Tag: Pink SF

Sexism at the Locus Awards

The SF SJWS are up in arms about sexism at the Locus Awards:

Renay, The Cabal ‎@renay
Surprise, welcome to Systemic Sexism, Locus Awards edition!!

Stephanie A. Allen ‏@stephandrea_
I guess I didn’t get the memo that female YA writers don’t write SFF

Martha Brockenbrough ‎@mbrockenbrough
Hey, if you read LOCUS, don’t worry: women do actually write fantasy and science fiction, even if they didn’t make any awards lists.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
To clarify my earlier tweet about LOCUS’s finalists. No books by women made the list in the YA category. This defies belief.

 No wonder they’re upset:

FANTASY NOVEL

    Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
    The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (Roc; Gollancz)
    Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road)
    The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
    Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Wait, what? Oh, sorry, apparently this is the problem.

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

    Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey; Harper Voyager UK)
    Half the World, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey)
    Harrison Squared, Daryl Gregory (Tor)
    Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine)
    The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)

For feminists, “sexism” means that somewhere, somehow, a man still has something that a woman thinks she should have.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
 You’re obviously forgetting that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman now. So much hate! You should be ashamed!

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
Is this a joke? Because I am not getting it.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I just think you’re being very insensitive and hateful to Ms Abercrombie. Not all women have vaginas, you know.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
First I have heard that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman. If she does, that changes things. 

And to think they say SJWs are no fun!

An impossible conundrum

It’s rather remarkable that in this long article about female fans doing to the new Star Wars what female fans always do – which is turn literally everything into sordid romance – that the author can’t possibly figure out why nearly all of them are intent on putting Rey together with Kylo rather than with the nominal hero of the piece:

In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”

Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia….

 “There’s a curve as to which ships are the most popular and which are the least. That Reylo is bigger than Finn and Rey is surprising to me.”

It’s true: Stories by fans about The Force Awakens’s two lead heroes falling in love are far outnumbered by ones about the movie’s heroine and its village-slaughtering villain doing so. One common explanation for this says that Rey and Kylo are simply the most fascinating people on screen. J.J. Abrams has talked about his philosophy of movies being “mystery boxes,” and certainly both of these characters, with Rey’s unexplained backstory and Kylo’s hazy motivations, fit that description.

There’s also a level of moral unsettledness that make them stand out. Kylo is visibly tempted to turn back to good; Rey has more pressing concerns than the fate of the galaxy. Ricca explained it to me in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rey’s focused on the bottom, on survival, while Kylo highmindedly obsesses over being the best Dark Sider he can be. “Having the two meet as equals is bizarre, and hints a lot of things,” Ricca said. “Some of those things are explored in Interstellar Transmissions, and a lot of them aren’t, because there’s so much potential.”

The problematic fact that they are attempting to avoid mentioning is that Finn is black. The reason so little fan fiction is written about Finn and Rey is because, despite being under constant barrage by Hollywood and the advertising industry pushing miscegenated propaganda, the vast majority of white women simply don’t find black men to be as attractive as white men. Like calls to like, as it has always done and as it always will do.

However, the article does indicate the primary problem with science fiction and fantasy today. Most of it simply isn’t genuine science fiction and fantasy, it’s merely professional fan fiction.

“The Donald Trump of Science Fiction”

Prophetic words from the Puppinette:

Last year, during the lead up to the Hugos, I wrote a post about how this was more important than just a rocketship…. At the time, the idea that Donald Trump would be a serious front-runner for the Republican party was the fodder for jokes. It would never happen. But… if anyone was paying attention to what was happening in SFF, it should have been clear that the Rabid Puppies represented the same xenophobic, white supremacist drive that is giving Trump power.

Let me tell you, I’m terrified of the elections this year.

We’ve been writing dystopian novels as warnings for years. The Hunger Games? Reality Television as politics… not so far fetched right now, is it?

So let me be clear. The fight that is going on in SFF for inclusion is not small. It is not petty. It is a reflection of a much bigger problem, and if we, as a community, don’t start paying attention and trying to change the larger culture then we know how this will end.

Mary Kowall is a low-energy liar and a blatant cheater who bought over 40 Hugo votes last year. But “the Donald Trump of Science Fiction”? Flattering! Great honor!

(I have to admit, I thought her tweet on the subject was exactly eight percent funnier since it was about one “Theordore”.)

In any event, she’s right to be terrified of the elections. And she should be terrified of rather more than that. Little does she know what is on the horizon. Little does she know what is coming.

Her rather chagrined tweet in response to the reaction to her comparison was even more amusing.

Mary Robinette Kowal @MaryRobinette
I suspected this would be the case. 

See, she totally meant to do that. They still don’t seem to grasp that anything they say about the Supreme Dark Lord can and will be used against them. And not only by me and the Vile Faceless Minions. Like the Republican establishment, the self-righteous SJWs of what presently passes for science fiction have absolutely no idea how deeply and broadly hated they are.

Look at the novels on the right sidebar of her site. Does that look like science fiction to you? Does it even look like fantasy? No, it’s fucking romance and that’s exactly how her Pink SF publisher is trying to sell it. To even call it Pink SF is a bit of a stretch.

And like the Republican establishment, the SJWs of Pink SF simply do not understand why so many people are absolutely delighted to be able to support the man those SJWs fear and hate, whether they agree with him on many things or not. I’m now seeing traffic levels the PSF-SJWs used to fantasize and lie about having, and a fair amount of that is directly due to them.

The evils of SF fandom

It’s time to shut down all science fiction-related conventions. They are obviously dens of pure racist, sexist, homophobic iniquity. Frankly, it is very, very hard to read this tale of SJW-on-SJW woe without shedding a tear or three. Of pure schadenfreudesque amusement:

On Friday night, at a room party in the main hotel, my partner Baize was sexually and racially harassed by someone attending the same dance party: Liz Gooch. At multiple points during the evening, she gestured behind him as if she were going to grab his butt. She kept referring to it as his “juicy booty.” She danced around him and told me to “not let this sweet piece of chocolate go.” Despite that our body language clearly showed discomfort, Liz would not stop harassing either of us. We had to move to another side of the room, and we eventually told the person running the party what she was doing. We both considered that perhaps she had been so forward and gross because she was drunk, but I had multiple interactions with Liz Gooch when she was sober following that night. The next morning, she was leaving an elevator as I was getting in a different one. She turned around and made a number of sexual gestures while pointing at Baize, which including kissing faces, winks, and licking her lips in an exaggerated manner.

On Sunday afternoon, I was the moderator on a panel titled, “Erasure is Not Equality.” This panel was specifically about the erasure of people of color in historical fiction, fantasy, and other genres. I was the only person on the panel who was not white. Furthermore, not one person on the panel seemed to understand the point of the panel, which was to talk about erasure. Instead, the conversation teetered between self-righteous back-patting and flat-out racism. Within the first five minutes of the start of the panel, I brought up a topic for us to discuss: how “historical accuracy” is often poorly used as a defense of the erasure of people of color. One panelist, Chris Gerrib, then began to talk about how people misunderstood history. The “Indian” people in Central America were already busy “killing each other” by the time the Spaniards arrived. When I asked for clarification, Gerrib confirmed that he believed that the Spaniards were “unfairly blamed” for the genocide of the indigenous cultures in Central America. I was so horrified by his continued talk of this ahistorical point that, after very little conversation, I asked that we change topic.

This set a tone for the remainder of the panel, which was easily the worst panel I have ever been a part of. All three of the white panelists confidently stated things that were simply not true; each of them kept saying “Indian” when they actually meant Native American or indigenous; every few minutes, more than half the audience was viscerally horrified by what the other panelists said. At one point, Jan Gephardt derailed the panel into talking about women instead of race and said that she was “happy to see any sort of women, like black or white or green.” Gerrib then chimed in with, “Or purple.” She also responded to a lengthy point that myself and an audience member made about the physical and emotional injury that can come from experiencing racism by reminding us that “racism is not real” because race “is just a social construct.” During a different conversation about how many authors mistakenly blur the line between different cultural groups, Chris Gerrib jokingly said, “Did you know that the Japanese aren’t the same as the Chinese?” Jan’s response? The Japanese and Chinese just think they’re different in their heads. She heavily implied that they were mistaken in this belief.

Holly Messinger, a ConQuesT staff member, was also on the panel. She spent a great deal of time talking only about her own work, repeating the message that she had read “five books on Indians” and that she had written her first black character, who kept the white character “sane.” She stated at one point that she was “terrified” about the response her book would get because people would get “mad” about her writing an “Indian” character. When I asked for clarification – specifically, was she worried about getting representation wrong? – she told the room that she had no concern about that. She’d read five books about “Indians.” She was concerned that people of color would misinterpret her.

There were many more incidents on this panel, and I could not recount them all here. The panel ended on a sour note, too. Baize spoke up and pointed out that part of the problem with erasure was that there was only one person of color on a panel about race. Holly Messinger shot back, “Well, we’re in the Midwest.” I left the panel feeling drained and numb. If you were at ConQuesT that weekend and you wondered why Closing Ceremonies started late, it’s my fault. I dashed up to my hotel room to cry because I felt so triggered, rejected, and alone. I’ve been on uncomfortable panels, but this was unique. The entire panel was argumentative; my questions as moderator were constantly avoided or ignored; anything I tried to state was fought or dismissed or contradicted. It was exhausting.

On the plus side, reading this was considerably more entertaining than the entire Best Novel shortlist for the Nebula Award:

  • Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
  • The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Saga)
  • Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
  • Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor)
  • Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)

The Nebula Award is so predictable now that Chaos Horizon nailed all seven of seven before they were announced. Here’s what I predicted would be in the awards mix back in December, prior to reading any of them, and based on nothing but who the author is.

  • Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
  • Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
  • Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

They ought to just change the name of the Nebulas to the Science Fiction Affirmative Action Awards for Women and Minorities Who Don’t Write Good.

A new tagline

“Public enemy number one of the entire science fiction community.” – RationalWiki

I like it, I do. They simply have no idea what they’re in for next.

Follow me… follow me to freedom!

Mailvox: a convention, converged

The lesson, as always, is this: don’t ever take McRapey’s advice:

Arisia is a mid-sized sf and fantasy convention in Boston which has been taken over by SJW’s despite some of us attempting to resist them. This year’s GOH was John Scalzi who triggered several changes to the code of conduct.

However, the con chair wasn’t satisfied was that. She insisted that every attendee sign a printed copy of the COC, even though it required 5 point type to fit on a single page. The con cobbled together new registration software and procedures to fulfill this requirement, but there were many problems with it. The registration line reached nearly 3 hours though its peak last year had been about 20 minutes.

Furthermore, faced with this fiasco, the con chair still was unwilling to back off the requirement to expedite registration.

Prediction: attendance at the conventions that have adopted Codes of Conduct that affect the experience in any way will gradually fall off. I know that in the Django project, the amount of emails and posts have already fallen off considerably, because everyone is, quite rightly, afraid that saying anything will make them a target of SJW attack.

This is why you don’t permit their entryists in the first place, and why you certainly don’t give into their demands. Convergence always eventually kills the converged organization unless it can latch onto a host that will financially sustain it.

SF-SJWs double down

Allum Bokhari of Breitbart addresses the latest attempts by SJWs in science fiction to silence all dissent:

There is no doubt that some sci-fi authors hold views that are alien to much of mainstream, liberal opinion. However, the SJWs who are trying to drive them out continue to fail to grasp that no political opinion is justification for exclusion from awards participation, bookstores, or the sci-fi community at large. The point of sci-fi is good sci-fi, and the point of awards is to recognise good sci-fi, not politically conformist opinions.

SJWs continue to demonstrate their inability – or unwillingness – to separate good art from questionable artists. In a manner eerily similar to the anti-historical campaigns to scrub images of unfashionable – yet historically significant – individuals like Woodrow Wilson and Cecil Rhodes from university campuses and public spaces. At the behest of SJWs,  the face of H.P Lovecraft, one of the genre’s pioneers, was recently removed from the iconic trophies of the World Fantasy Awards.

There’s something ISIS-like to it: the purging of historical icons and works of art because they represent something that falls outside a rigid, intolerant ideology.

Political intolerance in sci-fi appears to be growing, not diminishing. The Sad Puppies of 2016 will have their work cut out for them.

The mere fact that they are having to do openly what they managed to do behind closed doors for 30 years is a victory. And from Castalia House to Brave, we’re seeing one example after another of those who love freedom fighting back.

We’re going to win, in the end, because they are nothing but parasites and cargo cultists. They can’t create, they can’t build, all they can do is latch onto something someone else has created and converge it. Now, as the recent actions by the Linux Foundation have demonstrated, people are realizing that if they do not keep out the entryists, if they do not expel the SJWs, their organizations will not survive.

Tor editor “not expected to recover”

From Facebook:

Late this afternoon David [Hartwell] had a massive brain bleed from which he is not expected to recover.

Hartwell was John C. Wright’s editor at Tor Books; he was also friendlier to the Puppies than any of the SF-SJWs are likely to believe. I had the privilege of speaking with him when he called me last year after the Rabid Puppies overturned the SF applecart; he was the previously unnamed individual who explained the unusual structure of Tor Books to me, using the analogy of a medieval realm with separate and independent duchies. He wanted to avoid cultural war in science fiction even though he clearly understood that it appeared to be unavoidable; it was out of respect for him that I initially tried to make a distinction between Tor Books and the Making Light SJWs before Irene Gallo and Tom Doherty rendered that moot.

Despite his leftward leanings, David Hartwell struck me as being one of the last remaining sane individuals in the editorial offices there, and he was perhaps the only one capable of reigning in the lunatic impulses of Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Torstapo. By his own account, he even managed to talk the notorious award-whore into standing down and letting long-time bridesmaid Lou Anders of Pyr finally win PNH’s Best Tor Editor Award (also known as Best Editor (Long Form) Hugo) in 2011.

I expect he will be missed by many, and that things in the science fiction world are going to get even more, shall we say, interesting, in his absence.

UPDATE: David Hartwell has died. Requiescat in pace.

How dare we hit THEM back?

The SJWs at File 770 can’t quite decide if they should be a) outraged that we are addressing their blatant abuse of Goodreads or b) pretend that anything we do is simply insignificant.

Theodore Beale is explicitly targeting for abuse a woman who posts here regularly. I certainly hope all human beings with the slightest bit of decency and compassion will recognize this for the ugly, sinister, cynical brutality it is.

Unlike Lis Carey and other SJWs active on Goodreads, Rabid Puppies are abiding strictly by Goodreads policies. Reviews that refer to AUTHOR BEHAVIOR are specifically prohibited; Lis Carey is in blatant violation of Goodreads policy and we are drawing attention to her and every other reviewer who violate that policy.

**Delete content focused on author behavior. We have had a policy of removing reviews that were created primarily to talk about author behavior from the community book page. Once removed, these reviews would remain on the member’s profile. Starting today, we will now delete these entirely from the site. We will also delete shelves and lists of books on Goodreads that are focused on author behavior.

Lis Carey is not being targeted for abuse, Lis Carey is abusing Goodreads. She is not being singled out, she is merely the first of many abusive SJW trolls who will be addressed. We know perfectly well that the first reaction of SJWs is to go running to the amenable authorities, which is why we are always careful to abide by the rules.

Is VD conceding to his ilk that they are ineffective in their use of logic?

No, he is reminding them that there is no point in utilizing logic and dialectic in dealing with SJWs. SJWs are incapable of understanding it or utilizing it; if they could, they would not be SJWs.

I suspect that VD’s minions will find that their impact on GoodReads as a whole will be far less than they think it will. They are just about to find out how tiny and trivial their group truly is.

If that were true, then why are the File 770ers so obviously concerned about their activities? As just remarked above, SJWs are incapable of understanding or utilizing logic.

One thing to note is the cowardice of VD and his minions. They are specifically targeting someone because they think she is frail and easy to harass. In short, they are sleazy, small-time cowards who are too scared to actually challenge someone they think can put up a fight. It is exactly the sort of slimy pathetic thing that perfectly encapsulates who VD and his sycophants are.

So, John Scalzi, Tor Books, George R.R. Martin, and all of Fandom are totally unable to put up a fight? SJWs always lie. We will take on any and all of you. Just give us a reason.

What is different about me is that I take on all comers, regardless of how frail and unable to fight they may be. Attack me or mine and I will hit you back twice as hard, no matter who you are. Playing defenseless or crying out in pain as you strike won’t save you.

All you have to do to avoid being counterattacked is not attack. How hard is that? How dumb do you have to be to fail to understand that, after all this time? Leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. Attack us, we counterattack. It’s quite simple.

keep in mind that VD is such a towering, manly being that he kept expressing hysterical fear a couple of years ago, bleating with every appearance of high-strung sincerity that his physical safety was in danger from an imminent attack by Lee Martindale. (Lee is an older lady in a wheelchair.) He also bleated a number of times that year about his fear of me, claiming I had threatened him. (In reality, I had never even threatened to speak sternly to him.)

First women like Laura Resnick and Lee Martindale claim to be strong, independent womyn who are going to inflict Whedon-fu badassery on their foes, then they turn around and cry poor little womens who cain’t possibly do nothing to nobody the minute anyone responds to their threats and posturing. They’re not fooling anyone.

Part of me wants to say, “Please come over to Goodreads and comment back!” but I suspect that might just encourage him and his minions, so probably not wise.

It isn’t wise because doing so will only draw more attention to the way in which SJWs like Lis Carey and others are abusing Goodreads review policies. So, by all means, bring it on!

I note that File 770ers complain more about people legitimately nominating works, commenting on reviews, and rating books than they do about an active campaign by their side to blackball SF/F authors’ works from bookstores. Perhaps instead about whining about our legitimate activities, they should consider policing their own side before we adopt the same tactics in response.

UPDATE: Reading the comments at File 770 is like experiencing a Zen koan.

“There is a lack of evidence.”

The comments on File 770 are an unreliable source. Source: the commenters on File 770.

Social justice convergence at the bookstore

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have a new tactic at our disposal:

I’ve talked to a couple of book store owners in Toronto and someone is sending out Jim Hines roundup of the SP/RP affair. As a result, they are stopping making orders for Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Williamson and others of the worst broadcasters who have supported homophobic statements. I would assume the originator is part of Toronto’s gay community (which was oddly intertwined for years when Baka Books and the GLAAD bookstore were next door). It’s only the independents that I’ve heard so far, but if it hits Book City or Indigo, that could be a big repercussion. – Dexfarkin on January 2, 2016 at 7:59 pm

Remember this when they start crying about how morally reprehensible it is that we are daring to nominate books for awards and rate books on Goodreads.

Capital-F Fandom, on the other hand, is actively trying to destroy the careers of some of the most popular authors in science fiction and fantasy. Apparently it’s not enough that they publicly rejected anyone and everyone connected with Baen Books at Worldcon last year, they want to make sure that Baen books are not sold in any bookstores either.

If you live in Toronto, please find out which independent bookstores have done this and let me know.