap obloquy on Larry Correia, me, and other writers whose politics he dislikes:

D Franklin @D_Libris
Why is it that almost every Damien Walter article can just be replied to, justifiably, with “Oh shut up, Damo”?

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
.@D_Libris Excuse me, I asked you to explain your claim that it was “justifiable” to tell me to “shut up Damo”. I’m going to keep asking.

Novel deVice ‏@noveldevice
@D_Libris you didn’t @ him so literally if he doesn’t want to see it he can just stop vanity searching. Boom.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
.@D_Libris If that’s your justification for your continued rude and aggressive behaviour, so be it. I’ve requested that you stop.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
.@damiengwalter saying that I’ve been rude and aggressive doesn’t make it so. Coming into my mentions and harassing me for a day, though…

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@D_Libris I’ve asked you to explain why you consider it ‘justifiable” to tell me to “shut up Damo” you still have not done so.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
.@damiengwalter bcs you won’t. Bcs I don’t have authority to make you. Bcs it’s a common, unthreatening phrase.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
Added to which, because you wouldn’t have seen it if you hadn’t gone looking… Nor would you see people saying it

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
.@D_Libris Then I’m telling you it’s neither. Neither is your repeated rude and aggressive behaviour. I’m requesting, again, that you stop it.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
.@D_Libris I have a search open for articles I write for the Guardian, that’s standard practice so i can monitor the response.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
.@D_Libris If you search the URL, you’ll see yours stands out as personally abusive when no others are.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
.@D_Libris If you want to make criticisms, please do so constructively without personal insults.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris Jan 20
@damiengwalter “shut up” is personally abusive? How about spending a day poking at someone, & trying to set your followers on them?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter Jan 20
@D_Libris If you don’t believe it’s rude and aggressive, then I’m informing you it is and asking you not to repeat that behaviour.

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
@damiengwalter I notice that Patrick Nielsen Hayden is not being called rude, & indeed you proudly retweeted his comment?

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
@damiengwalter so it’s only people with platforms smaller than yours who you object to the perceived rudeness of?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@D_Libris I’m telling you that I find your repeated personal attacks rude and offensive. Will you respect my request to stop them?

D Franklin ‏@D_Libris
@damiengwalter I can’t stop what I’ve never done: I have never made repeated personal attacks on you, Damien

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@D_Libris OK. I’ve made my request, your future actions are your own choice. I’m not continuing any further discussion with you now.

Joseph Tomaras @epateur
In solidarity with @D_Libris, I ask that everyone who’s ever found a @damiengwalter article moronic, please tell DGW to shut up.

The reason, of course, is that Damien Walter hasn’t mastered his subject, doesn’t do his homework, often doesn’t know what he’s talking about, regularly fails to distinguish between opinion and fact, and shows no ability to defend his rhetorical positions. That is why “oh shut up, Damo” is all that is required to effectively rebut him.

I don’t read his columns, there is no reason to do so. He’s boring even when he’s trying to be offensive. At least with the likes of McRapey there is usually an entertainingly manic edge to the nastiness.


The importance of rejection

esr explains why it is vital to categorically reject the premises and principles of the SJW shriekers:

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior… the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.

You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they’ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called “emotional abuse”, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.

Third-wave feminism, “social justice” and “anti-racism” are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don’t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.

The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a “victim” or “oppressor” identity that denies your lived experience.

The identity-jamming part maradydd clearly gets; the most eloquent sections of her writing are those in which she (rightly) rejects feminist attempts to jam her into a victim identity. But I don’t think she quite gets how thoroughly you have to reject the rest of the SJW pitch in order not to enable their abuse.

This is the challenge of #GamerGate and Blue SF and Hacker culture and the Androsphere, to say nothing of a myriad of other singular interest groups. We are opposed to precisely the same thing, precisely the same phenomenon, sometimes even the very same individuals, and yet, because we don’t share interests, we tend not to recognize that we share the same enemy. We have the numbers, and yet we fail to ally and support each other cross-interest because most gamers couldn’t care less about fiction and most fiction readers are not hard core gamers.


In which Morgan reads an anthology

In case you’re wondering what an anthology edited by a diversity goblin would look like, the question has been answered.

The Mammoth Book of Warriors and Wizardry. This is a new anthology in the Mammoth series published by Running Press in the U.S. and Robinson in the U.K. Trade paperback in format, 515 pages, $14.95 price and Sean Wallace is the editor…. The cover: a photograph of a dude with chain mail grasping his sword hilt. This could have easily been a cover for a romance book. Remember the days when we had covers by Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, or even Ken Kelly?

When I heard about this anthology last year and saw the roster of writers, I joked to a friend that it looked like the product of a United Nations diversity seminar. “She was a tall woman clad in armor the color of dead metal,” makes you begin to wonder about English as a pseudo-second language. Just what the hell is dead metal, let alone the color?

The stories are all very nuanced takes on diverse, under-represented cultures and perspectives, where there isn’t even one extraneous word and every character is pitch-perfect and [insert the usual pink flattery drivel here]. This description made me laugh out loud:

“The one story that encapsulates this anthology is Carrie Vaughn’s “Strife Lingers in Memory.” A wizard’s daughter narrates the return of the exiled prince of the realm who overthrows a tyrant. That is covered in a couple of paragraphs. The rest of the story concerns the hero wandering the castle at night, cowering in the corners, and bawling his head off. The wizard’s daughter, now the queen, goes out to comfort him every night.”

Sounds fantastique, does it not? Read the whole review. And speaking of anthologies, Castalia House should have some news to announce on that front by the end of the month.

UPDATE: RPG fans won’t want to miss Jeffro interviewing Ron Edwards, the designer of the groundbreaking RPG Sorcerer and the co-founder of The Forge.