Tag: Pink SF

The rabbits quiver

Two posts in which File 770 compares Sad Puppies to National Socialism, me to a disease, and science fiction writers to dogs.

A comment by Daniel on Vox Day’s blog put this amusing spin on yesterday’s story about the 2014 Worldcon financial report:

    Semi-on topic: thanks to record memberships, LonCon finished with a cash surplus of…

    …about £1,000.

    Without Larry and Vox last year, they would have been deep in the red.

There you have it: all the people who joined to stuff the ballot box for Larry Correia’s “Sad Puppies” slate kept the Worldcon afloat. Now I know how that English schoolboy felt in Hope and Glory when he discovered his school had been bombed by the Luftwaffe — “Thank you Adolf!”

No doubt the pinkshirts will try to deny it, but there is no question that Sad Puppies was to the financial benefit of Worldcon. Some have tried to claim that the huge increase in memberships was the result of the con being based in London rather than the reaction to the nomination of works by Larry, Brad, me, and others, but you have only to compare the percentage increase in voting memberships to the increase in nominations to see that Sad Puppies not only inspired more involvement on the Right side of the science fiction spectrum, but on the Left side as well.

Did you hear the mournful baying of the Sad Puppies this morning? Yes, the pack is back in 2015, this time under the direction of Brad Torgersen. And his arguments for renewing this bloc voting campaign are one dogwhistle after another. Usually you can’t see these kinds of contortions outside of a circus.

  • The Hugos are a popularity contest – but not the right kind of popularity.
  • The Hugos don’t necessarily correlate with sales success – but neither did last year’s Sad Puppies slate, once you got past Larry Correia.
  • The Hugos “skew ideological” – Did you know they were trying to cure
    that problem when Vox Day got a Sad Puppies endorsement last year? (I
    thought it was only on House they try to cure patients by giving them another disease…)
  • The Hugos often ignore “successful ambassadors of the genre to the
    consumer world at large” – That dogwhistle is at a frequency almost too
    high for me to hear, but I believe he has a particular New York Times bestselling author in mind.

Anyway, if you felt something pushing against your “Worldcon fandom
zeitgeist” today — that’s because the dogs are off the leash!

As one might expect, he’s missing the points.

  1. Mournful? They may not be enjoying this, but we certainly are.
  2. The pinkshirts have long denied that the Hugos are a popularity contest. Sad Puppies belied, and continues to belie that argument.
  3. No one has ever claimed Sad Puppies was about sales. That being said, an endorsement by Larry Correia can absolutely be proven to boost sales.
  4. Again, the pinkshirts have always denied that the Hugos skew ideological. Sad Puppies disproved, and will continue to disprove that denial.
  5. It’s not just the Hugos. For example, Chaos Horizon noted the refusal of mainstream reviewers to even review Monster Hunter: Nemesis, considered to be a likely Hugo nominee.

The decline of science fiction

It is well known that science fiction sales have declined since the 1980s, but what Daniel demonstrates in Evidence for the Bust Years is that the perceived quality of science fiction, as measured by average Amazon ratings for books representational of their year, have fallen as well:

What this chart argues is that science fiction of the 50s and 60s
averages better than a 4.3 rating at Amazon (and you’ll note that all
decades average more than 350 reviews per book, so small groups of rabid
reviewers really don’t factor in). The quality slides in the 1970s,
plummets in the 80s, recovers slightly in the 1990s, but falls back
below 4 throughout the 2000s.

Now, this is just some raw data from a list of books from the past 60
years or so, but two things stand out to me: Science Fiction has
measurably fallen off in quality, at least according to readers,
according to this relatively blind snapshot. I’m sure we could generate
different results with a different list, but I want to emphasize that
this survey was both as random and as fair as I could muster (in fact, I
noticed after the fact that my list is somewhat more heavily weighted
toward award-winners in the decade that performed the worst!)

This should surprise no one who has been paying attention to the corruption that is Pink SF as it has spread throughout the science fiction and fantasy genres. For me, the obvious point was when The Quantum Rose, a romance novel in space that was a middle book in a series virtually no one was reading, was awarded the Nebula for Best Novel in 2002. Notice that despite it supposedly being the best novel of that year, it has a paltry 29 ratings averaging 3.70.

If that was truly the best of the best, how bad was the average book that year? And if it wasn’t, then how could systematically elevating the mediocre fail to have a subsequent effect on the genre? While more comprehensive statistical work is required to make the case conclusive, this first analysis does indicate that in the eyes of the reviewers, the quality of science fiction and fantasy has objectively declined.

How the media manipulates science fiction

I discovered an interesting site called Chaos Horizon yesterday. The author has developed a model to predict future Best Novel Hugo Award nominations on the basis of media coverage and past awards, and it worked pretty well last year. But what I found even more interesting and informative was his review round-ups, in which he tracks the media coverage of the various books he expects to be nominated.

Two of the listed favorites for 2015 are LOCK-IN by John Scalzi and MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS by Larry Correia.

LOCK-IN

Mainstream Reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
NPR
A.V. Club

WordPress Blogger Reviews:
Ristea’s Reads (4 out of 5)
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Bibliotropic (5 out of 5)
Alison McCarty (9 out of 10)
As the Plot Things (9 out of 10)
The BiblioSanctum (4.5 out of 5)
Infinite Free Time
Lucy Moo’s Book Reviews
Books, Bones, & Buffy (4 out of 5)
For Winter Nights

As you can see, that’s already a lot of reviews, and they’ve been pretty uniformly positive, averaging out to a solid 4.5 out of 5. The number of reviews is a testament to Scalzi built-in fanbase; the high scores speak to the book being well-liked.

Amazon Reviews:
(299) 4.2 out of 5 stars



MONSTER HUNTER: NEMESIS

Mainstream Reviews:

None? For each of these Review Round-Ups, I check the same places: Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, NYTimes, the Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly. These are some of the most popular and widely distributed reviewing venues, and they give us a good idea if the book is reaching beyond the core SFF audience. The fact that Correia received no discernible support from these outlets certainly says something. The lack of reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus is surprising, as they do short capsule reviews of tons of texts. For most authors, this lack of mainstream coverage would hurt them; for an author like Correia, this lack of coverage re-enforces his outsider or maverick status.

WordPress Blog Reviewers:
AdVerb Creative
Koeur’s Book Review
Bookstoge’s Reviews on the Road (4.5 out of 5)
Attack of the Books!
Alternative Worlds II

Not the biggest group of reviews, but all are fairly positive. It’s interesting that Monster Hunter Nemesis doesn’t show up as strongly in these places. Goodreads has 1700+ ratings for Monster Hunter Nemesis, which does indicate it’s selling copies. People just don’t seem to blog about Correia’s book with the same intensity as they do other texts.

Amazon Reviews:
(283) 4.8 out of 5 stars

It’s somewhat amusing to see that even though Chaos Horizons is aware of the Hugo controversy, he’s still genuinely surprised that there are zero mainstream reviews for Nemesis. What’s happening here is a microcosm of what happens in the gaming world. The pinkshirt media puffs up Pink SF and attempts to make it look better and more popular than it is, while ignoring better and equally popular non-Pink SF in an attempt to pretend it is not merely irrelevant, but doesn’t exist.

It’s even more obvious if you actually read the reviews for LOCK-IN. Most of them are more about the author than the book itself, because the content of the book is largely irrelevant, the object of the review is to signal that the book reviewed is the product of an ideologically-approved author and therefore should be supported.

I note that the Goodreads data is different than the Amazon data, but I tend to discount the Goodreads data as a proxy for comparative purposes because its readership has such a strong SJW bias. That being said, it’s probably an excellent proxy for the WorldCon membership and a Hugo-predictive model for precisely that reason.

Of rabbit fear and hate

Interesting though it is, I’m not entirely convinced by this particular aspect of AC’s theory myself:

In one post though, [John C. Wright] pointed out that he felt the work here was incomplete, because it didn’t deal with the spiritual. He is correct, of course. If you meet pure evil, face to face, you will realize that there is clearly something much deeper than a mere mechanism, which happens to produce evil as a byproduct of some other purpose. As one examines evil up close, the only answer which really makes sense is that the evil are soldiers, with a mission, serving some authority. They will sacrifice their own interests, destroy their own lives, and fall on their own swords, in a genuinely selfless pursuit of their evil purposes. They will even do evil when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no sense to it. Their evil mechanism is so self-sacrificial that it seems the type of thing which nature would eliminate over time. He is right about the spiritual lacking here, and I encourage others to not mistake its absence here for some endorsement of a non-spiritual world model.

One part of his response I take issue with however, is his assertion that the rabbits hate him because he exposes them to truth. A proper explanation of this touches on the spiritual, in part because a full understanding of the rabbit’s hate offers a window into the same hatred Satan holds for the good.

In short, the rabbits do not so much hate John, as they hold him in contempt. Hate is more of a visceral rejection of some moral or emotional aspect of something. Hate can be applied to anything – you can hate a beggar or hate a King. Contempt carries with it a subtle air of rejecting something due to inferiority or weakness. Hate is a raw emotion that you express without regard to your enemy’s status. Contempt is reserved, solely for the weak, whom you can afford to hold in contempt, and it is most often expressed by cowards who only attack their lessers, and who hold little in regard beyond their own immediate safety.

Rabbits have contempt for John because he is kind, rational, and compassionate, and they see that all as weakness. The rabbits dislike John because he is a man who challenges the falsehoods they need to quiet their amygdala. However it is only because his goodness renders him harmless, that this dislike manifests as contempt. The real source of the rabbit’s hatred of John is his tolerance of them – the very quality they claim so ardently to espouse and champion, but which they only use to infiltrate and corrupt any organization too tolerant to reject them.

The reason I’m not sure about this is that I find it very difficult to believe that I am not actually hated by the Pinkshirts. First, because I get a definite anger, fear, and hatred vibe from most of them, second, because I find it very difficult to believe that they sense any inferiority or weakness on my part.

I could be wrong, but I certainly don’t feel either of those things, particularly not with regards to the flabby, overweight, evolutionary dead-ends who have never seen the inside of a weight room nor tested themselves in any form of combat, and flee from the mere suggestion of seeing their intellectual skills tested by debate with me or other formidable figures of the not-rabbit Right.

Then again, the fact that I am patient and a counterpuncher by both training and inclination has caused people to misread me before, both online and in real life. My impression has tended to be that the rabbits hate me less because I disagree with them than because I remind them of the jocks they used to fear, envy, and hate back in junior high and high school. We are dealing with fairly serious cases of arrested development here, and back in the day, more than one girl told my friends and me that we reminded her of the bad guys in every 80’s movie ever, right down to the Porsches, Triumphs, and Jaguars. And in real life the athletes and arrogant rich boys with cars always get the girl, which tends to foster a certain lasting resentment among the would-be white-knighting gamma males of the world.

But regardless, there is one thing concerning which AC is indubitably right, and that is that their father is the Devil. They don’t merely hate the truth, they love lies, seemingly for their own sake. Every SJW I’ve met not only lies, but lies effortlessly, and without any shame whatsoever after being caught in a lie. And perhaps that is where the aspect of contempt that AC mentions comes in; like Nietzsche and the Nazis, the rabbits do not understand honor and they find those who are not willing to embrace every possible tactic and weapon to be weak and possessed of insufficient will-to-power compared to the progressive Ubermensch they consider themselves to be.

Of course, it’s a little difficult to put his hypothesis to the scientific test. I mean, what are we supposed to do, have Tom Kratman crucify John Scalzi on his lawn, then poll the rabbits to see if his popularity has risen among the science fiction left?

Pink SFFer defends a rabbit-pelleting

This should be amusing, although you may wish to avert your eyes if you are of tender sensibilities. McCreepy attempts to take on John C. Wright over the desirability of SJW propaganda in children’s cartoons:

The delusionality is strong with this one. Watch as he attempts to speak for an entire audience, many of whom were screaming with happiness at the Korra/Asami revelation.

Go watch this video of fan reactions. Look at the joy on those people’s faces.

These are some of the people he’s trying to speak for. Do they look like people whose way of life, whose values and religion and virtues, are so incredibly fragile that they can be hurt so badly by a several-second clip of two women holding hands, or the idea of two women falling in love?

Mister Wright, you do not speak for the audience of this show. You speak for yourself, and perhaps for a small group of intolerant bigots who can’t accept the slightest acknowledgement or recognition of relationships you personally disapprove of, for whatever twisted reason.

I always enjoy the way the more incompetent rabbits go right to DISQUALIFY without any pretense of a justification. Mr. Wright is more than capable of addressing McCreepy, so I see no need to go into any detail except to note that a) SJWs always lie and b) they always attempt to avoid dealing with the actual topic at hand. Would you stake your life on those most of those “fan reactions” coming from genuine fans of the show? I surely wouldn’t.

McCreepy is ignoring the obvious point that if the show’s fans genuinely wanted to see animated lesbians, they wouldn’t have been watching it on Nickelodeon, they would have ignored it in favor of Japanese anime and the writers wouldn’t have had to spell everything out after the show ended. The problem is not that two women were holding hands, the problem is the SJW symbolism it represented; the symbolism is precisely why the rabbits were cheering it.

“Hurray, we managed to defecate on something again! We totally own it!”

McCreepy knows perfectly well what Wright is criticizing. He knows perfectly well that he would not have defended the symbolism as trivial if, instead of a several-second shout-out to sexual aberration, the two women had rolled back their sleeves to flash swastikas newly tattooed on their wrists, then thrown a Nazi salute to each other. Totally harmless. Look at the joy on the faces of the fans in Germany. What bigot could possibly oppose that?

The good news is that the strong reaction of the rabbits to Wright’s criticism shows they understand the danger that our increasing rejection of their symbolic pelleting represents to them. They have to claim they have the numbers even when they quite obviously don’t, they have to stop the criticism quickly, because the illusion of strength is all they have.

The open divide in science fiction between Pink SF and Blue SF is growing. This is but one of many, many incidents to come. Foxification is upon the genre… and we are the Fox.

And as for sexual retrofitting, I may have been one of the few who wasn’t surprised by the announcement that Dumbledore was gay. Frankly, I thought the movie version of the character was more than a bit of a pedophile obsessed with Harry. Was there a sentence that came out of his mouth that didn’t begin with “Harry….”?

Propaganda and the illusion of defeat

John C. Wright is, to put it mildly, less than entirely enamored of the decision of a children’s cartoon to close with a climax celebrating aberrant sexual orientation while simultaneously subverting the traditional hero’s journey:

I do not count the judgment of people whose sole qualification to make a judgment is their loud and repeated insistence that they will ignore evidence, suspend their rational faculties, award the verdict to the party they know to be guilty, and condemn the party they know to be innocent.

This, in fact, is what the Leftists hold to be their qualifications to make a moral judgment. Ask any of them. They will tell you repeatedly, so vehemently that one cannot get in a word edgewise, that they make no moral judgments, that making judgments is wrong, and that to make a judgment even in one’s thought is wrong — they call this bigotry, because they call everything by the word that means the opposite of what they really mean.

The people not upset about this are not fans of the show, because to be a fan means to use one’s judgment to judge the show as being well crafted and the story well told. The decision was poor story telling, and that would be obvious – no matter what one’s opinion about the morality or desirability or corrosive effect on society of sexual perversion.

What is the lesson here for little boys and girls watching the show? That every friend of yours, male or female, secretly craves sexual congress with you? That to be a policeman means you can neither have the magical girl nor the attractive rich girl, but you are a big loser, and they go off with each other? That family means nothing, that sex is entertainment and means nothing, that life means nothing, that ergo young women should act like bigmouthed jerks? That a woman in a leadership role is not a princess, prophetess nor priestess but is instead a pervertess?

This perversion is what is at the heart of Pink SF/F. This is what we founded Castalia House to explicitly reject. Perhaps in reading how the Brave New World propaganda has been celebrated, in seeing the praise for “challenging expectations and bravely exploring content outside the scope of children’s television” those who have found the concept difficult to grasp will better understand the correct definition of Pink SF/F.

Pink SF/F is a Left-wing literary subgenre written as racial, sexual, and ideological propaganda in order to subvert traditional literature, religion, and society.

Substitute “cartoon” or whatever relevant medium for “literature” as you see fit. It should be readily apparent that the media praise for Team Avatar is an open confession that what the team was selling was neither art nor children’s entertainment, but propaganda intended to “change the world” in the guise of the former. And the world they intend to change is yours and your children’s.

But we don’t have to accept this. On Twitter yesterday, someone lamented that our explicit recognition of the Blue/Pink SF divide was the further Fox-ification of science fiction. And they are correct. That is happening. Here is the good news: in this analogy, we are Fox.

Notice that the Pink SF/Fers have media support in the Guardian (in the form of precisely two outside contributors), which they rely upon to make it appear that they are the more numerous and powerful side. So observe these newly audited figures from the UK media:

Daily Mail: 1,660,100
Telegraph: 498,484
Guardian: 177,000

Not only that, but the Guardian is down more than 10 percent year-on-year and has a circulation that is less than half what it was ten years ago.

What is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to believe the illusion that evil has already won. But it hasn’t, even if sometimes it feels as if it has. But here is the important point to keep in mind: Team Avatar had to wait until the very end to spring their retrofitted Pink Cartoon propaganda on its fans, because otherwise those fans would not have existed in the first place.