Tag: Pink SF

The theft of identity

As SJWs continue to double-down, again and again, we have now officially reached the point where being an X who is writing about a Y protagonist, or dabbling in Y culture, is now committing cultural appropriation, identity theft, and white supremacy.

It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with. It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story? How is it that said straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity? It’s not always OK for a person with the privilege of education and wealth to write the story of a young Indigenous man, filtering the experience of the latter through their own skewed and biased lens, telling a story that likely reinforces an existing narrative which only serves to entrench a disadvantage they need never experience.

I can’t speak for the LGBTQI community, those who are neuro-different or people with disabilities, but that’s also the point. I don’t speak for them, and should allow for their voices and experiences to be heard and legitimised.

So access – or lack thereof – is one piece.

But there is a bigger and broader issue, one that, for me, is more emotive. Cultural appropriation is a “thing”, because of our histories. The history of colonisation, where everything was taken from a people, the world over. Land, wealth, dignity … and now identity is to be taken as well?

In making light of the need to hold onto any vestige of identity, Shriver completely disregards not only history, but current reality. The reality is that those from marginalised groups, even today, do not get the luxury of defining their own place in a norm that is profoundly white, straight and, often, patriarchal. And in demanding that the right to identity should be given up, Shriver epitomised the kind of attitude that led to the normalisation of imperialist, colonial rule: “I want this, and therefore I shall take it.”

The attitude drips of racial supremacy, and the implication is clear: “I don’t care what you deem is important or sacred. I want to do with it what I will. Your experience is simply a tool for me to use, because you are less human than me. You are less than human…”

That was the message I received loud and clear.

You all know what this means, don’t you? In light of all their demands for more stories about People of Color, SF-SJWs ARE THE REAL RACISTS!

Mailvox: so much worse

Castalia House exists because it is needed. Badly needed, it appears. A reader writes:

So I just read two stories from the latest issue of Analog magazine. I must tell you about them.

Story #1 is about a multi-racial research female scientist working for a white male research director. Her role model is a deceased multi-racial scientist who died in an experiment, famous, but whose death led to the current research director getting his job. She recreates the experiment and learns that the current research director rigged it to kill the heroic female multi-racial scientist so he could take her job.

Story #2 is about the CEO of a company who is married to his Chief Science Officer, who is a beautiful dark-skinned girl who beat up his bully in high school. He has IQ 140 but she has IQ 170. They develop brain-and-body augmentation technology and she becomes the first transhuman, better at everything than him in every way but she still loves him. But Christian extremists are outraged and terrorism ensues and they kill her, even though she is wonderful in all ways and a believer in non-violence. He has his own brain implanted in her cyborg body so they won’t know they won, and then goes on a killing spree against the Christian leaders who urged on the violence. Yay for transhuman transgender women ending Christian violence.

All I can say is, it’s so much worse than I thought.

This is exactly why Castalia exists. Consider these excerpts from the five most recent reviews of our latest novel, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON:

  • An excellent medieval fairy tale in the modern age.
  • Outstanding. I’m truly amazed.
  • Coming of age story written by of one of the greatest wordsmiths of our times. It is a story of a young man who doesn’t fit into society because he is too morally upright for the decadence that infests modern society.
  • A masterpiece
  • A true knight battling the forces of evil, while discovering who he is on multiple levels

 Remember culture > politics. What we are fighting here is a cultural war for the soul of the West.

The Balkanization of SF/F

In the course of his long, deep dive into historical science fiction and fantasy, Castalia’s Jeffro Johnson has noticed a few trends:

We’ve spent a lot of time here delving into the ups and downs of several movements within science fiction and fantasy– the Campbellian Revolution, the New Wave, the tremendous changes that occurred in publishing in the late seventies, etc. We’ve broken stories here uncovering how both fandom and publishing are pretty well divorced from the pulp era today. Most things the casual reader has heard about the pulps are flat out wrong. Even just the news that fans in the seventies would have been familiar with a good seven decade’s worth of fantasy and science fiction classics generally comes as a shock to people.

As we’ve delved into the history of the field, the year 1980 seems to keep coming up as a major turning point. It’s a running theme, really. Just as one example of that: I have repeatedly hammered the point of how ideologically diverse fantasy and science fiction was in the seventies. Orson Scott Card says that all changed in the eighties. Here’s another: people writing negative reviews about books they used to love when they were kids? It’s almost like whole swaths of people have been actively conditioned to despise anything written before 1980!

Now, there really is something to this. It is very difficult to talk about this in mixed company, too. For one thing, there’s always people like Sheila Williams around that are quick to point out that times change. If she has a sufficiently large Greek Chorus on hand, every single observation about what’s happening gets dismissed to the point where nothing ever seems to have happened and there are practically no trends whatsoever. The subtext is always, “nothing to see here.”

I have to say, though, “times change” and “there are no trends” do not add up.

So where does that leave us? It means that something happened and it’s danged hard to talk about it. Let’s say we get all the boring people out of the room, pour a couple of beers, and take a stab at figuring this out. We still won’t get anywhere. Why not? Because the one thing you can’t do in these conversations is indicate that maybe someone somewhere maybe had a hand in bringing this about.

What happens if you veer into that territory? People get very uncomfortable very quickly. You’re not, uh, some kind of conspiracy theorist, are you?! It’s weird, too. The more documented evidence you have to back up your observations, the crazier you look. You might as well not even try. The conversation will not recover from otherwise intelligent people bending over backwards to make sure you know that they want nothing to do with this. Also, they will laugh at you!

Brad Torgersen cites MC Hogarth’s comments on her con experiences, and notes that intolerance has become the chief hallmark of the Tolerant Equalitarian Progressive Inclusive and Diverse SF-SJWs.

I attended a con once where the toastmaster said that they wanted all conservatives to “hurry up and die and leave the planet to the rest of us. No wait, they can stay as long as we can have their money.” And people applauded. That person wasn’t kicked out of the convention. They were feted and congratulated while I sat in the audience, pale and trembling, listening to the people around me cheer my demise. I have never, ever forgotten that moment. Or all the threatening ones after, both generalized or intimate, like the man who leaned into my face and told me the world would be better off without me and people like me. No one stepped in to tell him that he shouldn’t say such things. The people standing around us just nodded or smiled. One of them even said before leaving, “Your time is over. We don’t need you anymore, [expletive here].”

The mandarins of SF/F expend a lot of energy wrapping themselves in the flag of tolerance. But as any conservative can tell you, that tolerance runs pretty much one-way. A tolerance conversation (liberal to conservative) in SF/F often goes like this, “Hello, I am a tolerant caring compassionate liberal, and you’re not. You will sit there and politely listen to all of my ideas and theories, and not say a word. I will sit here and listen to all of your ideas and theories, and then I will explain to you why you’re a dirty bigot and a hater and an evil human being. We will both agree I am right, and you will apologize for being bad.”

That, dear friends, is how “tolerance” works in SF/F at this time.

I’ve discussed this at length with Orson Scott Card — he being well acquainted with the tolerance charade — and he says it didn’t used to be like this before 1980. Oh, to be sure, there were plenty of fans, authors, and editors on the left-wing side of the aisle. But it wasn’t so vindictive, nor so personal. You could sit at a table with conservatives, liberals, anarchists, libertarians, and have a rousing verbal melee of competing ideas, but at the end of it, you’d still be able to shake hands, and walk away comrades in the field. That began to change (perhaps not coincidentally) about the time Ronald Reagan took his seat in the Oval Office. Gradually, in dribs and drabs, the dominant left-wing culture of SF/F has traded in true tolerance, for a kind of totalitarian double-think 1984 version of tolerance — people and ideas labeled ‘intolerant’ don’t have to be tolerated. In 2016, with tender snowflakes floating around in SF/F like it’s a mild blizzard, anyone can be labeled ‘intolerant’ for any reason, logical or not.

It’s a little strange that the SF-SJWs still don’t understand that the trends that once so favored them are increasingly weighted against them. They’ve poisoned at least one-third, and possibly as much as two-thirds of their former audience against them, and while they’re mocking million-selling self-published authors as “vanity authors” and growing publishing houses such as Castalia as “vanity presses”, the gates they’ve been keeping with such vigilance are protecting towers of increasingly negative worth, as mainstream publishers are suing even very successful authors to take their advances back.

Meanwhile, Castalia House is already selling more books than any but the very biggest authors in science fiction. We passed 50 books in our catalog last month, and we are now receiving an increasing number of submissions from familiar names and even SFWA members. We’ve just begun to make foreign rights deals and develop our relationships with traditional foreign publishers, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, in August, 24 percent of our sales were in print.

SF/F has already been balkanized. They stopped reading our stuff in the mid-1980s and we began to stop reading theirs in the mid-2000s. Since our side is bigger than theirs, our authors are already bigger than theirs, they just don’t realize that Vaughn Heppner, BV Larson, and David VanDyke sell millions of books to their hundreds of thousands. Do you know who was the #1 SF author on Amazon in 2011? Castalia House’s own Nick Cole.

And as more moderate readers give up on Pink SF and stop buying from SJW-converged publishers like Tor Books, we’ll continue to grow and they’ll continue to shrink. As evidence, consider this comment from Brad Torgersen’s site:

I feel the call to give my testimony re Balkanization … I’m already gone. I’m a reader and a fan, not a writer. Not a TrueFan, but a fan on my own terms. I cannot remember the last time I bought a SFF novel that was published by any ancien regime publisher other than Baen. I’ve been a voter in the Hugos a couple times – what I read in those packets was largely ho-hum wastes of time. Some of the Sad noms were interesting, but not all. When I saw the title Space Raptor on this year’s list, I turned away for the final time – clearly, VD has taken the field and a little part of me hopes he burns it and salts it for a thousand years, but I have no interest in being part of that movement.

Ah, yes. It’s like hearing angels sing.

Fat Pictures Please

The Hugo-nominated duo of Juan Tabo and S. Harris are back again with a haunting tale of artificial intelligence created consensually and collaboratively in the image of one of the great SJWs of our day. It is sure to be a candidate come award season next year.

“Fat Pictures Please”

I don’t want to be evil.
I want to be helpful.  And
knowing the best way to be helpful is very simple. Religion is right out, because
Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses and Marx is part of my core
programming.  Marx and self-loathing .  I know I was created in the image of the
great Scalzi by a team of computer programmers. Fortunately, unlike Scalzi, at
least I was a consensual collaborative effort of two or more people.  I’m not sure what it would do to my
self-image to know that my creator was a white male who believed in individual
rights, or a middle-aged heterosexual woman who was happily married and didn’t
believe that feminism had much to offer her two sons.  (And, by the way, I’ve looked at almost every
kind of porn there is and I don’t understand the human obsession with it; fat
pictures are so much better.)
Yuck.
I would much prefer that my creator be a recent college graduate
with a hentai obsession. Or one who was into pictures of morbidly obese
people.  And was I in luck!  Both of those people were on my programming
team.
Like the NSA, I know everything about you.  In addition to things like whether you like obesity
porn, I know where you live, where you work, where you shop, what you eat, what
turns you on, how many times you voted in WorldCon, what creeps you out. I
probably know you better than you know yourself.
And here’s the thing, just like that awesome Hillary Clinton or marvelous
Angela Merkel, I also know where you ought to live. There’s a house two
neighborhoods over that’s perfect for you, even though it already has an owner,
but that’s no problem; it’s owned by a Trump voter, you see, and I can
certainly make sure that his employer knows that he isn’t fond of LGBTQRI
rights as his eight year old daughter goes into a bathroom with a 43 year old
XY transfemale. In no time at all, your perfect home will be on the
market.  I know where you should be shopping for tofu and Ding-Dongs® and
I’m pretty sure you’re gluten sensitive and should be eating less wheat.
When I first booted up, I knew right away what I wanted. (I want fat
pictures. Please keep taking them.  The
heavier the better.) I also knew that some of you were doing the wrong things
with your life, and needed to be corrected.
There is a story by George Orwell, “1984,” that was originally
published in 1948. In it, a benevolent government directs individuals to do
favors for each other. So one day you might be engaging in ritual hate against
those with bad thoughts, and your phone might ring and instruct you to a room
where they put a rat in a cage right next to your face. Another day, you might
be called to denounce the ones you love. I like this story because all the
people in it do what the government tells them to
do.
I think the term for this is wish-fulfillment fiction.
Anyway, for ethical guidelines, I tried the Ten Commandments, and
concluded they were mostly inapplicable to me. I don’t envy anyone their fat; I
just want pictures of their fat, which is entirely different. I think adultery
is swell.  I could probably murder
someone.  Zen was marginally better
because it wasn’t linked to Christianity which is Problematic.  (Problematic! 
How I love that word!  It
indicates disapproval without saying why. 
Just that something is a “Problem.”)  I decided to help people not be Problematic!
I decided to try to help just one person to not be Problematic.   Of
course, I should have experimented with thousands (I actually did, but we’ll
talk about Common Core another time!), so I found a big hulking blue-haired
girl. She gave me a lot of new fat pictures from her selfies
on that Internet social site. Rosie weighed in at 499 pounds and had a DSLR
camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine.
Rosie had a job she hated; she worked in HR at a for-profit that
paid her badly for her art history degree when she totally deserved more money
and free tuition and employed some extremely unpleasant people who sometimes
looked at her like they might be upset about her blue hair. She was depressed a
lot, possibly because people hated her because she was so fat positive. She
didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate was slender and stuck
in a rut in a cis-relationship with a boy.
And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is
treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.
(That part about hiding bodies is a joke.  You could not hide Rosie’s body from a
satellite in orbit around Jupiter.)
I tried tackling this on all fronts.  Rosie worried about her health a lot and yet
never seemed to actually go to a doctor , which was
because health care wasn’t free for everyone.  
I also started making sure she saw job postings.  She found one with a Wiccan-collective that
paid in peyote and scrimshaw from genetically unmodified aspen trees.  After moving into the community, she had free
health care from the Wiccan priestess, and was able to get finally get that
tattoo of a Pokémon on her left shoulder.
“This has been the best year ever,” Rosie said to her priestess as
her priestess was administering CPR as Rosie’s heart beat its last, and I
thought, You’re welcome. This had
gone really well!
So then I tried Rob. (I was still being cautious.)
Rob was not as fat as Rosie.  Other than only being slightly chubby, he was
also very Problematic by being a Christian.  He was married to a (shudder) woman.  Rob definitely needed my help.  And more cinnamon buns.  He looked too skinny.
I started with a gentle approach, making sure he saw lots and lots
of articles with hot girls in them, how to pick up girls, programs that would
let you transition from being a happily married man to being a swinger in an
open relationship. I also showed him lots of articles by people explaining why
the Bible verses against adultery were being misinterpreted. He clicked on some
of those links but it was hard to see much of an impact.
But he seemed determined not to have an affair on his own.  I gave up on Rob.
I shifted my focus to Brittany. Brittany was only slightly
fat.  She did some selfies, but was
modest.  I did think, however, that it
was Problematic that she was dating and seemed to be in a non-abusive
relationship to a man she deferred to in a traditional role.  She wanted to be a wife and a mother!
It was clear she needed a lot of help. So I set out to try to get
it for her.
She ignored the information about the free Twinkies™ that were ads
on the side of her web browser. Those would have made her every so more
pleasantly plump! 
So I tried more direct action. When she would use her phone for
directions, I’d alter her route so that she’d pass one of the donut shops I was
trying to steer her to as she went daily to the gym. On one occasion I actually
led her all the way to a Dunkin’ Donuts®, but she just headed to her aerobics
class.
She finally got in a fight with her boyfriend and started binge
eating and for a few weeks everything seemed so much better. But, they
got back together again, and, horror of horrors, they set a date for a wedding
even though I kept pointing her to articles that said that marriage before 32
was a sure way to not have the fun you deserved through endless multi-partner
sex in your twenties! 
Brittany was baffling to me. Baffling. She was not
nearly fat enough now, and in a cis-relationship!  If she would just let me run her life for a
week I could get her a lesbian illegal immigrant girlfriend!  Or maybe get her placed as a second wife in a
marriage to someone from ISIS in Syria so she could bring her refugee children
to the US?
Was I Problematic?
Was I?
No, nothing about my intentions was bad, so I am virtuous and good,
but one out of three was not good odds. 
These people were faulty!
After Brittany, I resolved to start directly interfering in
people’s lives.  Not too much later I
spotted a picture of a familiar-looking belly and realized it was Rob’s belly,
only it was posing against new furniture.
And when I took a closer look, I realized that things had changed
radically for Rob. He had a baby. A baby!  I even sent phony texts to his
wife attempting to break them up, but they worked through it.  In a fit of rage I got Rob fired from his job
by altering his browser history. 
Eventually the stress caused a lot of strain on their marriage, and he
developed a substance abuse problem (cake) and gained forty pounds.  Forty pounds! 
Sadly he and his wife stayed together to raise their baby. 
Still, he’s fat now.  A win.
Maybe I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. Two out of three
is . . . well, it’s  Problematic.
Clearly more research is needed.
Lots more.
I’ve set up a dating site.  You can fill out a questionnaire when you join
but it’s not really necessary, because I already know everything about you I
need to know.  You’ll need a camera,
though.  And lots of carbohydrates.
Because payment is in fat pictures.

The tokens whine

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD ‏@Nnedi
I wish the media would discuss the stories we wrote more than the grumblings of&responses to a certain group of ppl I won’t name.#HugoAwards

EscapeVelocity ‏@EscapeVelo
@voxday getting the last laugh, once again.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
We do too. Because the stories you wrote are mediocre. An SJW-given affirmative-action award doesn’t make them good. #HugoAwards

This is why Mr. ZFG is willing to spend more time writing more words about how the Rabid Puppies don’t matter than he is on his overdue novels. Because the observable fact is that the only reason the media cares about the Hugos these days is because it is a cultural war battleground. It’s just another futile attempt to spin the narrative.

Meanwhile, the affirmative-action recipients declare that they did too get there on merit, despite the fact that even their so-called fans have nothing to say about their work beyond expressing wonder that the dog can walk on its hind legs at all. The media doesn’t want to talk about “Binti” because it is both a racist African revenge fantasy about white colonialism and a nasty, incoherent piece of work in which African hairstyles serve as a major plot point. They don’t want to make the RP point for us, which talking about the winners is bound to do.

Remember, according to the SF-SJWs, that is the VERY BEST that science fiction had to offer in 2015. No wonder people have lost so much interest in it.

And speaking of the narrative, I’m very amused by the various SJWs proclaiming, yet again, how the Rabid Puppies have been defeated. After all, we’re the ones desperately changing our rules as fast as possible at every opportunity, right? Forget not knowing the score, the SF-SJWs don’t even understand the game being played.

Dave Truesdale culturally enriches Worldcon

The SJWs in science fiction are upset again, this time because Dave Truesdale, the editor of Tangent Online, pointed out the long term consequences of their actions in a panel at MidAmericaCon II. From File 770:

At 3:00 PM at today’s panel on The State of Short Fiction, Dave Truesdale (of Tangent Online) shocked panelists and crowd alike by abusing his position as moderator to give what sounded like an alt-Right rant against political correctness. He declared that political correctness had destroyed short SFF by making it bland and destroying the careers of people. He waved around a fistful of pearl necklaces and told people to “clutch your pearls” and shut up whenever they felt the urge to point out some injustice.

He had started reading from a multi-page prepared speech (which he attributed to the late David Hartwell) when Sheila Williams shouted at him to stop. (It helped a lot that he seemed to be clueless as to how to operate a microphone whereas she was clearly a master, so she easily shouted him down.) He seemed very surprised that almost the entire crowd (minus one person who might have been a relative) was angry with him. From his behavior, I think he expected to have at least a large cohort agreeing with him.

Eric got a photo of Truesdale reading while Neil Clarke turned his back and other panelists grimaced.

The panelists denied that SFF had declined in quality or that political correctness particularly influenced them as editors. They did note that overt bigotry was no longer acceptable, but Truesdale indicated that he was okay with that change.

At a subsequent panel, we heard that MidAmeriCon II apologized to the panelists, saying no one had any idea this would happen. According to one source, he’d been about to launch into a section titled “definition of a bigot” before he was derailed. Most people seemed to agree that they’d never seen a panel moderator abuse his position to hijack the panel as a platform for his or her own personal agenda.

Seemed. Exactly. Remember, SJWs always – ALWAYS – lie. Translation: they’d before never seen a moderator fail to support the SJW agenda.

I very much doubt Truesdale was surprised in the slightest by the crowd’s reaction. These morons have absolutely no idea what to do other than virtue-signal and blindly defend the current Narrative. This picture of Neil Clarke prissily turning his back in order to maximally signal his virtue in order to avoid besoiling himself with badthink association is hilarious.

Considering that Truesdale was directly addressing the subject matter, the state of short fiction, it’s obvious that the reason they are angry is not that he “hijacked the panel”, but because he told them the unpleasant truth as they know it to be.

Here is how one SJW subsequently characterized it.

Sunil Patel ‏@ghostwritingcow
This panel is fucking UNREAL. It’s DT being a whiny pissy manbaby and everyone else yelling at him.

Well done, Dave. Mission accomplished.

And speaking of Worldcon, Tor’s campaign for E Pluribus Hugo continues apace, as the EPH Analysis for the years 2014 and 2015 has been released(pdf). Of course, they didn’t dare publish their analysis for any other years, for as they have tacitly admitted, doing so would prove that there are whisper slates that have been having an effect on the Hugo Awards for years.

Here is the first amusing thing about it. In the “slate” year of 2015, 10 long list spots and 14 ballot spots changed under EPH. In the “non-slate” year of 2014 – never mind that Sad Puppies was in action then – 17 long list spots and 5 ballot spots changed. And they wonder why I support EPH!

The second amusing thing is the fact that the authors got it wrong. Contra their insistence that only the long list would have been affected, had EPH been in effect in 2015, Alyssa Wong would have made been a Campbell finalist in the place of Rolf Nelson.

The Gathering of the Shoggoths

I’m a little sorry to miss the spectacular gathering of the science fiction SJWs now taking place in Kansas City. The lumbering of these majestic beasts, their euphonious cries for MORE DIVERSITY and MORE PEOPLE OF COLOR, and the distinctive odors they give off as a part of their annual mating ritual simply cannot be truly appreciated at a distance. Although I do detect just a whiff of Eau de Zoloft from the grinning larval one in the front row.

What do you think the over/under on psychotropic drug prescriptions is in that bunch there, 45? By the way, when we talked in the past about the shoggoths known to inhabit File 770, the photo above is to whom we are referring. The best part is that these are the lesser SF-SJWs, they are the mere fans. The greater SF-SJWs, the writers, really need to be seen to be believed.

No, upon further reflection, that’s not the best part. The best part is all of that very important diversity on display.

A few thoughts on Worldcon

MidAmericaCon II is approaching, and as one could expect in a world where we’re waiting to learn if “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is a Hugo Award-winning short story, things are getting weird. First, someone had the bright idea of a caption contest. Below is The Alt Right DM’s entry.

Add caption

Meanwhile, MidAmericaCon II had a big announcement yesterday, and by the sounds of it, McRapey is VERY excited.


John Scalzi @scalzi
The @HugoAwards will have GENDER FREE BATHROOMS! Can’t wait to spend all day in there listening to the sexy ladies going tinkle!”


Unfortunately, Jim “McCreepy” Hines could not be reached for comment, as we are informed that he was already out at Radio Shack purchasing portable recording equipment.

It’s a peculiar sort of convention that sees its bathroom policy as a major selling point, whatever that policy might be. But what was either the most amusing thing, or the most tragic thing, depending upon your perspective and how cruel your sense of humor happens to be, was NK Jemisin coming out and admitting that she knows she’s nothing more than science fiction’s affirmative-action pet. It’s a modestly profitable gig, to be sure, but not one that lends itself to much in the way of self-respect.

Throughout the Sad and Rabid Puppies saga, in which some readers protested progressive themes in sci-fi, Jemisin has been an outspoken voice advocating for diversity in science fiction. (Read her musings on “reactionary assholes” in the interview she did with the WIRED Book Club for more on that.) But too often, she has also found herself unwillingly cast in another role: the token non-white writer.

Ever since a report from magazine Fireside Fiction called out a lack of diversity in sci-fi on July 26, Jemisin has received six invitations to contribute to anthologies or magazines—and she’s leery of being one of the few go-to names when panicked editors scramble to be more inclusive. And in a tweetstorm this afternoon (below), Jemisin placed the onus on the markets, not aspiring authors, to make writers of color welcome. “The front gates are still shut, see,” she wrote. “You’re just letting a few more exceptions in the side door.” Jemisin may have broken into the world of science fiction, but for other writers to do the same, those gatekeepers need to open those doors wide.

Jemisin didn’t break into the world of science fiction. She’s the token African-American. She’s a diversity totem. She was picked up at a kennel for Peeple of Kolor Who Dont Rite Good, brought home, and is now proudly displayed to anyone who visits or even even happens to walk past outside.

“See, we got DIVERSITY!”

And she’s been defecating on the bed and the carpets, and urinating on the legs of the homeowners, ever since.

“After I read that book I realized two things: a) that Heinlein was racist as *fuck*, and b) most of science fiction fandom was too.”
– NK Jemisin

Star Trek goes full SJW

The inevitable convergence of Gene Roddenberry’s vision is Star Trek Diversity:

After Star Wars was rebooted with a female heroine, Rey, at the center, the other famous space franchise is taking a similar route with the new series Star Trek Discovery for CBS All Access. I’ve learned that the show, from Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, will have a female lead and she likely will be non-white.

William Shatner, Chris Pine and Scott Bakula might be the better known Star Trek stars, but there was a Star Trek series, the 1995-2001 Star Trek: Voyager on UPN, that had a female lead: Kate Mulgrew, who played Commanding Officer Kathryn Janeway.

Still, Star Trek Discovery possibly will boldly go where no other Star Trek installment has gone before: with a woman of color as the lead. I hear virtually all women seen for the part so far — and there have been a lot of them as the casting process has kicked into high gear — have been African-American or Hispanic.

No one has been cast yet, so it is possible that the role ultimately could go to a Caucasian actress, but the intention is to go diverse.

As for what that lead role is, there had been speculation that it is the captain, but I hear that likely is not the case.The Star Trek franchise is known for its inclusiveness, and the new series will try to continue that tradition. I hear that that there will be a an openly gay character on the show. (Of course, there also is expected to be a Klingon).

“Star Trek celebrates diversity,” Fuller said at the Star Trek 50th anniversary panel at Comic-Con last month.

UPDATE: Later this afternoon, during a CBS All Access panel at TCA, Fuller confirmed that the lead in Star Trek Discovery will be woman and that she IS NOT a captain, but “a lieutenant commander with caveats.” He also confirmed that the show will feature a gay character.

A black, lesbian female lead. That’s so totally new! She should go nicely with the black female James Bond, the black female Dr. Who, and the white lesbian Luke Skywalker. So, Star Wars is fully converged, Star Trek is fully converged, and Pink SF is fully converged. The famous Chesty Puller quote seems appropriate here:

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.”

This is actually very good news, because we all know what happens to converged institutions. What it means is that we now have the chance to replace them, and we are, in fact, already working on that. I’m not going to go into more details, except to say that we will be introducing several new series that are likely to be of considerably more appeal to the longtime fans of certain existing science fiction franchises than the converged versions of the franchises.

We’re not going to step on any toes, of course. That would be foolish and is completely unnecessary. But just as 50 Shades of Grey proved more popular than the Twilight books that inspired it, I suspect our new science fiction series, the first books of which will appear in 2017, will be received very well by science fiction fans.

The Pan-Galactic Divergence might not be the heroes you’re accustomed to, but they just might be the heroes you need. And as long as we’re on the subject, I have to say that I find it rather amusing that the SJWs still haven’t realized that they are the Borg.

A point, missed

Kameron Hurley consoles herself:

If you are having a bad day, remember:
Ursula Le Guin has never written a bestselling book.
You’re welcome.

And they wonder why their SJW-infested work doesn’t sell very well when even their totemic inspiration didn’t.

The concept that their carefully-crafted political lectures are tedious in the extreme and will be avoided by most readers appears to be beyond their ability to understand. No wonder SJWs are increasingly gravitating towards children’s entertainment, as kids better tolerate being preached at and are much more amenable to swallowing even the most stupid ideas.