Tag: Pink SF

The coming death of big publishing

It’s coming, and it’s coming much faster than anyone is really prepared for. Item One: Castalia author Nick Cole visits Barnes & Noble:

The other day I popped in to a big Barnes & Noble anchor store inside a high traffic entertainment complex called the Spectrum down in Irvine, California. The rest of the world may be experiencing some kind of recession as a result of Obama’s disastrous economic policies as is now being admitted by all sides, but Southern California barely shows the effects. Unless you know where to look.

So, I just wanted to cruise the science fiction section, and of course see if any of my books were in stock, and look around and see if there was anything interesting to pick up.

This is just an update on an unfolding disaster I’ve talked about before regarding the science fiction section at Barnes and Noble.

It’s a disaster. Seriously.

The science fiction section consisted of  three small shelves, badly, and fully, stocked with some standard big hitters for sure-fire sales.  But there wasn’t enough evidence in those three tiny half-aisles that spoke exciting and aggressive growth in the genre. It felt stale. It felt old. It felt Soviet. It felt defeated.  Maybe that was because it was stuck on the second floor, back near the bathroom.  You know where they keep all the best selllers and the sexiest books

Hint: No they don’t.

No, this particular placement for the once-vaunted science fiction section, a staple they kept so many bookstores alive with the trade of the faithful binge-buying junkie science fiction readers cleaning them out,  is now relegated to the smelly back of the store.  It seemed like some sort of discount holdover section no bookseller wanted to be sent into to organize. There was no love. It was forsaken.

Of course it is, because modern mainstream science fiction isn’t science fiction at all, but social justice fiction, as Barnes & Noble itself will confirm. Item Two: B&N blogger Joel Cunningham lists 20 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books with a Message of Social Justice:

From The Time Machine to Kirk and Uhura‘s unprecedented kiss, speculative fiction has often concerned itself with breaking barriers and exploring issues of race, inequality, and injustice. The fantastical elements of genre, from alien beings to magical ones, allow writers to confront controversial issues in metaphor, granting them a subversive power that often goes unheralded. On this, the day we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., let us consider 20 novels that incorporate themes of social justice into stories that still deliver the goods—compelling plots, characters you’ll fall in love with, ideas that will expand your mind. Let’s imagine a day when the utopian ideals of Star Trek are more than just the stuff of science fiction. 

They’ll have to imagine it, because it has zero relevance to the society of the future, which is much more likely to resemble the Reavers of Firefly than the neutered pantsuits of Star Trek. I was shocked the last time I visited my favorite Barnes & Noble, and that was more than 12 years ago. What had once been a large, healthy, well-stocked SF/F section – and one that carried both my books at the time – had somehow been shrunk into two bookshelves, one of which was entirely filled with graphic novels and television-show tie-in novels. Most of the rest of the “science fiction” novels had covers that looked like romance novels. I can’t even imagine what it looks like now.

Anyhow, in light of Nick’s prediction, it is interesting to observe that at least one mainstream publisher is attempting to think outside the box, as Macmillan has set up Pronoun, a pan-channel ebook distribution system that pays 70 percent on all digital sales, which compares well with Amazon’s Amazon-only 68.5 percent. It’s a pretty good deal, although it is probably five years too late in coming, as I strongly suspect another system, from a much more formidable player, is already in development.

And finally, since I mentioned graphic novels, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that one for Quantum Mortis is in the works.

A late SF giant and Pink SF

From a short, but substantive interview with the late Poul Anderson in 1975:

TANGENT: What do you think of the cycles and trends in science fiction, if they exist at all?

ANDERSON: Well, I think Algis Budrys put it very well once—a passing remark in a review or something: ‘Trends are for second-raters.’ There seems to be an occasional bandwagon, but what really happens is somebody has come along and broken new ground, done something original, and it’s worth exploring, you know, so naturally we all get interested—a lot of us try ourselves out in it too. But as far as making that an all-time direction or something, that is only what people incapable of originality would do. The originators, the ground breakers, they’ve gone on to something else.

I think, basically, that Jim Baen is right in his new direction. Not that there should be any declared moratorium on down-beat stories, but it does look as if that theme has been pretty well worked out, for the time being at least. What new disasters can you think of that haven’t already been done? (Laughs) You get these cycles, you know, about ten years or so ago, there was such a rash of stories, about psionics especially, and we all got sick of ‘psi’, and about ten years before that there’d been such a rash of anti-utopian things, especially bad imitations of The Space Merchants. I at least got the feeling that if I read one more of those I’d have to go and throw up.

In other words, this relentless push for multiculturalism, female authors, and diversity on the part of the SF publishers, too, shall pass.

In not entirely unrelated news, the third volume in Brian Niemeier’s Soul Cycle series, THE SECRET KINGS, has been released.

When the villains are white

I think Castalia House is going to have to create a team of diverse superheroes who pursue various white villains… and fail every time because they are diverse minorities who do the diverse things that minorities do.

This is the new Spiderman Homecoming team. You can just imagine how many ways things would go wrong with a pretty Halfrican girl who is an NBA groupie, a whip-smart Hispanic girl who always has to be right and argues about everything when she’s not busy getting beat up by her gangster boyfriend, the gay Indian H1B who doesn’t actually know how to use the computer technology in which he is supposedly an expert, and the fat Asian who keeps losing track of time in the middle of his Hearthstone matches and regularly collapses after 36-hour gaming binges.

And then, of course, there is the half-Jewish Spiderman, who agonizes over every decision, wondering whether it is good for Israel or not, is insecure about his sexual orientation, and is in love with both the Hispanic and the Halfrican to no avail.

Meanwhile, the white villains are running rings around them as they work towards enriching themselves, the Ascendance of their God-Emperor and the total destruction of the United Nations. I would read THAT comic book.

Illusion and observable reality

The chart above is a Google Trends comparison between three writers, John Scalzi, Jim C. Hines, and myself. What is interesting about it is the way that it completely demolishes both the SF-SJW narrative as well as the idea that one’s only path to success runs through the gatekeepers.

Remember, the SF-SJW Narrative is that John Scalzi was hugely popular due to Whatever being the most popular blog in science fiction. Tor Books signed him because of that massive success, and he subsequently became one of the leading authors of science fiction, which led to his massive $2.3 million book contract and his status as the unquestioned #1 author at Tor Books, itself the #1 science fiction publisher. He presently stands astride science fiction like a snarky giant, the one true heir to Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H. Beam Piper, and Isaac Asimov, all in one.

That’s the Narrative, anyway. But as you can see, even at the time of my initial encounter with him in March 2005, his trend score was less than twice mine, at 26-17 the month before. And as we now know, he was always lying about his site traffic, exaggerating it by as much as a factor of 5x, although we should have known that by virtue of his lower-than expected Google Trend score.

Scalzi’s signing by Tor Books subsequently boosted his career, as the general growth, and two peaks in particular, demonstrate. But not even winning the Hugo, two major book tours, or the announcement of the biggest publicly announced book contract in science fiction was enough to help him break out and reach the level of a genuine leading author like Brandon Sanderson, and his declining site traffic actually has him trending well below where he was back in 2004. Sanderson’s current advantage is 54-12 and the 5-year average is 41-15. As I have repeatedly observed, Scalzi is a midlist author masquerading as a leading author courtesy of an amenable authority named PNH.

He’ll surely get another spike when Tor starts pumping up his next book in earnest next spring, but that effect will fade away as quickly as the previous attempts have. And that is when you have the benefit of the biggest publisher in science fiction pushing you on the world! No wonder he admits to feeling like an imposter, it’s because he is an imposter. He has been from the start.

Now look at Jim C. Hines, a lesser Tor author who has desperately tried to follow in Scalzi’s footsteps through a combination of award-pimping and very loud virtue-signaling. Despite all McCreepy’s efforts, he has barely been able to move the needle despite 12 years of hard slogging. One has to rather marvel at his stubborn persistence in this regard, because most people would have figured out by now that their strategy was not working.

The funny thing is that Hines is one of the many SF-SJWs who have constantly tried to push the Narrative that I am irrelevant. But neither Google Analytics nor Google Trends lies. Whether pageviews, book sales, or interest over time is the metric, it is obvious that it is Hines who is the irrelevant party.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. In case you weren’t certain that the Hugo Awards were irrelevant, and that the gatekeepers are now toothless, here is a comparison of Hugo Award-winner and New York Times columnist N.K. Jemison, Hugo Award-winner Kameron Hurley, and an oft-No Awarded outsider nominally banned from the respectable ranks.

That little spike on the red line, which only got Jemisin to within 6 points of where I was back in March 2005 when I first encountered PNH, TNH, and John Scalzi, is Jemisin’s much-ballyhooed Best Novel win. The effect has already worn off, of course, and Jemisin will likely return to her former obscurity quickly enough, as few of those unfortunate readers who sample her depressing, degenerate, award-winning work are likely to remain within her literary orbit for long.

But there are three larger lessons here than the fact that I am not above reminding SF-SJWs of their continuing inferiority and irrelevance. The first lesson is that you can NEVER trust an SJW narrative. They ALWAYS lie, and moreover, they will readily lie about things you can independently verify. Never take anything they say at face value. The SJW Narrative is that Jemisin, Hurley, and Hines are Important and Relevant Award-Winning Science Fiction Authors whereas I am a minor, vanity-published figure banished to the periphery, when the reality is that all of them sell fewer books than I do, all of them get considerably less site traffic than I do, and all of them cumulatively generate less than half the global interest I do.

The second lesson is the importance of building your own media platform and selecting your long-term partners carefully. As long as you are propped up by someone else, be it Tor Books, the New York Times, FoxNews, Universal Press Syndicate, or WorldNetDaily, you are going to be at least somewhat dependent upon them. That’s all right, as all of us need partners and allies, and it simply doesn’t make sense for most authors to try to become media savants and publishers as well as writers. Few of us are Mike Cernovich, Vaughn Heppner, or BV Larson.

There is nothing wrong with being helped, or working with a publisher, or taking advantage of a boost offered by someone else, unless it comes at a price you are unwilling to pay. But never confuse being helicoptered to the top of the mountain with climbing it on your own. It doesn’t make you a better climber.

The third lesson is that the gatekeepers are more interested in ideological conformity than in awareness, platform, or popularity. If you want to get signed by a science fiction publisher, you’re better off virtue-signaling on social media than building up a sizeable readership, a big Twitter following, or a popular blog. Of course, you’ll sell fewer books that way, but at least you’ll be able to enjoy the feeling that you’re a big-time author… right up until that fatal moment that you look at the Amazon rankings.

Adios, Asimov’s

I dropped my subscription 15 years ago. And apparently, the magazine has only gotten worse over time. It’s not even a science fiction magazine anymore:

The quality and type of fiction is a magazine is largely dependent on the main editor. If you find a magazine whose editor has tastes that align with your own it’s a guarantee that you will enjoy at least some of the stories included.

Sadly, Sheila Williams and Asimov’s do not align with my tastes at all. Actually I would like to know who her tastes align with because based on the stories in the last few issues I’m beginning to think she doesn’t actually like Science Fiction or Fantasy.

I have a digital subscription. Correction, had because I’m way over waiting for an actual SFF story from this magazine. The latest issue was the last I will ever read. Not one of the stories was an actual SFF piece. The only SF was background window dressing or downright stupid. The crowning achievement of the magazine was an idiotic novella about a gay waiter who traveled to Colonial times pretending to be an angel and getting the locals addicted to meth so he can take back Paul Revere’s silver spoons. A premise so stupid and insulting I wanted to toss my Kindle.

On the other hand, maybe we’ve misjudged these SF SJWs. Maybe they’re all just variant on the Chuck Tingle theme. Let’s face it, time-travelling gay waiters selling meth in colonial America is a pretty funny concept.

And then there is that moment when you realize that a) they’re serious, and, b) they genuinely think it is good. At this rate, Chuck Tingle is going to win a Hugo without requiring any Puppy assistance.

Always happy to help

My, such excitement and drama revolving around Worldcon 75:

A growing controversy over Dave Weingart’s termination as Music department head, brought about by his explanation and complaint on LiveJournal, and the 2017 Helsinki Worldcon committee’s effort to explain and justify their actions on Facebook, has been defused by the Worldcon 75 issuing an apology and taking down its Facebook thread about the matter. Weingart says he has also received a verbal apology from one of the chairs….

Weingart had already made private his LiveJournal posts about the controversy in reaction to Vox Day linking to them from Vox Popoli:

Because Vox Day and his miserable crew of people have glommed onto my disagreement with Worldcon 75 I have made my DW/LJ posts mentioning any other party private. I’ve done likewise with my FB posts.

After Worldcon 75 took down its Facebook thread, Weingart responded:

The wording of Worldcon’s posted apology is something I agreed to verbally on the phone with one of the co-chairs on 2016-10-10, when I was also given a verbal apology. Worldcon’s deleting their other post on this subject (on the Worldcon 75 page) was done with my explicit permission as well. Whatever the disagreement, neither Worldcon 75 nor I want Vox Day to have anything to do with this.

I suppose I’ll just write up a little summary for Infogalactic then. Worldcon 75: Controversies. And since there isn’t any source information to which we can link it, given the way it’s all been hidden away, I guess that just leaves it up to me being able to remember everything correctly.

So, this all started when some sad filkish gamma started stalking a Swedish girl at a science fiction convention, right? I’m sure it will come back to me… perhaps the miserable crew can help jog my memory.

The broken freaks of fandom

They really are mentally ill, self-hating nutcases. I’ve said for years that the SJWs of science fiction are a vast collection of human wreckage. That’s why their parasitical books are so dreadful, devoid of all beauty, joy, truth, and love, and from a literary perspective, amount to little more than fingerpainting in fecal matter. They are morally blind, mentally weak societal cancers. One would pity them if only they did not attempt to recreate the world in their ugly, soul-shattered image.

They have many reasons to dislike me, but they main reason they hate and fear me is because, in my self-assurance, I remind them of the bullies who scarred them for life. And here is the conclusive proof that I was right: 100+ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Authors Blog About Suicide, Depression, PTSD—a #HoldOnToTheLight Update by Gail Z. Martin

  • My wife, doctor, and I developed a scale of rage from 1 to 10, 1 being “everything’s cool” to 10 being “I am out of control and breaking shit in the house, car, and my body.” It’s been…let’s see…maybe a few months since I had no-holds-barred Level 10 outburst. But I come close every week or two. I probably reach an 8 once every ten days. But that’s down from a 10 every other week or so. I hate me more than any ten, a hundred, or a thousand people on earth combined could ever hope to. (Even more than Kirkus and Goodreads reviewers, if such a thing be possible!) That’s my legacy. 
  • I’ve dealt with depression and lingering self-doubt for much of my life, because of that long-ago bullying. Which gives me great compassion for those who are different or who feel like outsiders. And though I won’t name names, because it is not my story to tell – I can assure them that many of the writers and artists I’m friendly with have experienced either bullying, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, or a combination of those things.
  • I grew up believing that I was not going to survive to adulthood. My parents were into doomsday politics and apocalyptic religion, so whether it was Soviet nukes or Armageddon, we were all going down in flames. Everyone around me—extended family and religious social group—echoed the same fears and beliefs. I was pleasantly surprised to still be alive at age 12, but I didn’t figure it would last. That’s the year I discovered Star Trek (original series) and read my first science fiction book (Destination: Universe by A.E. VanVogt). I still remember the moment when it hit me that other people saw the possibility of a completely different future than the fire and blood I’d been raised to expect. Cataclysmic destruction was not inevitable. I remember lying in the grass in my back yard, book open, tears running down my face when I realized I actually might live long enough to grow up.

Now, some of these people experienced genuine abuse. Most, however, experienced nothing worse than the usual societal disapproval for being weird little kids who couldn’t bother to abide by childhood social norms of behavior, conversation, and hygiene. But regardless, the ironic thing is that by wallowing incessantly in their “oh, poor me, I am so broken and depressed and suicidal” nonsense, they only cement their unhappy fate. Virtually none of them experienced the significant life challenges that Ivan Throne did. Very few of them were likely bullied as relentlessly as I was in my first three years of school, being younger, smarter, more athletic, and considerably smaller than everyone in my elementary school class.

I may, admittedly, have been a little arrogant in failing to conceal my intelligence, my athletic ability, or my interests.

(I couldn’t figure out why John Scalzi was such a broken little creature, given that he wasn’t particularly fat or ugly, and how he was handed educational opportunities of the sort one seldom sees outside of rich families sending their children to boarding schools, until I learned he’d spent a whole school year in a wheelchair hanging out with the school nurse during recess as the result of an accident. That’s where he learned to rely on snark and pretense as a means of psychological self-defense. An unsound body, when combined with a lack of honesty and courage, often produces a withered soul and an unsound mind.)

There is one, and only one, difference in the choice that these pathetic husks of human beings made, and the choice that men like Ivan and I made, when we were children under psychological pressure. We fought back. We never ran from reality. We never broke. We refused to accept our externally imposed fates, we also refused to pretend things were other than they were, and by doing so, we not only changed our fates, we changed who we were. They cringed, they cowered, they ran, and they have never stopped running.

About seven years after graduating from high school, I ran into the one boy who was smaller than I was in junior high in a weight room, a smart kid who also liked to write. We were doubles partners on the JV tennis team in ninth grade. He was still only 5’7″ but was 200 pounds of solid, barrel-chested muscle, and it turned out that he was the reigning state powerlifting champion. I’d added 40 pounds of muscle myself and was a ripped, skin-headed martial artist. We looked at each other and both burst out laughing. “You think we overcompensated a little?” were his first words to me.

The SF-SJWs genuinely can’t understand why their collective disapproval means absolutely nothing to me. They are confused and befuddled when a failure or a rejection fails to dissuade me from looking for another way forward. They can’t figure out why I get up and go back into the fray after I am knocked down. And that tells you everything you need to know, not about me, but about them. They cannot even imagine a scenario where you don’t curl up and die because someone doesn’t like you. They call me “the most despised man in science fiction”, but remember the Third Law of SJW: SJWs always project.

The reason the sad sacks of science fiction despise themselves is not because they have post-traumatic stress disorder or chemical imbalances in their brain or a crippling lack of god-belief. In most cases, those are consequences, not causes. They hate themselves because, knowingly or unknowingly, they harbor contempt for the child they once were. Their works are an endless and futile attempt to replay their childhoods to produce a different outcome.

And instead of humbling themselves, admitting that they are weak, fat, inferior, mentally ill cowards, and taking action to stop being those things, they band together and collectively proclaim that black is white, weak is strong, evil is good, and ugliness is beauty. The light onto which they’re holding is Luciferian, and nothing positive will come of their competition to be the most broken, the most abused, the saddest and least-deserving victim of them all.

“You’re not alone!” they cry. But you are. Everyone is. There comes a critical point in every man’s life when he faces the choice to accept reality and deal with it or deny it and enter a parallel world of self-centered delusion. You know what choice you made then, and you know why.

UPDATE: A reader comments: “My husband had a horrendous childhood. Beatings, starvation, severe neglect, homeless and living on the streets at age eight. He is a very high achiever, the strongest man I know, very happy, and successful. Why? He is a FIGHTER. A bad childhood is not a life sentence to misery.”

In fairness, I know who her husband is and to call him a “fighter” is akin to calling the Joker a guy with a few psychological issues. I like him, and he’s a good man, but on a “don’t mess with this guy” scale ranging from 1 to 10, his rank is “Vladimir Putin having a bad day”.

Childhood adversity will make you weaker or it will make you stronger. The choice is yours.

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.