Tag: Pink SF

The self-lobotomizing of SF/F

Jeffro Johnson brings his epic series on Chapter N to a close with a sobering conclusion on the mental barriers being erected to separate entire generations of science fiction and fantasy readers from the genre’s history:

This estrangement between the generations… it isn’t normal. And it’s not just that people in the seventies would have read many of the same science fiction and fantasy authors that their parents and even grandparents did. The scope of things that fall within the black hole of the generation gap seems to be expanding almost exponentially now. Even things like Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry– I would have watched the same stuff that my big brother watched when I was a kid… and we were familiar with the same classic cartoons that out parents and grandparents would have watched. But that’s changed now. And it goes beyond these things just sort of quitely dropping off the radar for the moment. Millennials that will admit to never seeing them still “know” somehow that these things were racist or something and deserve to be erased. It might seem silly, maybe, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When it was announced that the World Fantasy Award was replacing its iconic Lovecraft bust, Joyce Carol Oates declared that the literary canon is “saturated with racism, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-democracy… and lunacy.” Graciously she allows that “tossing it all out is no solution.” But why wouldn’t you toss it out…? If it really was as bad as people say, you probably would do just that. I mean really, why would people read the works of such terrible people…? They don’t. And if by some chance they do, the reaction can be almost physical sometimes, as this woman describes it:

    I read a lot of Bradbury as a teen and thought his stories were wonderful. Rereading his stories now is actively painful to me. I’m a lot more able to pick up on those subtle cues, and less able to make excuses for them, that the author doesn’t really see his female characters as important, or real, or three dimensional, or people.

Are we really so advanced a civilization now that The Martian Chronicles necessarily should make us ill?

Older people steeped in the classics will dismiss that as an outlier, but it really is a sign of the times. This attitude certainly shows up in a great many of the reviews of old works of fantasy and science fiction that pepper the internet. It’s almost as if there is a barrier in these peoples’ minds. As soon as they get to something they been trained to think of as being “problematic”, they shut down. Very little in the way of any kind of analysis of the material can even be done, because calling out and reviling everything from Madonna/Whore complexes to “black and white morality” is the sort of thing that passes for deep or sophisticated thinking.

The retiring of Lovecraft’s bust from the World Fantasy Awards is therefore not so much reminiscent of statues of Stalin being pulled down in post-Soviet Russia. It’s more a reflection of the Berlin wall… going up.

Social justice convergence destroys everything it touches and erases history because it can neither tolerate nor survive truth.

They really hate the classics

When the pinkshirts in science fiction talk about wanting to destroy Campbellian SF, they’re not being ironic or kidding. They seriously believe that Pink SF is better and genuinely want to eradicate old school Blue SF/F because it is too outdated, offensive, and problematic.

I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels – and they were shockingly offensive. Why are so many of NPR’s list of best science fiction books so misogynistic, and why can’t we move past our nostalgia for them?

When
it comes to the best of anything, what do you expect? If it’s science
fiction and fantasy novels you want epic adventures and getting out of
impossible situations. But what you often get is barely disguised sexism
and inability to imagine any world where women are involved in the
derring-do.
At
the end of 2013, after a year of reading very little, I decided to
embark on a challenge: read all the books I hadn’t yet read on
NPR’s list of 100 best sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Nostalgia permeates the list. Of the books I read, there were more
books published before 1960 than after 2000. The vast majority were
published in the 1970s and 1980s. There were also many sci-fi
masterworks or what were groundbreaking novels. However, groundbreaking
30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and
shockingly offensive….

Recent controversy

I’ve been acutely aware of the ferocious debate in the science fiction and fantasy community about representation (the recent controversy over the Hugo awards is a case in point), so I should have been somewhat prepared for this relentlessly depressing string of disappointing novels. But with the dogged determination of reading through the list, it really grinds you down. How can people actually defend the status quo when it’s so obviously awful? Putting these books on a pedestal, given how problematic the portrayal of women and other minorities, is surely part of the problem?

Frankly, from my vantage in 2015, it was just plain weird to read books where there were hardly any women, no people of colour, no LGBT people. It seemed wholly unbelievable. I know what you could say: it’s science fiction and fantasy, believability isn’t one of the main criteria for such books. But it is relatively absurd that in the future people could discover faster-than-light travel, build massive empires and create artificial intelligences but somehow not crack gender equality or the space-faring glass ceiling.

The consequence of the lack of women and the obvious sexism is that the books became very much like one another. My book reviews contained more profanity and I became a much more harsh critic of the genres I most enjoyed reading. They were all the same story of white guys, going on an adventure….

I can understand how many of the books on the list may have once been
groundbreaking but that doesn’t mean that they are now the best examples
of the genre. They have been supplanted, hundreds of times over, by
other authors that took similar themes but made them better and more
inclusive.

They genuinely believe throwing in a few men-with-tits and white men with colored skin – which is as far as their attempts at diversity generally go – somehow magically improves a book. Of course, the general public disagrees, as the continued decline in SF sales demonstrates.

Progress at the speed of light

Tangent Online addresses the problematic issue of gender issues in author identification with an ingenious solution:

While we applaud Lightspeed’s recent groundbreaking, progressive Women Destroy SF and Queers Destroy SF special issues, we feel they didn’t go far enough. To effect change one must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. Women and Queers are not the only groups destroying science fiction, for those who champion such a worthwhile social cause as androgyny are at fault too. These forward-thinking social futurists should be given their just due as androgyny is perhaps the most important social issue facing science fiction practitioners today, and which, for the most part, the SF community has chosen to ignore with its retrograde thinking in regards to the problem of gender inequality and gender bias in its fiction.

With greater frequency (which we welcome, but is still a small percentage of the fiction published in the magazines and in book form today), science fiction stories with nameless protagonists or ancillary characters are at the forefront of the androgynous revolution. But only in the field’s fiction do we see how it might work, as fictive experiments, so much enlightened theory on paper—food for thought and nothing more. If the lofty goal of the Androgyny Revolution is to reveal unconscious bias and prejudice in fiction by rendering invisible the gender of its characters then the same ideology should just as readily reveal bias and prejudice in other areas of the real world, but not if gender assignation is permitted to continue.

Therefore, Tangent Online will show how the philosophy, the core defining predicates of androgyny can be applied to non-fiction as well as fiction and how in other ways it should be applied to areas of our real world lives. Thus, the table of contents for the August issue of Lightspeed below will contain only story titles—no author names; for revealing an author’s name would give immediate rise to the same conscious or unconscious bias we find in so much of our fiction. As well, the name of the reviewer is not mentioned for the same reason. Following the lead of the special Women and Queers Destroy SF issues of Lightspeed, you will find an essay following the review. Its author is also nameless, as it should be. It is the content of the words which truly matter and not who penned them. Content over author or editor is the only way to go in the Androgyny Revolution.

Lightspeed and its companion magazine Nightmare have seen the light and no longer showcase author names on their covers. Only the magazine title and subtitle, issue number and issue date are shown for each. The exception being that the editor’s name is prominently displayed on every cover. We can forgive this seeming contradiction to the basic canons of the androgynous movement because it is a given that the editor’s name on the cover of any magazine is perforce a more lucrative marketing strategy than displaying author names—those who provide the content for which the potential buyer is shelling out their beer money. It works, and so we give it a pass because we all already know the editor is really one of “us” (yes, this previous knowledge leads to bias but since the editor thinks like we do it’s no big deal; insider exceptions are one of our most sacred, binding rules).

There is no end to progess in the SJW quest to bring about a more perfect world. So brave. Thank you for this.

Correction

Edd Jobs does not know whereof he speaks. He’s also banned and spammed, for SJW-level ignorance and dishonesty.

Danby: It’s sludge. Sewerage with cotton candy floating on top. It’s badly written, extremely poorly thought out, and boring.

The N.K. Jemisin school of literary review.

No.

….

This is the N.K. Jemisin school of literary review.

…

Stranger in a Strange Land is racist as *fuck*.

…

So is science fiction fandom.

…

So are you.

Sexism in SF publishing

It’s there, it’s just not in the direction you think it is. The former senior editor at Tor UK broke down their genre submissions by author sex in 2013:

I’m just one of a fair few female editors in this particular area. My colleagues (and competitors) are a set of brilliant, intelligent and hard-working women, who have loved genre since they were kids, have fought their way through the ranks, have extensive lists, love their jobs and don’t compromise on the quality of fiction they publish. To name but a few there’s Bella Pagan who works with me at Tor UK, Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz, Anne Clarke at Orbit, Jo Fletcher at Jo Fletcher Books, Jane Johnson and Emma Coode at Voyager, Cath Trechman at Titan and Anne Perry over at Hodder.

That means that every genre publisher in the UK has female commissioning editors and 90% of the genre imprints here are actually run by women. So you can imagine there’s a slight sense of frustration each time I see yet another article claiming that UK publishers are biased towards male writers. And I do wonder if those writing the pieces are aware who is actually commissioning these authors?

The sad fact is, we can’t publish what we’re not submitted. Tor UK has an open submission policy – as a matter of curiosity we went through it recently to see what the ratio of male to female writers was and what areas they were writing in. The percentages supplied are from the five hundred submissions that we’ve been submitted since the end of January. It makes for some interesting reading. The facts are, out of 503 submissions – only 32% have been from female writers.

Tor submissions inbox
   
Historical/epic/high-fantasy: F 33%, M 67%
  
Urban fantasy/paranormal romance: F 57%, M 43%

Horror: F 17%, M 83%

Science-fiction: F 22%, M 78%
   
Young Adult: F 68%, M 32%
   
Total: F 32%, M 68%
          
You can see that when it comes to science fiction only 22% of the submissions we received were from female writers. That’s a relatively small number when you look at how many women are writing in the other areas, especially YA. I’ve often wondered if there are fewer women writing in areas such as science fiction because they have turned their attentions to other sub-genres but even still, the number of men submitting to us in total  outweighs the women by more than 2:1.

Now what happens when you compare these percentages to how many new authors we take on in a year? Tor UK is still quite a compact list – we normally only take on three or four debut authors each year, if that. Of the four authors Bella and I have taken on this year – two of them are women.

In other words, in a field that is 90 percent run by women, two female editors accepted 26.4 percent less male submissions than would have been dictated by statistical neutrality. If there is sexism in SF publishing, there is a clear anti-male bias.

Now, given the very small size of the sample set – they accepted four out of 503 submissions – that’s not really a fair characterization. But then, when do feminists ever trouble themselves about such things when the shoe is on the other foot?

And the sex imbalance at the gatekeeping editorial positions does tend to explain why Pink SF has become so dominant in recent years. Does that mean we should whine about how unfair it is and lobby Congress and Parliament to regulate the sexual distribution in SF editorial positions?

That’s one way to do it. The other way, of course, is to simply set up a new shop that caters to the Campbellian Blue SF and Inklingesque True Myth Fantasy they have consciously rejected and eat their lunch.

C’est la même chose

I find it rather amusing that there are SJWs in science fiction who insist that I should not be on the shortlist for the Hugo Awards because there is NO PLACE in science fiction for any editor who believes female science fiction writers are different in any way, shape, or form than male science fiction writers.

“As a rule, women do not make good
scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies
on scientific matters are usually limited.”
– Hugo Gernsback

“Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack
the physics, so they either write romance novels in space about strong,
beautiful, independent and intelligent but lonely women who finally fall
in love with rugged men who love them just as they are, or stick to
fantasy where they can make things up without getting hammered by
critics holding triple Ph.D.s in molecular engineering, astrophysics and
Chaucer.”
– Vox Day

In case the irony escapes you, the Hugo Awards are named for Mr. Gernsback, a science fiction editor who knew very well whereof he wrote. I very much doubt that the various excesses and absurdities of the Pink SF age would be any surprise to him.

Meanwhile, an actual female physicist adds:
“Instead of getting educated in science and writing harder sci-fi, women major in squishy subjects, write romance-in-space, and complain about how misogynistic it is to point out that women major in squishy subjects and write romance-in-space.”

It is apparent the Rabid Puppies have a battle cry: Hugo lo vult!

The historical Pink SF/Blue SF divide

At Castalia House, Morgan demonstrates that the divide has been around a lot longer than most of us realized, it’s just that the relative positions have been reversed thanks to the post-1980s gatekeepers:

A backlash against Conan began in the October 1933 issue. Sylvia Bennett of Detroit wrote in to say,

    “Will Robert E. Howard ever cease writing his infernal stories of ‘red battles’ and ‘fierce warfare’? I am becoming weary of his continuous butchery and slaughter. After I finish reading one of his gory stories I feel as if I am soaked with blood.”

Weird Tales contributor Jack Williamson, who would survive as one of the most long-lived writers from the pulp era, wrote to “The Eyrie” for the December 1933 issue defending “Black Colossus”:

    “I was rather surprised at the brickbat aimed by Miss Sylvia Bennett at Howard’s Black Colossus, which struck me as a splendid thing, darkly vivid, with a living primitive power.”

Sylvia Bennett would return to “The Eyrie” in the June 1934 issue:

    “Northwest Smith has become my idol in WEIRD TALES. Believe it or not, I’ve fallen passionately in love with him. There is a character for you! Warm, human, lovable and incredibly realistic. No barbarian baboon hot-head, this one, who slices off human and unhuman heads on the slightest pretext; nor snarls and growls at his girl-friends; nor socks his dames with such manly toughness as would make Clark Gable and Jimmy Cagney look like sissies in comparison. It is certain C. L. Moore is destined to become a popular Weird Tales author. Although Black Thirst did not reach the high standard of Shambleau, still it was an excellent job, weirdly and thrillingly beautiful.”

In other words, women have been trying to turn SF/F into romance novels long before Catherine Asaro or Stephanie Meyers were even born. The difference, of course, is that people didn’t pretend that what is essentially an SF/F-Romance hybrid was the True and Proper SF/F, much less give it awards claiming it to be best of breed.

However, notice the proto-SJW declaration of the inevitability of C.L. Moore’s success. Some things simply do not change.

Mailvox: the sorry state of SF

I thought this email from RC was interesting, as it demonstrates how Gresham’s Law applies to science fiction, with Pink SF tending to drive out Blue. Hey, even if Tor Books can’t be bothered to read your emails, at least I do:

I am writing to you today regarding the lack of professionalism of certain staff at Tor books.  I know others have contacted you regarding the contempt in which some staffers hold certain authors and a large part of your customer base.  What I wish to address is the editors’ contempt for the genre itself, and their incompetence at one of the essential tasks of producing SCIENCE fiction: getting the science right.  I am certain these are related.  The upshot is that Tor is printing a lot of stuff which ticks all the fashionable social and political check-boxes, but stinks on ice as SF.

An egregious example which I encountered recently is in the first of the Ender’s Game prequels, Earth Unaware.  There are a host of glaring faults in the orbital mechanics among other things, but they are too involved to detail in a short letter.  I will instead quote a concise example from page 261:

“The ship scoops up hydrogen atoms, which at near-lightspeed would be gamma radiation, then the rockets shoot this gamma plasma out the back for thrust.”

There is no such thing as a “gamma plasma”.  Gamma rays are photons, not atoms or parts of atoms.  Plasmas are a mixture of ionized matter and free electrons.  A high-energy proton is not a gamma ray; many cosmic rays are high-energy protons, but that does not make this phrase remotely acceptable in a science fiction book.  A well-read middle school science geek could have caught this error; I should know, I was one.

Shortly after this comes another one (p. 269):

“If it’s sucking up hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed and taking in all this radiation….”

This is part of a plotline that plays for weeks, between a mining ship plying the Kuiper belt and Earth.  The Kuiper belt extends from about 30 astronomical units to 55 AU from the Sun (earth orbits at 1 AU).  Light travels 1 AU in roughly 500 seconds, so an object travelling at “near-lightspeed” would cover 55 AU in not much more than 27,500 seconds; on the order of 8 hours.  Even if the initial speed of the object is reduced to 25% of c and it decelerates linearly, the transit time is less than 3 days.  The whole plotline is nonsense because the author (Johnston, I’m sure; Card does better work) couldn’t be bothered to read a basic science book.  This is lousy even for fan-fiction.  Why did this ever make it to print?  More to the point, why do the editors have such contempt for the genre and its fans as to allow it, to the point of commissioning a lightweight like Johnston to play in Card’s universe in the first place?

I could not but help but notice that Earth Unaware got all the “we are the world”, social justice, anti-corporate messages lined up front and center.  The priorities are literally that obvious.  That’s why I’ve not bothered to read the other two prequels.  I don’t waste my time on dreck. I spotted this trend quite some time ago, but it was only after the highly-publicized outbursts of certain senior Tor staff that I realized that it wasn’t due to the times, but was a matter of policy.

Well, we all make mistakes from time to time, authors and editors alike (cough, tunnel), but it is pretty egregious to combine SJW message fiction with a major plot foul-up of the sort one RC describes. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t testify to the accuracy of his critique, but it does sound like a rather impressive howler.

As for the total number of emails sent, based on the CC’s Peter and I received, around 2,300 emails were sent by 765 different people that we know of. And there were others being sent as well, although we can’t possibly know how many. Regardless, I expect that enough were sent to make it clear to Macmillan that the excuses given by the senior Tor employees for the emails that they previously received was a false one.

Those senior employees have publicly attacked Tor-published authors, Tor published-works, and Tor customers. They have needlessly antagonized tens of thousands of book-buyers in pursuit of their ideological agenda. They’ve now been caught lying to their superiors about the extent of the consequences of their unprofessional behavior and violations of the Macmillan code of conduct. And that is why, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Macmillan cleans house even more thoroughly than people have been demanding. I certainly would if I were in their shoes.

Then again, for all we know the Macmillan executives are fanatic SJWs whose instinct will be to dig in and defend the actions of Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. If that’s the case, Peter Grant has made it clear that the boycott, which for no particular reason at all may be christened TORDROP, will begin at noon on Friday, June 19th. And since no one has received any sort of response at all from Macmillan or Tom Doherty as yet, this is a good time to take a picture of your books published by Tor Books and tally up the total of the books and ebooks you have purchased from them. The truth is that we’re not asking for much, only that the senior employees at Tor Books be held to the same professional standard expected of a retail sales clerk or a fry cook at McDonalds.

SF war to the knife

One would expect Peter Grant to recognize one:

I’ve had a couple of threatening e-mails from supporters of Ms. Gallo’s position, warning me that if I (and/or other indie authors) call for a boycott of Tor books, they’ll call for a boycott of my/our books in return.  This made me laugh out loud.  As those of you who’ve read my books will know, I don’t think I can be described as ‘progressive’ or ‘SJW’.  Heck, read the header of this blog – it’ll tell you in a nutshell my position on most things!  I have grave doubts whether readers of the progressive persuasion have ever bought my books – so why would a boycott from that part of the reading spectrum hold any fears for me?

No.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that the problem lies in the corporate culture that’s taken over at Tor Books and Tor.com.  Four individuals currently or previously associated with Tor’s management and publishing activities at a senior level have now made statements that I can only regard as biased beyond logical comprehension.  They are Patrick Nielsen Hayden (manager of science fiction books at Tor);  his wife Teresa Nielsen Hayden (listed by Wikipedia as a ‘consulting editor’ for Tor Books, and formerly a senior editor there – also the publisher of the well-known web log and forum ‘Making Light’);  Moshe Feder (also a consulting editor for Tor Books);  and Irene Gallo (Associate Publisher of Tor.com and Creative Director of Tor Books).  Certain Tor-published authors, primarily John Scalzi but also including others, have spouted the ‘party line’ in their support and/or on their own account as well.

There’s an old military saying when bad things happen:  “Once may be an accident.  Twice may be coincidence.  Three or more times is enemy action.”  In the same way, I could understand one senior Tor representative holding such views.  I might even accept two.  Four is too many.  This is not coincidence.  It’s concerted, organized, deliberate enemy action.  Tor as a publisher appears to either espouse, or tolerate (and actively encourage), views like this.  The utterances of these individuals appear to indicate that the company supports lies, slander, libel and viciousness as debating and/or promotional tactics.  I hope that the reality belies that appearance;  but that’s for Tor to say, not me – and back up their words with actions.  Weasel words will no longer be acceptable in any way, shape or form.

THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE.

It won’t be. Let them threaten. What are they going to do, continue to not buy books from Castalia House, from Baen, and from independents? Are they going to keep not reading what they repeatedly proclaim to be terribly written bad-to-reprehensible works without ever having read them? What are they going to do, have the Board vote me out of SFWA again? Are they going to continue not giving Nebulas to John Wright, and Sarah Hoyt, and Larry Correia, and Brad Torgersen? The reality is that we have the decisive advantage here because we have long supported them.

But we don’t have to.

I have can count dozens of Tor and Forge books on my bookshelves surrounding me, and that doesn’t count the bookshelves in the halls, in the bedrooms, and in the attic. But I don’t have to buy any more. Why should I, when the Senior Editor of Science Fiction at Tor has done nothing for me except insult and attack me for ten years now? A lot of people are getting sick of their constant bullshit, even people who have absolutely nothing to do with me in any way, shape, or form.

“I’m an author, involved with the publishing industry. Does that mean that I have the moral authority to point out to you that she is making actual, factually untrue statements here? She might be a really wonderful individual, in person, but her facts are dead wrong, bordering on libelous, and taking a position on a hotbutton issue really undercuts Tor’s credibility as a politically neutral, or even tolerant, business.”
– Jim Butcher, author, The Dresden Files

Apparently the bestselling and Hugo-nominated Mr. Butcher didn’t much appreciate being described as an author of “bad-to-reprehensible” books.

Back in April, Larry Correia and I, among others, encouraged everyone to leave Tor Books out of it. We made it clear that our problems were with certain individuals at Tor, not the organization itself. But as Peter Grant points out, Irene Gallo’s comments, to say nothing of Moshe Feder’s and John Scalzi’s (now that the organization has bet its future on him, Scalzi is relevant in this regard), appear to indicate that we were wrong and our problem is with the organization as it is presently comprised after all.

What do you think? I’m interested in hearing everyone’s arguments, pro and con.

UPDATE: I would certainly hope that they didn’t.


2h2 hours ago

Happy Monday! We appreciate your comments & would like to remind you that the views of our employees do not reflect those of the publisher.

Publishing: the negative-sum game

It is both amusing and a little tragic to see the brave face that the File 770 wannabes put on when contemplating the state of the traditional publishing world. They keep insisting that it is not a zero-sum game, which is true in a sense, because it is actually a negative-sum game.

The most difficult problems are negative-sum situations, where the pie is shrinking. In the end, the gains and losses will all add up to less than zero. This means that the only way for a party to maintain its position is to take something from another party, and even if everyone takes his or her share of the “losses,” everyone still loses in comparison to what they currently have or really need. This type of situation often sparks serious competition.

However, negative-sum disputes are not always lose-lose because if the parties know the pie is shrinking, it is possible their expectations will be low. A perfect example of a negative-sum dispute is the allocation of budget cuts within an organization. In this case, each department expects to have some funds taken away, but whether the outcome is a win or loss depends on how much money a particular branch gets in comparison to what they expected to have cut from their budget. So, if a branch was expecting to get a 30 percent cut and they only got cut 20 percent, which would be a win, even in a diminishing resource situation.

The present negative-sum situation was probably inevitable, not only due to the primary factor of men’s increasing preference for electronic forms of entertainment, but there is also the secondary factor of changing ethnic demographics. In the USA, for example, Hispanics don’t read as much as Anglos and they don’t buy as many books.

Among all American adults, the average (mean) number of books read or
listened to in the past year is 12 and the median (midpoint) number is 5. The White average is 13 and the median is 5, the Black average is 12 and the median is 4, the Hispanic average is 7 and the median is 3.

Throw in the number of non-English speakers into the mix and it should not be a surprise that prospects for the traditional publishing world were not good despite a growing population even before the SJW invasion of genre publishing is taken into account. But that doesn’t mean that the advocates of Pink SF haven’t made the situation worse, as the corporate masters are apparently beginning to understand. “Tor’s editorial director Julie Crisp has left Pan Macmillan following a
review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing.”

Does that mean that Castalia has stupidly entered a declining market in the hopes of carving off a slice of a shrinking pie? Not at all. Because we have no intention whatsoever of becoming a traditional publisher, our cost structure will keep us competitive despite the higher royalties and lower prices we offer, and we know there is still a significant market for the Campbellian science fiction created by beardy, middle-aged white men in which the traditional SF publishers are aggressively disinterested.

Moreover, as the Brainstorm crowd knows, we are developing the technology to massively expand that market by reaching the young men who have, quite reasonably, abandoned the traditional SF market. I started reading Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Seveneves, and it is truly depressing. Less because nearly everyone on Earth dies than because he appears to have gone full SJW with a Gamma sauce. It’s the first time I’ve found it necessary to force myself to keep reading one of his books, and the first time one of his books has struck me as being proper Pink SF. Female presidents, token ethnic melanges, you name it, he’s got it to such an extent that were it not for Stephenson’s past gamma markers, I would almost suspect an epic, master-class trolling of the current genre.

On a tangential note, as Aristotle has informed us, some people are simply incapable of learning.

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
So I’ve had a lot of submissions in recently. And do you know how excited I am to see how many of those are SF novels written by women?!!

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
The answer is VERY!! 🙂

Her doubling-down on her enthusiasm for female SF authors is intriguing in light of this news report from 2011:

But with the hiring of Bella Pagan away from Orbit, Tor UK does hope to grow — and diversify — its line. Crisp explains:

With Bella joining us, we’re looking to grow our list in size, direction and selection. While, as of yet – everything is still under wraps concerning the new innovations we’ll be putting in place (watch this space!) I can tell you that Bella has a particular interest in urban fantasy and paranormal romances – an area that Tor UK hasn’t explored to its potential previously. So that’s one area we’ll be looking to expand into.

It doesn’t look like that strategy worked out all that well, does it. I’ve even seen some rumors floating around that Pan Macmillan is in the process of shutting down Tor UK altogether. Meanwhile, Tor.com is abandoning the novel in favor of the novella:

When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation.

Enter the novella, an old form with a new lease on life. We expect that the reader who has to fit their reading into their daily commute will appreciate a novella they can finish in a week, rather than a year. We’ll be releasing books that can be begun and completed on just one of those rare evenings of uninterrupted reading pleasure.

Apparently they believe Pink SF is more digestible in smaller doses.