Tag: PinkSF

No matter how hard you bend over backward to appease SJWs, they will NEVER be content. It’s not enough to have 90-pound butt-kicking science fiction princesses in the place of the traditional male hero, now they’ve got to be post-menopausal, overweight, butt-kicking science fiction crones who nevertheless remain inexplicably attractive to the handsome, wealthy heroes who desire them as much as they respect them:

As women get old, they gain a superpower: invisibility. And not only in real life. ‘Young adult’ fantasy and science-fiction hits such as Suzanne Collins’s novel series The Hunger Games and Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight series have been taken to task for doing away with mature women. In fantasy generally, older women mainly occupy supporting roles, such as fairy godmothers, wise crones and evil witches. The best are subversions — George R. R. Martin’s Queen of Thorns in A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, or Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg in the Discworld series. All of them embrace old age with gusto.

I expected better from science-fiction novels, where alternative worlds and alien nations explore what it means to be human. In 1976, after all, Ursula K. Le Guin argued in her essay ‘The Space Crone’ that post-menopausal women are best suited to representing the human race to alien species, because they are the most likely to have experienced all the changes of the human condition. And Robert A. Heinlein offers a fantastic galactic grandmother in The Rolling Stones (1952): Hazel Stone, engineer, lunar colonist and expert blackjack player irritated by the everyday misogyny of the Solar System.

Over the past year, with support from such authors and readers all over the world, I’ve searched for competent, witty female elders in major roles in sci-fi novels. I found no shortage of fantastic female characters across the genre, from the gynocentric utopians of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland to mathematician Elma York in Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2018 The Calculating Stars. But I have so far confirmed just 36 English-language novels in the genre that feature old women as major figures. The earliest is Gertrude Atherton’s 1923 Black Oxen; the latest, from 2018, are Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller and Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

It never stops. It never, ever, stops. This is why it is a mistake to even give them so much as a nanometer.

The Greatest “Science Fiction” Writer Ever explains why her work is such a joy to read:

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

And yes, reading her work is EXACTLY as painful as this little vignette suggests.

Only more ellipses. A LOT more. The only thing Jemisin enjoys more than oppression is ellipses.

This week I launched Flying Sparks, my beautiful superhero comic of a hero and villain in love, and the mantra of Jon Del Arroz “isn’t really a bestseller” continued. The publisher’s wife and employee of the company Teresa Neilsen Hayden launched an attack on me because I spoke positively of fellow author Vox Day, who has recently taken a generous amount of time actually criticizing some of my work in a constructive way and guiding me to help me become a better author, something no one from Tor has ever come close to doing in their childish namecalling and gaslighting attacks.

But the Nielsen Haydens still have just enough influence within the creepy little SF fandom community to put on a show for the Twitter Trust & Safety Council at the expense of the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction. Based on my experience, this is the prelude to Jon Del Arroz’s eventual banning from Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but I’m truly going to enjoy Arkhaven and Castalia House crushing these evil grotesqueries. They have already failed, they simply aren’t fully aware of it yet. Once the full extent of what we’re now in the process of doing becomes clear to them, they’re going to need to seriously up their medications. And speaking of Jon Del Arroz, I can confirm that Dark Legion Comics will be publishing the retail editions of his successfully-funded Flying Sparks comic.

At least two conventions have decided not to let SJWs talk them into self-evisceration:

Dragon*Con decided that alienating half the country was not worth the loud-mouthed SJWs who only accept people who are just like them, as Ms. Stromborn wanted the convention to be.

Her refusing to back down unless certain authors were uninvited and Dragon*Con taking a stand against the attempted political mobbing marks the first time a convention has openly gone against the SJW hate mob. This is a big shift in culture as people are fast learning that the SJWs don’t actually create “inclusive spaces” they actively attempt to exclude normal people which eventually shuts down a convention, or kills the audience off and harms a group financially.

ConCarolinas Back On Track

But there was a second instance this weekend. ConCarolinas at their closing ceremonies announced they made a mistake with John Ringo, and henceforth will no longer be using political ideology as a litmus test for who gets invited. This is great news as well, and it means that ConCarolinas is going to stick to their original mission of promoting geek fandom and literature, and is standing up to the bullies who successfully mobbed Mr. Ringo out of the convention earlier this year.

Good for them. At this rate, they may be the only two conventions remaining in ten years.

They should have listened to Moira Greyland:

Floyd “Huston” Huddleston – founder of the Hollywood Science Fiction Museum, has been arrested for the following child pornography charges (in the comments) – Seriously, we HAVE to get people like this OUT of the Entertainment industry.

The challenge is that if they get rid of all the criminal pervs from science fiction, Castalia House will be about all that is left.

In which I address Larry Correia’s disinvitation to Origins in light of my own banning from ConSimWorld over an argument with a proto-SJW demanding the elimination of black SS counters from wargames about 15 years ago in a Darkstream.

The thing is that nothing has changed, it’s only gotten worse, things are only getting worse because nobody is fighting back. I mean even someone like Larry Correia, whom I admire, whom I respect, and who in creating Sad Puppies launched what until recently was the only effective response to the SJWs, now even he just wants to be left alone. And that is the fundamental flaw of the Right; you cannot win a war that you refuse to fight, you cannot win a war by being left alone, and the SJWs have made it very very clear that they will never ever leave us alone.

The woman who complained about Correia to Origins and managed to get him disinvited was bitter at him over a takedown that he had done of her boyfriend back in 2014, four years ago! So these people do not forget and they are going to continue to come after you. They would continue to come after me if they could, you know, if they didn’t know that I am always ready for it, I’m always anticipating it, and they also know damn well that I’m going to go after them harder than they come at me every single time, and so they tend to go, “you know what, maybe we’ll go after easier targets.” I mean it’s not like there aren’t a plethora of them out there.

And so what what you need to understand is that there is no telling them “that’s enough”, there is no warning them, the point is that you keep reading these articles, you keep seeing these comments, you know, now they’ve gone too far, now it’s too much, and that’s not going to achieve anything. There is a standard boilerplate conservative column that I could probably write in my sleep, I’ve been reading that same column for 30 years now and I call it the conservative dire warning column. If the Left doesn’t watch out, they’re not gonna like what happens! Well, guess what? Nothing’s gonna happen. You’re not going to do anything! You know, and they already know, that you’re not going to do anything. They already know that John Ringo is not going to do anything, they already know that Larry’s not going to do anything.

I mean, these guys are successful. These guys are successful and it’s not worth it to them. I understand that. I’m not unsympathetic. You know the problem is, that is the response of everybody: well, you know, it’s not that big a deal. Well, it’s not that big a deal to you, but it is a big deal collectively to everyone else that is now affected by it. Now I’m not condemning or criticizing anyone who just wants to wash their hands and walk away from that. I don’t go to conventions, it’s not my thing. I don’t want to be around a bunch of people, so if someone says “hey, you know what, I’m just not gonna go” hey, that makes perfect sense to me.

But here’s the problem. Every time you do that, you’re conceding space, you’re providing moral comfort to the enemy, and you are encouraging them to continue doing it. And eventually they’re going to push into spaces where it actually affects you. For example, you know someone like John Ringo doesn’t really care about getting disinvited from a convention, right? But he’s going to care a whole lot if he ends up getting dumped by Baen for his political views. Now you might say, oh, that’s ridiculous, he’s very successful, why would they ever do that? Well, because SJWs are not rational people. They don’t look at the situation and say “gee this guy is one of our best-selling authors, we shouldn’t get rid of him”, they’re just going to look and say this is a bad person and we’re going to go after them now.

If Disney was willing to throw away a billion dollars in order to turn Star Wars into an SJW fest, do you really think that a publisher is going to be unwilling to give up some book sales? They are not primarily motivated by money so you cannot anticipate their behavior on the basis of whether it’s in their economic self-interest or not.

UPDATE: Neither Bridget Correia nor John C. Wright appear inclined to take this lying down.

The SJWs have already ruined STAR WARS, STAR TREK, DR WHO, Marvel Comics, the Hugo Awards, the News media, the Anglican Church, and the Boy Scouts.

They ruin the fun for everyone.

They nag, they lie, they play holier-than-thou, and at the same time promote moral depravity that makes your stomach turn. These are the same people, allegedly so afraid of Larry Correia, who defended and continue to defend Marion Zimmer Bradley and her homosexual husband running a pedophile ring at conventions.

It’s amusing to see SF-SJW Foz Meadows running around demanding apologies from everyone who believed zher legal spouse is Camestros Felapton. Now, of course I can understand even such a visually repellent, talentless creature as Foz taking massive offense at being accused of having sufficiently low standards as to engage in any form of congress, be it marital or otherwise, with Felapton, but then, Foz is an unrepentant liar who doesn’t merit apologies from anyone for anything. Who gives a quantum of a damn what Foz wants, expects, appreciates, or demands?

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
Related to all the recent Puppy kerfuffle, I would like the record to note that @davefreersf, a self-professed Sad Puppy, has unequivocally admitted that siccing Vox Day on someone is a tactic meant to cause “serious harm” to the target.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
Replying to @fozmeadows
Like. There’s been so many occasions when I’ve had Sad Puppy acolytes in my mentions frothing about how VD and the Rabid Puppies are a TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED THING TO THEM and how DARE I suggest that the Sads be held in any way accountable for the Rabids!

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
I would also like to note that while, as far as I know, Freer didn’t email VD about my husband being Camestros – a falsehood now acknowledged as such by @LouAntonelli – VD has nonetheless run with Freer and Antonelli’s original claims on his blog.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
Replying to @fozmeadows
I won’t subject anyone here to quotes from the salient comment thread on VD’s blog; sufficed to there’s a fucktonne of homophobic abuse directed at me, plus the odd wish for physical violence, and my husband’s workplace being disparaged as an institution. So, you know. The usual.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
What I will say is that, in the event Dave Freer *does* admit he was wrong & that my husband isn’t Camestros, I won’t be accepting any apology he might make. His gross, homophobic speculation about my marriage & identity, & his slander of my husband, was always a separate issue.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
Replying to @fozmeadows
None of what Freer has said about my personal life is excused or justified by his belief that Toby is Camestros. It has literally nothing to do with anything, and not only has he doubled down on it multiple times, he has actively encouraged others to speculate, too.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
The only type of apology I’ll even *consider* accepting from Freer is one that involves an admission of homophobia, an acknowledgement that none of his personal comments were either correct or appropriate, and a pledge to actively educate himself. Anything less is meaningless.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
Replying to @fozmeadows
Regardless of whether he does that, however – and I rather suspect he won’t – the absolute fucking LEAST he can do, as per Antonelli, is to acknowledge that he was wrong in thinking Toby was Camestros, and to apologise TO EVERYONE for spreading the lie.

Foz Meadows@fozmeadows
I’d also appreciate a similar apology from Brad Torgersen. I have zero expectation of Vox Day doing anything remotely conciliatory or charitable, but I’ll do Torgersen the kindness of assuming him capable of admitting error.

First of all, no one sics me on anyone. I act as I see fit. I am more than happy to publicly deride that wretched creature and I will continue to do so until zhe either a) dies or b) publicly retracts all of zher claims that I am a Nazi or other derivation thereof.

Second, I am confident that I speak for everyone when I say that I am truly and deeply relieved to hear that Foz Meadows is not married to Camestros Felaptron. Sweet St. Darwin, what if those two had spawned? The human race may be in genetic decline, but that’s one evolutionary branch we really don’t need to explore. Shades of Innsmouth, anyone?

Third, Dave Freer didn’t sic me on anyone about anything. I don’t recall having any communication with him in years. I just checked my email and I haven’t received even a single email from him since I set up my current machine in April 2016. Nor have I spoken to him.

But I require no apologies. Foz should instead be apologizing to the entire human gene pool for whatever horrific accident of evolution or malevolent fate led to zher existence.

UPDATE: This comment at File 770 from Laura Resnick was particularly funny.

I took a look at the VD post and comments Ms. Meadows references… and, yep, I can see why she chose not to link to it. Very ugly and bigoted—gosh, contain your shocked surprise. And, as always, you could search high and low, far and wide, without finding people stupider than VD and his blog followers. The absence of intelligent life there seems almost scientifically astounding.

Classic midwit posturing. Resnick is a mediocre fantasy writer who can’t even figure out how to stop stuffing her fat face, but that’s not going to stop her from trying to strike a laughable pose as an intellectual superior to literally everyone here.