Tag: Pink SF

The First Rule of Fighting the Patriarchy

The first lesson of fighting the patriarchy and exposing sex predators is don’t talk about Neil Gaiman! First Reddit:

r/neilgaimanuncoveredu/voxday is permanently banned from r/neilgaimanuncovered
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The amusing thing, of course, is that there are more comments on a single post on that subject at Sigma Game than on any post at that subreddit. And then something called Bluesky, which is apparently where all the would-be literary SJWs ran after Elon Musk bought Twitter for reasons that are still unclear to me. I’m not sure I even got around to posting anything there yet; they REALLY don’t want you talking about Neil Gaiman AT ALL. Notice that to SJWs, the mere creation of an account is “harassment”.

Hi there,

A Bluesky account you control (@voxday.bsky.social) has been taken down for harassment.

This takedown is not a temporary suspension. Please do not create additional accounts on our service. We will take action against any additional accounts as we become aware of them.

If you have any additional questions or wish to appeal this decision please email moderation@blueskyweb.xyz.

Bluesky Moderation Team

Anyhow, if you wonder why JDA and I are still talking about this, this should explain why. The evil people in this publishing industry desperately want to maintain their wall of silence. Just because he’s always been irrelevant to our community – I don’t own a single Gaiman book or comic; if I want to read magical realism, I’ll read Murakami or Borges, not a mediocre wannabe – doesn’t mean he’s not extremely important to them, if only as a symbol of success. And it’s observably making a difference; I have now heard from several people who have been strangely silent up until now who are clearly in the process of formulating their first public statements about Gaiman. But they know how it goes.

Of all the words of screen and pen

The saddest are these:

Vox was right again.

DISCUSS ON SG

Birds of a Feather

Wowzers, they made quite the creative pair… the publisher disappeared Kramer’s name at some point, just as SFWA tried to claim that the convicted pedophile wasn’t still an active member of the organization when he was still in their member’s address book, both print and online. Birds of a feather and all that…

EDITORS

Neil Gaiman has been awarded more Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards than any other creator, took the World Fantasy Award for The Sandman #19 (making it the first comic ever to win a prose literary award), and has awards for his comics from England, Finland, Canada, Austria, Spain, and Brazil. His miscellany, Angels and Visitations, was nominated for two World Fantasy Awards, and was awarded the International Horror Critics Guild for Best Collection. In addition to The Sandman he is the author of such graphic novels as Signal to Noise, Mr. Punch, and Violent Cases. He cowrote, with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, a funny novel about how the world is going to end and we’re all going to die. He just made a six-part TV series for the BBC called Neverwhere, and is working on a Neverwhere novel. He has just finished his first book for children, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and was surprised to find himself acting in the BBC Radio adaptation of Signal to Noise. The Sandman collection Dream Country was picked by Waterstones and The Observer as one of the ten coolest books of the 1990s. He is 35 years old, and is intimately familiar with jet lag in all its forms.

On July 3, 2024, Neil Gaiman was accused of sexual assault by two women in a four-part podcast series by Tortoise Media. Neil Gaiman is reported to have denied the charges, but has yet to make any public statement about them.

Edward E. Kramer is a writer and coeditor of Grails (nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology of 1992), Confederacy of the Dead, Phobias, Dark Destiny, Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, Excalibur, Tombs, Dark Love, Forbidden Acts, and many additional works in progress. Ed’s original fiction appears in a number of anthologies as well; his first novel, Killing Time, is forthcoming from White Wolf. His credits also include over a decade of work as a music critic and photojournalist. A graduate of the Emory University School of Medicine, Ed is a clinical and educational consultant in Atlanta. He is fond of human skulls, exotic snakes, and underground caves.

Kramer was arrested on August 25, 2000 and charged with molesting three teenage boys. The ensuing investigation revealed that Kramer had previously been accused of molestation in 1997 before the alleged victim recanted. On December 2, 2013 Kramer pleaded guilty to one charge for each of the three victims. On February 27, 2019, Kramer was arrested by officers from the Lawrenceville Police Department for allegedly taking photos of a young boy at a doctor’s office. Kramer was later charged with possession of child pornography.

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman has reportedly hired the same US lawyer who has represented Prince Andrew and Danny Masterson. The same Danny Masterson who got 30 years in prison. Since he’s not currently facing any charges this strongly suggests that he’s expecting to be arrested and charged for crimes committed in the USA.

UPDATE: A third accuser has now come forward about her experience with Gaiman after meeting him at a book signing in 2014.

Claire uses a pseudonym to share her story about being groomed and sexually coerced and manipulated by world-renowned author Neil Gaiman. We discuss the power of stories and fame, and she shares how journaling, therapy, and friendships have helped her find her center in her own story. We originally spoke in 2022, and at that time she decided she wasn’t ready, but said that if other survivors came forward, she would join them. Several weeks ago two women came forward and shared abuse stories about Neil Gaiman. Claire reached out to me to support herself and them and all survivors by sharing her story today.

There will be more. There will very likely be dozens more.

DISCUSS ON SG

Neil Gaiman: “The Tip of a Very Large Iceberg”

The mainstream and SF/F medias remain eerily silent about Neil Gaiman and the accusations against him. Virtually no one of any note in the SF/F community besides me, Larry Correia, Jon Del Arroz, and John Scalzi have addressed the matter at all, and Scalzi, who purports to be close friends with Gaiman, is refusing to say anything beyond noting the accusations, even though Gaiman has hired the same crisis management team, Edendale Strategies, that worked for Ezra Miller and Marilyn Manson, and has also cancelled his only public event since the accusations were made public.

But social media is certainly paying attention:

  • Just here to tell my own personal experience: I was friends with one of his former personal assistants, and I remember her telling stories back in the early aughts about having to “pull Neil off of a 15 year old fan.” She said this with kind of an eye-roll like it wasn’t uncommon, simply a part of the job. Given that, I think we’re about to hear much worse stories than the ones in this podcast.
  • Yeah, I keep hearing (what are so far) rumors of this kind and it’s unsettling to say the least. I’m waiting for more information but at the same time I feel like I know what’s coming.
  • Neil was very important to me at various times in my career. He was my teacher at Clarion. He blurbed my first novel. He invited me to perform at TED. We’ve always been friendly. My impression was that he’d dated fans in the past, during headier younger days, but now knew better. But now that survivors have gone on record? I have zero problem cutting all ties. I want to say that publicly and explicitly. No personal favors—and no creative works, frankly—are worth more than the safety and well-being of these two young women. And who knows how many others. I also say this because you better be sure I’ll be paying attention to whoever stays silent.
  • Thank you so much for saying Neil Gaiman. His silence and the silence of everyone in his orbit in the wake of this is making me feel like I have lost contact with reality.
  • it really is bananas how much more heat the sff community has for, like, guys accused of being social-climbing jerks than for the neil gaiman allegations
  • Me: I wonder what Neil Gaiman is saying about this. Me 30 seconds later: oh look, he hasn’t posted anything in over two weeks, what a freaking coincidence! At this point in the process, that’s nearly an admission of guilt.
  • First Neil Gaiman disappeared for obvious reasons. Then Ken White disappeared because (I assume) he just chose to do so. If John Scalzi disappears then my feed will basically be empty.
  • Whatever does or doesn’t come of the Neil Gaiman allegations, the fact remains that many many people (myself included, to an extent) have spent years extolling The Sandman, whose beloved protagonist condemned a woman to eternal torture for checks notes rejecting his advances
  • Absolutely WILD for Amanda Palmer’s first tweet since June 19 to be scolding Joyce Carol Oates for not reading the Alice Munro article before speculating on it considering she’s actively avoided addressing her part in the Neil Gaiman allegations. Particularly wild seeing as Amanda Palmer deleted comments from her Instagram on Saturday asking her about the Neil Gaiman allegations (including the allegation that 13 young women came to Amanda about Neil’s behaviour and that she personally hired the 14th to be their nanny)
  • LOL Reddit’s Neil Gaiman board is banning all discussion of him allegedly liking rough, non-consensual sex and instead only allowing discussion of his work. I guess we’ll soon be seeing the r/hitler subreddit shifting its focus to an art appreciation thread?
  • Ngl, I’m kinda disappointed at the fact that the comic community isn’t talking about the Neil Gaiman sexual assault allegations. I find it very hypocritical that they will so swiftly condemn others for racism and bigotry, but when a big name like Gaiman is accused, pure silence.
  • I’ve known this about Neil for years. A close friend of mine is a local artist who has worked for Neil and Amanda off and on for years and had to deal with Neil’s advances. They knew of others as well. I have posted about Neil’s behavior on occasion on social media and sometimes women reach out privately to thank me for saying something, they have long feared coming forward due to the harassment they will likely face. I’m not going to debate anyone here, but yes I spoke to the reporter behind this, who happens to be well known and award winning. He was looking for information, not a story, and the information is what informed the story he wrote, from people I know and a lot of others. What is presented in this podcast is a tiny fraction of what I and others are aware of. This is what can be demonstrated right now with the permission of the victims willing to come forward and face the inevitable abuse Neil’s fans will heap upon them, but there are others, a lot of others. This is the tip of a very large iceberg.

The publishing industry knows. The publishing industry absolutely knows about Gaiman, has known about him for decades, and is now preparing for sufficient information to come out that will sink him entirely. Hollywood will probably fight harder and try longer to protect him, but the publishers don’t want to be caught with large stocks of books they can’t sell.

  • I can tell you that the female junior staff at Harper used to warn each other about him.
  • They are really pushing them Neil Gaiman books REAL HARD. The sales prices are ridiculous. Like, “We gotta get in there before the whole public gets in the know” levels of hard.
  • I’m pretty sure the example in the cited Girls scene about “Chuck Palmer” is supposed to be a plausibly deniable reference to both Chuck Wendig and Neil Gaiman, which sure tells me the writer had heard the same convos as me in 2016.

There is also at least one confirmed report that Random House is removing Gaiman blurbs from forthcoming books.

There are even some very old posts referring to Gaiman’s alleged past behavior on Tumblr.

UPDATE: Less than eight hours after this was posted, presumably as a result of this post, the linked article about a negative reference to “Chuck Palmer” was disappeared. However, it was archived and can be seen here. The reason the “Palmer” is believed to be a reference to Neil Gaiman is because at the time, he was married to his second wife, Amanda PALMER.

UPDATE: Posted on Reddit. There is a moderate probability that PrudishChild is either a) a sockpuppet of Neil Gaiman’s or b) an employee at Edendale Strategies.

PrudishChild: Any reason to think he set up the gmail, or had access to it? I thought someone else set it up and he just commented on it.

voxday: Yes, there are very good reasons to think Mr. Gaiman set up the Gmail, as well as the BathBookNeil Tumblr site.

  1. The mediocre parenthetical dialogue is very indicative of his writing.
  2. There is no “Jolene Parton” who is a bored college student. JOLENE is a song by Dolly PARTON released in 1973. As a music journalist, Mr. Gaiman would be familiar with it, whereas few, if any, college students would be. Also, the only Jolene Parton in the USA is in her 60s now, far too old to be the bored college student.
  3. The fake surprise. Mr. Gaiman knows Rule 34, so he’s not going to be surprised at a naked bath site. The whole dialogue between Gaiman and “Parton” is fiction written by the same person, presumably Mr. Gaiman.
  4. Mr. Gaiman appears to have a bath fetish. He writes about bathtubs more than any author outside of the plumbing industry. He writes nearly as often about baths as George RR Martin writes about rape.
  5. The BathBookNeil site hasn’t been taken down yet, while other damning articles such as the Splinter article about the coded “Chuck Palmer” reference believed to be about him and Chuck Wendig on the show GIRLS were vanished within eight hours of being cited.

Googlers already know if he set the Gmail account up or not. The truth will come out eventually.

DISCUSS ON SG

Four Episodes of Mr. Tubcuddle, Scientologist

Even Neil Gaiman’s biggest fans think his self-defense is inadequate and troublesome after listening to all four episodes of the Tortoise revelations about him.

After Listening to all four episodes: the facts themselves are bad

Let’s take a step back and assume, for the sake of argument, that literally everything that the women are saying is false, and that Gaiman’s version of events is closer to the truth. It is as exonerating as it can possibly be.

Gaiman still has a history of exploiting younger, inexperienced women who are either starstruck by him, or dependent on him, causing an absolutely massive power imbalance. He does this despite being married in an open relationship, and seems unwilling to be clear that he cannot commit to them.

This is if he is being entirely honest. At one point in the podcast to exonerate himself, he sends an email of K saying that she can’t wait to visit, her “loins are desperate” (not exactly it, but close) that’s from 2017, way after their relationship ended. When the journalists dug deeper they found that it was part of an email chain where he told her he was working with David Tennant, who she had a crush on, and her jokey “horniness” is clearly in reaction to Tennant. This shows that he is absolutely willing to mislead or to misrepresent evidence when it comes to this.

While there is no direct evidence of assault in Scarlett’s story, there’s a lot of smoke. Gaiman being accused of assault by Scarlett’s friends is indisputably something that happened. As is her saying that what happened “pushed boundaries” at the time.

If you insist that the benchmark needs to be: overt rape or bust, then sure, the evidence is probably insufficient. Even the podcast seems to walk it back to “sexual abuse” the vast majority of the time. But…sexual abuse is pretty bad. There is a very wide spectrum of treating women in a shitty way before you get to outright sexual assault.

I say this as a Gaiman fanatic. As someone who is irrevocably influenced by his work. I listened to all four of these episodes because I care deeply, and what we know for certain really sucks.

Here’s the main thing that the hapless defenders of the Scientologist Neil Gaiman are forgetting to take into account: where there’s an amount of smoke, there is usually fire.

There are two distinct accusers now. The a) combination of those accusations with b) Mr. Tubcuddle’s own body of work incorporating various forms of sexual abuse, sexual violence, and sexual assault, and c) Mr. Tubcuddle’s obviously suspect judgment, and d) the general degeneracy in the world of science fiction fandom, means that there will almost certainly be more accusers, more evidence, and more conclusively damning evidence forthcoming.

Here is one fan’s summary:

According to his recounting of events, in the early 2000s he met an 18 year old girl and was overly friendly to her. Then 2 years later he started dating her while married & kept her existance secret, made her so upset she followed him onto an aeroplane and he had her forcibly removed. Then in response he tried to make it seem like she was thirsting after him years later when she was thirsting after David Tennant. (Aren’t we all.)

Then, in 2022, he met his son’s 21 year old Nanny who came to stay with them during a pandemic. The first time he ever met her, he got fully naked and asked to have a bath with her, then “kissed and cuddled.”

Then continued to have an ongoing BDSM & sexual relationship with someone 1/3 of his age while he was her employer.

She spoke to her friends at the time and called it abuse, her friend confronted Neil’s wife Amanda Palmer, and then she responded by saying it’s a “very bad situation” (not defending him) and breaking up with him.

Then when Scarlett spoke out about what happened he said he was suicidal and manipulated her into comforting him, and in doing so got her to say it was “eventually” consensual. IN RESPONSE TO HIM SAYING HE WAS SUICIDAL.

And then he said she has a false memory disorder when she doesn’t.

It’s readily observable from his version of events that Gaiman has been deeply and profoundly dishonest about both situations. He not only misrepresented the evidence of the context of the first woman’s emails after the fact, but sent the second woman “an NDA backdated to the day they met (when some very questionable behavior on his part occurred) as a condition for giving her six months rent money after the relationship had ended.” And he extorted a statement about consensuality from the latter with threats of suicide.

Furthermore, since Gaiman is a Scientologist, we know the Church of Scientology has a comprehensive record of his past misdeeds, at least up to the point that he claims to have left the organization, which may or may not be true. If it’s true that he was a level 8 auditor, then he wasn’t just another ignorant Hollywood celebrity recruit. Given the way Scientology operates, they quite likely have maintained an updated file on him that continues to the present. Which means the damning information is likely out there and available; don’t be too shocked if he unexpectedly rejoins Scientology in the aftermath of his public unmasking as, at the very least, a predatory, manipulative, and sexually-inappropriate creep.

It’s worth noting that he’s already threatened to kill himself over this. Which tends to indicate that there is considerably more that will come out over time, and explains why the science fiction community is being so quiet about this instead of engaging in their usual full-throated man-the-barricades approach.

UPDATE: As usual, one can always trust the logic. His ex-wife, Amanda Palmer has reportedly been quoted as saying the second woman “was the 14th who had come to her about what Neil did.” I think we can officially put a fork in Neil Gaiman. Whether he goes to jail or not, he’s done.

UPDATE: Gaiman’s father was the head of public relations for Scientology in the UK and Gaiman was actually kicked out of an Anglican school due to being a Scientologist. No wonder his work is so avowedly, and so nonsensically, anti-Christian.

DISCUSS ON SG

How NOT to Talk to Girls at Parties

Neil Gaiman, who is being accused of sexual assault by two women, really does not appear to be an ideal role model on the basis of his short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”. And while the title of the story is amusingly ironic in light of the current accusations, reading the story tends to be rather less ironic and rather more problematic for Mr. Gaiman.

This is the climactic excerpt of the story, in which the hapless protagonist abruptly is dragged out of a party by his best friend, Vic, who had previously disappeared into a room with a girl he had just met at the party, Stella.

 As Vic pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.

This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella’s face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall remember that.

Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes—

You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.

We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the gutter.

He wiped his mouth.

“She wasn’t a—” He stopped.

He shook his head.

Then he said, “You know . . . I think there’s a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore? You’d be the person who’d done that? The places you just can’t go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight.”

It would appear that Mr. Gaiman has, at least in his imagination, contemplated what it would be like to go further with a young woman than he would dare. We already know, by his own admission, that he is the sort of 61-year-old man who would “cuddle in the bathtub” with a 22-year-old nanny that he had just met that day.

Which admission tends to raise considerably more questions about how much further Mr. Gaiman has, in fact, dared to go, and how much more inappropriately he has behaved. Given what we already know about him, the ages of some of his better-known literary subjects also tends to raise additional, and even more disconcerting, questions about the man.

One thing that we’ve known for at least a decade, however, is that Gaiman is a sketchy creep and a Gamma male. And needless to say, File 770, Whatever, and the various science fiction sites that have been slobbering all over Gaiman for more than a decade are completely silent on the subject even though the mainstream media is covering it.

UPDATE: A keen-eyed reader notes an astonishing coincidence.

The review quote on the Gaiman book cover is by Junot Díaz, accused of sexual harassment in 2018. He was eventually cleared of misconduct. What are the odds?

Creeps of a feather flock together…

UPDATE: Unlike the SJW sites, Fandom Pulse is on top of it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Bad Idea Jeans: Neil Gaiman edition

ITEM: British author Neil Gaiman wrote a book.

ITEM: British author Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by two separate women.

Conclusion: do NOT take his advice for how to talk to girls.

Have you ever noticed that while the SJW-infested media never seems to write hit pieces about these accused sex criminals? There is never a whisper or a peep heard in public until the courts get involved.

JDA has declared an Emergency Arkhaven Nights to discuss this breaking news, so don’t miss it!

DISCUSS ON SG

The Rehabilitation of a Pedo

Not only does SFWA resolutely refuse to eject the pedophiles, past and present, convicted and unconvicted, from its midst, but the morally-depraved science fiction community is now even trying to rehabilitate the reputation of confirmed dead lesbian child-abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley, upon whose work the new Star Wars Acolyte is obviously based.

After her death, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter, Moira Greyland accused her not only of aiding and abetting her second husband in child molestation, but in herself molesting their daughter. Since Ms. Greyland made this accusations only after MZB was dead and could no longer defend herself or refute the charges, MZB had no opportunity to go to court and clear her name. Some authors have donated the money earned from sales to Bradley to various child-related charities. Given that she edited Breen’s book, Greek Love, and edited and contributed at least one article to his journal, The International Journal of Greek Love, she had to at least suspected his unhealthy interest in boys. “Greek love” is an old euphemism for male homosexuality, especially the relationship between an older man and a boy or youth. Many who knew her well said they had never seen or suspected anything untoward. However, others believed the accusations. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., the publisher of Bradley’s digital backlist, donated all the profits to the British charity Save the Children. Author Janni Lee Simner donated the money she earned from sales to MZB to the American anti-sexual assault organization Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network. Other writers chose to keep the money they earned…

She was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000 posthumously.

After her death, she was cremated, and her ashes, appropriately enough were scattered on Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England.

Her influence as a writer will last so long as her stories are in print. Her influence as an editor continues to spread, as the writers she mentored are now mentoring a further generations of writers.

Remembering Marion Zimmer Bradley on Her Birthday, SCIFI.RADIO, 3 June 2024

If her influence as a writer continues to bear fruit such as Acolyte, she’ll be completely forgotten, and deservedly so, before the end of the decade. No one reads Darkover anymore and the market for lesbian pedophile space witches isn’t likely to survive Clown World’s collapse.

It’s fascinating to observe how the same freaks who believe and assiduously repeat obviously false information about those of whom they assiduously disapprove will openly deny and attempt to discredit the direct and convincing testimonial evidence of the actual victims of the criminals they are defending.

The dead lesbian pedo Marion Zimmer Bradley has never been disavowed by SFWA, is still recognized as a Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and there are at least two known pedophiles who are honored as SFWA Grand Masters. The real reason the SF community hates me to this day with a white hot passion has nothing to do with Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, my open contempt for their diversity pets, or even my ideological views. It’s because I published this book and they know their attempts to rehabilitate their fallen heroes will never, ever succeed.

There is a perfectly valid argument for separating the art from the artist in many cases. The problem, in the specific case of MZB, is that it is not possible to do so when so much of her art was steeped in her particular wickedness and written with the avowed objective of infecting society with it.

UPDATE: From Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how many of these SF authors join the rehabilitation efforts going forward. And notice that there is no mention of me being one of the authors who has publicly condemned her.

A number of science fiction authors have publicly condemned Bradley. Among the first was John Scalzi, who within a day of the allegations being made public, described the allegations as “horrific”. Hugo Award winner Jim C. Hines wrote that Bradley’s positive effect on her readers and associates “makes the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley protecting a known child rapist and molesting her own daughter and others even more tragic.” G Willow Wilson, who along with Bradley is a fellow World Fantasy Award winner, said she was “speechless”. Diana L. Paxson, who collaborated with Bradley on a number of novels and who continued to write novels set in the Avalon Series after Bradley’s death, said that she was “shocked and appalled to read Moira Greyland’s posts about her mother… I never personally observed, nor had any reason to suspect, that (Bradley) was abusing either of her children.”

UPDATE: In response to this post, SciFi.radio has memory-holed the article. But the Internet remembers…

DISCUSS ON SG

No Common Ground, No Compromise

One of the leading lights of the Evil Legion of Evil, John C. Wright, reminds us of the the irreconcilable differences between the SJWs of science fiction and the Sad Puppies:

The difference between the Puppies and the Morlocks is not artistic, cultural, political nor ideological. We are civilized folk who can have a civilized discussion on this or any topic, and judge matters based on simple principles of fairness all civilized men since the dawn of time have understood.

They are barbarians. Barbarism is not an ideology, not a political party, not a religion. It is a state of undeveloped savagery which simple and primitive emotions hold sway. It is a mob.

Q: •Do you see any way to encourage a reconciliation between the literary camps?

JCW: Reconciliation was attempted and savagely rebuffed. To use one example of a dozen, Mr. Martin and I had an agreement to let these matters rest, which he immediately broke in a dishonorable and disappointing fashion. When my wife, also a Tor author, meekly approached Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden at a party during World Con in an attempt to affect a reconciliation, he shouted and swore at her using potty-mouth language. Fortunately for my police record, this event did not happen within my earshot. It is not the way any professional conducts himself in business.

Q: If so, how might that be achieved?  If not, why not?

JCW: Reconciliation is neither desirable nor possible, for the difference between the two camps is not a difference in literary taste, not a difference in political opinion, nor a difference of philosophy nor religion. It is a difference between creators and destroyers; it is a difference between unhappy and envious parasites and the happy hosts on whose blood and work they feed, attempting in vain to fill their own emptiness.

Q: Given your experiences with the Sad Puppies/Hugo situation, what advice would you offer to aspiring writers who are concerned about the politics of the sci-fi/fantasy writing industry today?

JCW: Again, your terminology is imprecise. This is not politics. This is a war between civilized men and filthy barbarians. It is a struggle between humans and post-humans.

My advice is to gird up your loins and prepare to fight for what you love.

These people are relentless. They cannot be reasoned with. They despise reason.  Compromise is not possible. They regard concession as admission of weakness. They will not accept your surrender. They hate you and hate everything you love. What they want is the power to terrify you by threatening your livelihood and damaging you reputation, and then to use that power to destroy.

Even the most loyal bootlicking sycophant among them, at any moment, for any reason or no reason, can be denounced as this week’s thought-criminal, and subjected to the Two Minute Hate. You cannot escape the Eye of Sauron by obeying him.

Elizabeth Moon and Jim Frenkel are persons whose progressive, leftwing credentials are impeccable. The social justice warriors arbitrarily and randomly decided to destroy the careers of these two. This was done to impress all onlookers with the arbitrary nature of the Morlock power. The fact that both are innocent of the bizarre accusations leveled against them is a feature, not a bug. A rational despot can be obeyed, and those who obey have no need to fear. The irrational terrorist, however, smites random targets, so that all will fear.

I offer aspiring writers this advice: Never apologize to a Morlock when called upon to do so. They do not call upon the guilty to apologize, but the innocent. Never believe a word they say. The social justice warrior always lies; always retrenches his lies when caught; always accuses you of his own sins.

Adopt the correct motive for writing: myself, I write to please heaven. I have no interest in pleasing Uncle Screwtape or any of his minions and thralls, knowing or unknowing, here on earth. To wring the cold smile from a dead-eyed fanatic that hates my civilization, my nation, my faith, my family and my life is not one of my goals and should not be yours.

There is no common ground. There can be no compromise. And there will be no reconciliation. But whereas they are weaker and less popular than ever before, we are stronger, more influential, and even more imitated than anyone could possibly have imagined 11 years ago when this all started with Larry Correia’s original campaign to avoid Puppy-related Sadness.

DISCUSS ON SG

SF Freaks Gonna Freak

Dave McCarty, the head of the Hugo Awards, has been accused of sexual assault by several women in the literary ghetto formerly known as the science fiction community. The only real surprise is that children are not, as yet, reported to be involved:

There’s been a months-long campaign to discredit the Hugo Awards and Chengdu Worldcon from the establishment elites including cross-dresser John Scalzi, former SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal, and Neil Gaiman again, which has caused many who have been disillusioned with Worldcon and the Hugo Awards to laugh at how inept this group in charge of science fiction publishing has become.

It was revealed through a chain of emails that several participants were disqualified from the Hugo Awards for the very woke identity politics that were championed by this group, including orders to spy on the social media and political activities of the people involved. This led to mass apologies and several people stepping down from convention activities because of their corruption.

Now, Dave McCarty, who headed this Hugo Awards committee, is being accused of multiple instances of sexual assault.

Posting to the left-wing echo chamber BlueSky, artist Meg Frank said, “Dave McCarty is emotionally abusive, generally manipulative, and has sexually harassed myself and numerous others. I’ve spoken openly about this and made CoC complaints when possible. He is not a missing stair, he is a creepy handyman who has been using his previous community service as a shield. The hugo shit is awful, and I feel terrible for many people but he is worse than all that.”

Not to be outdone in the victim Olympics, Jesi Lipp quoted the post and said, “I’ve never made it a secret that he groped me at a Smofcon in 2011 and it has always been largely treated as a non-issue.”

Fandom Pulse seems skeptical. I simply note that longtime Hugo-centric SF fandom site File 770 is named, by the owner’s own admission, after what was either an orgy of sorts, or even more tragically, just the first party that the sort of losers whose social lives revolve around an annual science fiction event ever attended.

File 770 is named for the party in Room 770 at the 1951 Worldcon that upstaged the convention.

ROOM 770

— This was a St. Charles Hotel room registered to fans Max Keasler, Roger Sims, Rich Elsberry and Ed Kuss at the 9th Worldcon — nicknamed NOLacon — held in New Orleans in 1951. Frank Dietz had been hosting a room party which was asked to quiet down by a hotel detective, and Dietz resolved the matter by taking eveyone to room 770 circa 11:00 PM Saturday night, whereupon a massive party developed which lasted till 11:00 AM the next morning. Numerous fans drifted in and out, including the legendary Sam Moskowitz, and just possibly, Canada’s Norman G. Browne for whom this was his first convention.

Ain’t no party like a Hugo Party. And thank God for that!

Anyhow, I’m sure it’s no problem that giving another Best Novel award to an angry black woman devoid of any vestige of literary talent won’t solve.

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Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF

A highly literate reader named JC emails a detailed analysis of George RR Martin’s difficulty in finishing A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and reaches precisely the same conclusion that I have assumed all along, which is that Martin is too devoted to intellectual subversion to accept the true and obvious heroic end to his fantasy saga, which is to say, the triumphant marriage of ice and fire.

To put it rather more concisely: one can no more write an English-style novel and not end it with a wedding than one can write a Japanese-style novel and not end it with a suicide.

I don’t think it’s so much that Martin won’t finish the saga as that he can’t. And principally for one reason (though I imagine there’s a host of ancillary reasons): Jon Snow & Danaerys Targaryan themselves. He didn’t anticipate when he set out to write his story, I suspect, to write one genuinely heroic character, let alone two.

It’s clear that Tyrion, and the Lannister family in general, are his favoured characters, and it’s the Lannisters who set the tone of the series. I think this is so for both internal-structural reasons and for personal reasons. Martin just prefers them and sympathises most with their worldview. Structurally, I believe the Lannisters are the vehicle through which Martin has tried to accomplish his main artistic goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire: to subvert the Fantasy genre, with its roots in the heroic and the mythical, by introducing an element of cynicism and realist historiography, a literary Real Politik.

To do this he had to build a typical Fantasy setting with mythological elements, in order to deconstruct them from within. What he didn’t anticipate, I suspect, is that the ‘machinery’ of his writing would churn out two more or less heroic characters, there among all the cynics, warlords, cowards, bureaucrats, hypocrites, mercenaries, careerists et al. with which his universe abounds: Jon and Dany — who do fit the classical standards of heroism, despite Martin’s critique of their characters, as their motivations ultimately transcend the merely self-interested, and they are brave in the pursuit. Martin is, at bottom, a good storyteller with a keen sense of character, so it’s very likely he trusted his intuitions in writing these characters and plotting out their stories, without fully realising the overall structural implications for his saga.

Now I think he’s reached a bind in his grand narrative. There are two irresolvably conflicting impulses acting within him as a writer — and it’s this irresolvability that has given him an incurable writer’s block, sapping him of all motivation to conclude his epic: the first impulse is the conscious wish to accomplish his artistic aim of deconstructing the heroic and mythical foundations of Fantasy; and the second impulse is the novelist’s natural need not to betray his own characters, to provide a coherent resolution to their ‘character arc’. The problem is that, unwittingly, Jon and Dany have turned out to be genuine heroes in their own right, and Martin can’t figure out how to give their stories a fittingly heroic ending without succumbing to classical Fantasy standards, the very standards he set out to subvert in the first place. Jon and Dany narratologically deserve an heroic ending, but can Martin bring himself to do justice to their heroism, or even to spoil it with one last act of cynicism?

It’s clear that the ‘Ice’ and ‘Fire’ in A Song of Ice and Fire are Jon and Dany respectively, and that it’s ultimately their tale. I can only imagine that Martin did this unconsciously, and that it’s made him nauseous now that he’s discovered it. What we see in the TV Show — Jon and Dany having a romantic affair and it being discovered to be incestuous — I think is Martin’s intention, and I think this development shows his good writer’s instinct. It’s what comes after (the final season of the TV Show) where everything falls apart, and I think Martin knows it. He knows the notes he provided to the show directors are sloppy, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. I can only imagine that when he now sits to write the final chapters in his story, he feels a debilitating anxiety over the problem the existence of Jon and Dany, and the challenge their unforeseen heroism, transcending the pettiness of their surroundings, has caused for him, leaving out all that enthusiasm he once had for the narrative and its setting, when he was writing the opening volumes.

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