Tag: PinkSF

Worldcon doesn’t ban pedophiles

Or sex criminals. But they do ban Hispanics. The leading Hispanic science fiction writer – and author of the first Alt★Hero novel – Jon Del Arroz, is banned from attending Worldcon.

Mike Glyer of File 770 saw it coming back on December 22nd. But what did Mike know and how did he know it?

MG: Serious question. Do you have a Worldcon membership?

JDA: Yup, I’ll be there. I don’t believe in taking my ball and going home.

MG: Goodbye Jon. 

Worldcon 76 announced the ban yesterday… for intended thoughtcrime!

Worldcon 76 has chosen to reduce Jonathan Del Arroz’s membership status from attending to supporting. He will not be allowed to attend the convention in person. Mr. Del Arroz’s supporting membership preserves his rights to participate in the Hugo Awards nomination and voting process. He was informed earlier today of our decision via email.

We have taken this step because he has made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct. We take that seriously. Worldcon 76 strives to be an inclusive place in fandom, as difficult as that can be, and racist and bullying behavior is not acceptable at our Worldcon. This expulsion is one step towards eliminating such behavior and was not taken lightly. The senior staff and board are in agreement about the decision and it is final.

Kevin Roche is the chair of Worldcon 76 in San Jose. Kevin has been making costumes since he was 8, and continues dressing funny to this day.

Personally, I think it is great that the Funny-Dressing Nazis of Worldcon have taken the important first step of banning this straight male author from attending, and I look forward to seeing them take the obvious next step of banning all men and women who are not sexually dysfunctional, don’t wear Star Trek uniforms, and shower more than once per week, and finally transform Worldcon into the loving, age-equalitarian utopia it is meant to be.

I understand the theme of Worldcon 76 will be “An Homage to Marion Zimmer Bradley” which will feature the announcement of a new award, The Bradley, which will be presented to the science fiction author who has done the most to advance the vital cause of sexual abnormality in the previous year. The trophy will be a bronze statuette of a crying little girl clutching a teddy bear.

Nominees for the 2017 Bradley Award will be announced in April.

What part of “shut up” does he not understand?

In what can perhaps be best described as a metappropriate response, Wil Wheaton cries about being portrayed as a crybaby.

I love that this set exists. I love that enough people want to do TNG LEGO to create a market demand for these figures. I can’t speak for the rest of the cast, but things like this, based on us, are always awesome. Earlier this year, a guy gave me a little minifig that he made of Wesley, and even though it’s unofficial, it is a delightful thing to own. He’s in his little red spacesuit, and he looks like he’s got a course you can plot. I love it.

In this particular custom set, though, Wesley is depicted as a crying child, and that’s not just disappointing to me, it’s kind of insulting and demeaning to everyone who loved that character when they were kids. The creator of this set is saying that Wesley Crusher is a crybaby, and he doesn’t deserve to stand shoulder to minifig shoulder with the rest of the crew. People who loved Wesley, who were inspired by him to pursue careers in science and engineering, who were thrilled when they were kids to see another kid driving a spaceship? Well, the character they loved was a crybaby so just suck it up I guess.

“Oh, Wil Wheaton, you sweet summer child,” you are saying right now. “You think people actually loved Wesley Crusher. You’re adorable.”

So this is, as you can imagine, something I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with for thirty years. It’s been talked about to death (on this very blog, more than once), but I’ll sum up as briefly as I can: I reject the idea that nobody liked or cared about the character…. it’s “Shut up, Wesley,” made into what would otherwise be an awesome minifig, in a collection of truly amazing and beautiful minifigs.

It’s a huge disappointment to me, because I’d love to have a Wesley in his little rainbow acting-ensign uniform, but I believe that it’s insulting to all the kids who are now adults who loved the character and were inspired by him to go into science and engineering, or who had a character on TV they could relate to, because they were too smart for their own good, a little awkward and weird, and out of place everywhere they went (oh hey I just described myself. I never claimed to be objective here).

Now THAT is funny! You can put the Gamma on camera, but you just can’t reason, talk, or beat the Gamma out of him. Seriously, Wil, just shut up already. The general public would like you a lot better if you’d simply take your well-merited beatings with a graceful smile.

Anyhow, there are probably more pedophiles who were inspired by Wesley than scientists and engineers. No one – NO ONE – loves Star Trek more than pedophiles. I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see pictures of Moira Greyland and her brother in Star Trek uniforms as children.

“We always say there are two types of pedophiles: Star Trek and Star Wars,” says Det. Ian Lamond, the unit’s second-in-command. “But it’s mostly Star Trek.”

How SF-SJWs celebrate the Happy Holidays

Because, after all, we all know they certainly don’t celebrate Christmas. Anyhow, this may be the most SF-SJW headline ever seen at File 770. Or, possibly, anywhere.

Season’s Readings: N.K. Jemisin & Christopher Brown Offer Visions of Unhappy New Years at the KGB Bar

Just wait, it gets even better.

In a special treat, and fighting bronchial problems, she shared the revised version of an unpublished short story, at present entitled “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death.”  Continuing the evening’s dystopian theme (where was the season’s merry jollity?), we were shown a future where the powerful inhabitants of Towers dominate, ruling by fear and dependency, and have genetically tweaked frogs (as in the Plague in the Book of Exodus) into drug-sniffing dragons.  Rural black raiders, however, have co-opted the dragons, diverting them from eating dark-skinned people with what sounded like soul food (this is a serious story, she reminded us).

Ladies and gentlemen, your two-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel! Let’s hope she can make it three straight in 2018!

Still not tired.

The science fiction is settled

The SF-SJWs never learn, never change, and fail to realize that the changes in the distribution system means that their ability to play gatekeeper has ended.

You see, all this introduction about SF being about Change, and defining that change as the emergence of narcissistic navel-gazing natterings is just so that he can call anyone who doesn’t embrace that as neanderthalic bigoted throwbacks.

Instead of discussing the content and the quality of the stories, some people made derogatory comments [about] the race, gender, sexual orientation, and behaviors of other authors. These were comments that were rooted in bigotry. I should point out here that bigotry is not an expression of hatred as much as it is a demonstration of fear, insecurity, and cowardice. It’s natural to fear the unknown — real courage is embracing it.

God help me, but I’m gonna invoke Vox Day. “SJW’s Always Project.” And here’s the perfect illustration of DARVO and Gaslighting. Since the Puppies were always about the quality of the stories, and Gerrold’s side has always been about denigrating writers on the basis of their race (if white), Gender (if male), sexual orientation (if straight), etc. He’s managed to swap the sides in this statement, trying to claim the moral high ground, and in the process ceding that the other side had it. As an old white male himself, Gerrold had best tread carefully among his fellows, since he’s terribly short on intersectionality points.

And that, perhaps is the real point of this essay. One which he inadvertently makes himself, if you’re not viewing it through SJW lenses. He must maintain his cred that he’s one of them.

There’s an old Russian story about a Communist party meeting, and when the party chairman’s name is mentioned, it is required to stand and applaud his name. The clapping continues and continues, loudly and uproariously because nobody wants to be the first one to stop clapping. After ten or fifteen minutes, the audience is in agony, but nobody dares to stop out of fear. Simply put, because even though it gives everyone else the excuse to finally stop, the first to stop is never seen or heard from again.

This is the danger of playing the Virtue Signaling game. And he goes right out and illustrates this as if it were proper thinking.

Larry Niven has wisely said: Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man. In fact, one could distill this into a much more general rule. Never throw shit. Never stand next to anyone throwing shit.

This is profoundly good advice. There has been too much shit-flinging. Monkeys are good at it, but human beings have made it an art form. Some of us enjoy shit-flinging so much that we forget we’re human beings, we become fecal trebuchets.

Now this is extraordinary advice, considering the speaker was the Master of Ceremonies at the single greatest celebration of shit flinging in the entire history of SF Fandom (One of his claims to fame in his bio at the end of the piece). This is a classic example of “Let’s stop after I get my last shot in.” Of course, on the internet, nobody gets the last word, not even me.

So again, he’s projecting his sins upon others. (Also, he missed the point of the Niven quote.)

And why? Because for the next few screens worth, he goes on and on about one single idea. “So let’s have this conversation be about remembering our essential humanity — and what we must do to preserve it. It’s this simple. If someone is throwing shit, verbal or otherwise, silence is interpreted as agreement.”

Fine, this is why I am not being silent, because he has been at the forefront of the gang denying people’s essential humanity. And this goes back to well before the Hugo Wars. He blocked me on Facebook ages ago when I took offense to one of his many (since purged) screeds about how Republicans should be put to death that came up on a liberal friend’s feed. The list of shit he’s thrown, and shit he’s been silent and complicit about is long and horrid, and I’m sure he feels smugly satisfied about every single turd.

But there’s the root of it. This is why he has to make this point calling everyone who disagrees with him in the slightest misogynist, racist, and homophobic. Because in SJW-land, you HAVE to. If you miss one Two Minutes Hate, then your silence is interpreted as agreement, and they will attack you twice as bad for being a traitor to the cause.

It is satisfying to see that more and more people are beginning to see what I was trying to tell them from the start. There is no compromising with this people. It is not possible. They cannot be fixed, and their behavior can only be influenced by force and fear. They are fundamentally damaged and their behavior is driven by internal processes rather than reactions to external influences, so one can no more talk sense into an SJW than one can convince a person with tuberculosis to stop coughing.

And is there a word that male SF-SJWs love more than “fecal”? It’s a dead tell.

Kirkus, converged

Kirkus is supposed to be a serious professional book review site. But, as has been written, SJW convergence always prevents an organization from being able to fulfill its primary purpose:

Around the time when diversity became the cause célèbre for young adult fiction’s most passionate activists, trade reviewer Kirkus implemented some unique rules to establish its bona fides at the forefront of the movement: characters were to be explicitly identified by race, religion, and sexual orientation in every YA book review moving forward; furthermore, the writers of those reviews would be selected according to their race, religion, and sexual orientation as well, critiquing texts for sensitivity in addition to entertainment value. A statement on the Kirkus website reads:

“[Because] there is no substitute for lived experience, as much as possible books with diverse subject matter and protagonists are assigned to ‘own voices’ reviewers, to identify both those books that resonate most with cultural insiders and those books that fall short.”

The implementation of these policies hasn’t been without hiccups, but overall, Kirkus had more or less successfully positioned itself as a reviewer striving to be sensitive to pressing contemporary concerns about diversity and representation in YA — right down to the use of the word problematic to describe books that aren’t adequately woke.

It was with these policies in place that Kirkus published its review last week for American Heart, a YA novel by author Laura Moriarty. American Heart takes place in a dystopian future where the U.S. has rounded up and relocated its Muslim population to internment camps in Nevada. Its protagonist, Sarah Mary, is a 15-year-old from Missouri who doesn’t question the validity of the ban until she meets a Muslim woman on the run, an Iranian immigrant and professor named Sadaf. In a story loosely modeled on Huckleberry Finn, Sarah Mary ends up traveling north with Sadaf in the hopes of helping her escape to Canada.

For some members of the YA community, the premise was objectionable from the get-go (the first Goodreads review, left on September 7, begins with “fuck your white savior narratives”). But after a research and review process including multiple sensitivity reads, Moriarty was prepared to stand by her work, and the notoriously prickly Kirkus gave the book a starred review. Published on October 10, it described American Heart as “terrifying, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and touching” and “a moving portrait of an American girl discovering her society in crisis.”

Only a few days later, the review was pulled amid continued criticism of the book from community members. The review was replaced by a statement from Kirkus’s editor-in-chief Claiborne Smith explaining that the editorial board and the reviewer — described as “an observant Muslim [woman] of color” and “expert in children’s & YA literature [who is] well-versed in the dangers of white savior narratives” — were “evaluating” the review. Shortly thereafter, Kirkus published an amended review that retracted the book’s star and condemned Moriarty’s choice to write the story from the first-person perspective of a white teenage girl.

“Sarah Mary’s ignorance is an effective worldbuilding device,” read the new review, “but it is problematic that Sadaf is seen only through the white protagonist’s filter.”

Add “book review sites that don’t review books” to the long list of SJW-converged organizations unable to perform their primary function. And speaking of SJW convergence and YA novels, look at what sort of creature Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Tor Books is now attempting to push on young readers.

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders mashed up technology and witchcraft in her debut novel All the Birds in the Sky. Now, in her latest project, she’ll be journeying into space and delving into the teenage psyche, in a new young adult science fiction trilogy recently acquired by Tor Teen.

“Now it can be told: I’m a YA author at last!” Anders tweeted. “I’ve always loved YA and I have been toiling in secret on this for ages.”

I expect everyone in science fiction will be tremendously surprised when it gets arrested for something to do with YA readers within 18 months of publication. We may need to lower the time estimated for when Castalia’s sales pass Tor’s.

Cracking under pressure

Brian Niemeier is more than a little amused by John Scalzi cracking under the combined pressure of his big, beautiful book contract and the God-Emperor’s presidency:

Scalzi’s “the dog ate my homework” post is yet another indication that #1-selling indie author Nick Cole is about to be vindicated once more. To quote Nick:

Okay.  As I’ve talked about before this before… this is what happens next:

  • Big Pub reduces its Author List down to servicing Cadillac Clients.  Many authors who think they’re something are about to be shown the door in the form of un-returned emails, unanswered calls, and not talk of future projects.  Already happening.
  • Amazon Opens Book Stores.
  • Trad Pub Authors attempt to seamlessly bring themselves, and their mojo, into Amazon and fail badly because they’re not used to the volume of work.  Marketing, Formatting, Editing, Social Media, and most importantly now: a tight release schedule of every 30-90 days.  Also Amazon picks the winners and its more interested in New Talent.

A cataclysmic paradigm shift is underway that will soon overturn the publishing landscape as we know it. Indie has been overtaking tradpub for years, and now the Big Five New York publishers’ sole advantage–their paper distribution monopoly–is about to collapse.

When B&N goes, it will take the tradpub midlist with it. You’ll know the old era is over when current tradpub authors start trying to go indie. But as Nick forecasts and Scalzi confirms, former tradpub darlings are woefully unprepared to handle the increased workload.

And that’s just on the writing front. Factor in the additional responsibilities of being your own publisher and marketing department, and consider how a guy who can’t finish a novel in ten months with the backing of sci-fi’s biggest publisher will fare in the new order.

Here’s the truth: Scalzi’s ongoing nosedive has nothing to do with who’s president or the current weather. It has everything to do with the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden handed him a golden ticket. Scalzi has never had to work in this business without Tor propping up his career. Now he’s losing favor to N.K. Jemisin, his last book underperformed, and he’s falling behind on his contract–all in the looming shadow of B&N’s failure.

I prefer to characterize my friend Nick Cole as a bestselling Castalia House author, but otherwise, Brian has described the situation rather well.

I’m sure you will understand that I found this comment to be particularly entertaining.

“The worst part of all this is that Vox called it when he was given the deal in the first place. And Scalzi, in his arrogance, set about to prove him right.”

The thing is, I wasn’t making the prediction out of any malice or SJW-style magical thinking. It was entirely obvious to me that an author whose primary skill was marketing himself to editors was not going to be successful once they stopped devoting excessive resources to propping him up and maintaining a false narrative about his skill and his success. Scalzi is, and has always been, a mediocre mid-list author with a penchant for juvenile vulgarity. If he submitted a manuscript to us under a different name, there is virtually no chance we would accept it for publication.

That being said, John Scalzi is very highly skilled and he is extraordinarily successful, just not at what he wants you to believe he is. The challenge facing him is that while those particular skills were integral to his success in a traditional publishing model that required currying favor with SJW editors and the pseudo-media of SF fandom, they are considerably less useful in the brave new world of publishing today.

Can Star Trek be converged?

Or is that an intrinsically redundant concept? ST:D answers the question:

As for the Klingons, they’ve received the biggest redesign of the series, both physically (the design falls somewhere between the ridged foreheads of Next Generation and subsequent shows, and the rebooted race from Star Trek Into Darkness) and aesthetically, with the Klingon outfits taking on an ornate, golden style that’s different from anything seen on Trek series before. Discovery’s Klingons are also fiercely religious, seeming to worship Kahless the Unforgettable, the first Klingon ruler to unite the species, and the founder of the Klingon Empire.

The new Klingons are also incredibly devoted to the idea of Klingon culture above all else — T’Kuvma, the Klingon leader, has a rallying cry of “Remain Klingon,” and while he is (relative to the other Klingon houses) open to accepting any Klingon, even those considered to be outcasts, he loathes the Federation ideals of equality, diversity, and peace. It’s easy to draw parallels to America’s current political atmosphere, where issues of isolationism and racial supremacy are sadly rearing their ugly heads again — which the showrunners absolutely intended, according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Yes, believe it or not, you can actually turn the SJW convergence up to 11, even on Star Trek. I’m genuinely surprised that they didn’t name the Klingon leader D’Drumpf. And can there be any doubt that a villain will eventually appear with fabulous hair and a name like Y’Milo?

All the media reviews are positive, which tends to suggest that the show is going to tank faster than DC Comics introducing a gay black Superman in a wheelchair.

GRRM on Jerry Pournelle

Give credit to the man, unlike some of the younger SF-SJWs, he understands there is a time to criticize and there is a time to eulogize. His post is titled A Sadness:

Jerry Pournelle has passed away. He was 84.

It would seem that he attended Dragoncon in Atlanta, caught some kind of bug, and died in his sleep on September 8, after complaining of feeling unwell in his last blog post, on the 7th.

Pournelle has been a major figure in the field for as long as I have been a part of it. I first met him in 1973 at the worldcon in Toronto, where both of us were finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer (along with Lisa Tuttle, Ruth Berman, George Alec Effinger, and Robert Thurston). That was the very first year the award was given. To the surprise of no one, Pournelle won, though Geo. Alec Effinger finished so close behind the con gave him a special second place plaque, the only time THAT ever happened. (How close, you may ask? Ten votes, two votes, a single vote? No one knows. In those days, worldcons did not release vote totals).

The Hugos were given at a banquet in those days. I could not afford a ticket, so I came in after the meal for the awards. It was rather an unusual ceremony. The Hugo rockets had not arrived, so the winners received only empty bases… except for Jerry, since the Campbell sponsors (Conde Nast, in those days) HAD managed to come up with a plaque. There’s Jerry holding it, above.

The other weirdness about that night was that toastmaster Lester del Rey, for reasons only known to himself, chose to present the awards backwards. In other words, he started with Best Novel (the ‘Big One,’ then as now), working his way though short fiction and to the fan awards, and ended with the brand-new never-given-before Campbell. Thing is, people started leaving after each award was given, and by the end, there was hardly anyone left in the hall except me, Jerry Pournelle and his party, and the other nominees and their friends (I think Lisa Tuttle and Ruth Berman were there, but Thurston and Effinger were not, someone else accepted the plaque for Piglet).

I came out of the night all right. It was an honor, a huge honor, just to be nominated. And in the aftermath I came up with the idea of a Campbell Awards anthology. A couple editors told me it was an idea worth pursuing, but of course I needed to get all the nominees to sign on… and the key one was Jerry, the winner. So I bought him a drink and pitched him the notion, and he said yes (though, being the consummate pro, he made that contingent on me being able to pay competitive professional rates). Eventually that conversation led to my NEW VOICES anthology, and launched my career as an editor and anthologist… and I’m still going strong there, forty-four years later.

The Hugo voters knew what they were doing when they gave Pournelle that first Campbell; he went on to have an amazing career, both on his own and in collaboration with other writers, particularly Larry Niven. With INFERNO, LUCIFER’S HAMMER, FOOTFALL, and (especially) MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, the two of them helped transform the field in the 70s. They were among the very first SF writers ever to hit the big bestseller lists, and among the first to get six-figure advances at the time when most writers were still getting four figure advances… something that Jerry was never shy about mentioning. Though he was nominated for a number of Hugo Awards in the years that followed, he never won one… but if that bothered him, he did not show it. “Money will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no money,” he said famously.

Pournelle was fond of talking about all the help Robert A. Heinlein (whom he always called “Mr. Heinlein,” at least in my hearing) gave him when he was starting out, and he was a passionate advocate of RAH’s “pay it forward” philosophy, and did much to help the generations of writers who came after him. He served a term in the thankless job of SFWA President, and remained an active part of SFWA ever after, as part of the advisory board of Past Presidents and (even more crucially) on GriefCom, the Grievance Committee. Jerry could be loud and acrimonious, yes, and when you were on the opposite side of a fight from him that was not pleasant… ahh, but when you were on the SAME side, there was no one better to have in your foxhole. I had need of SFWA’s Griefcom only once in my career, in the early 80s, and when we met at worldcon with the publisher I had Jerry with me representing Griefcom. He went through the publisher’s people like a buzzsaw, and got me everything I wanted, resolving my grievance satisfactorily (and confidentially, so no, no more details).

His politics were not my politics. He was a rock-ribbed conservative/ libertarian, and I’m your classic bleeding-heart liberal… but we were both fans, and professional writers, and ardent members of SFWA, and we loved SF and fantasy and fandom, and that was enough. You don’t need to agree with someone on everything to be able to respect them. And while MOTE IN GOD’S EYE may not have won the Hugo in its year, it remains one of the great classics of space opera, destined to be read and re-read for as long as people read science fiction (it IS an honor just to be nominated).

The last time I saw Jerry was at Keith Kato’s chili party at MidAmericon II. He loved Keith’s chili as much as I do, another point in his favor.

R.I.P. Jerry. You were one ornery so-and-so, but you were our ornery so-and-so. Hoist a pint for me at that Secret Pro Party in the sky, and say hello to Mr. Heinlein.

Yeah, so, about that….

Fornax has a great idea: BAN VOX DAY FROM FANDOM (pdf):

The Nerd & Tie blogger had an idea for handling the pretentious delArroz: Don’t invite him to a convention ever again. That sounds like a great idea. From now on, fandom needs to shut out those like del Arroz, Correia, Hoyt and their leader Vox Day. All those who wish to trash fandom for both fun and profit should be kept out of fandom functions, such as conventions, that can accord writers and others publicity and public standing in the world of science fiction. Either you are on the side of fandom or you are against it. No middle ground.

I think it is fairly apparent that I am very much against the decrepit collection of obese, sickly, and mentally ill individuals who collectively make up what passes for fandom in science fiction. I make no attempts to write for them, sell books to them, or appeal to them in any way, shape, or form.

My contempt for them is overt and unconcealed. Even the forthcoming Alt⭐️Hero  line of comics openly spits on them and their social justice values.

I have attended precisely one science fiction convention in my life. I was a panelist at the grotesque freakshow called Minicon once about twenty years ago and I have never attended another one since. I have participated in precisely one other fandom function, a book signing at Barnes & Noble with other writers such as Gordon R. Dickson, Dave Arneson, Joel Rosenberg, and David Feintuch.

While it was the most successful book signing in that bookstore’s history, the fact that none of those four writers are still alive should tell you how long ago it was. I have not done another book signing since, nor do I have any plans to ever do another one, because I don’t like signing books, I don’t like fandom, and I don’t like public events.

I acknowledge the possibility that some of the other writers the SF-SJWs propose banning from fandom might actually care about it. In my case, however, I can assure them that any such ban will meet with neither objection nor protest from me.