#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The newest member of the Day household. While there can’t ever be a replacement for the Dainty Flower, I have no doubt that Spacebunny’s new Ridgeback will prove to be a fine, upstanding member of the family. Or that he’ll do an excellent job protecting the “puppies” that she loved so much.
As Sasquan approaches, more of the File 770 SJWs are starting to lose it.
Patrick May: There is, however, a group within the non-Puppy set that has been making broad accusations of racism, misogyny, and homophobia against all Sad and Rabid Puppy supporters.
Matt Y: Eh, if you’re a supporter of a movement with a mission statement about how previous recent award winners only won because of affirmative action instead of quality work, without citation or evidence to back up that claim, I don’t think that’s a broad statement. There might be Puppy supporters that aren’t, but what they’re supporting certainly is.
Shao Ping: I would also add some of the works the Puppies supported add a great deal of credibility to charges of racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
That makes no sense. Whether you have supported someone who has made a broad statement or not, it is still, by definition, a broad statement to accuse you and every other supporter of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This attempt to create a distinction about Person X’s action on the basis of Person Y’s action isn’t logically valid; Person X’s action exists in its own right. And I would also add that by Shao Ping’s standard, many of the works supported by the science fiction SJWs add a great deal of credibility to charges of child molestation, child abuse, rape, sexual deviance, and pedophilia.
For example, there is considerably more solid evidence indicating that SFWA Grand Master and NAMBLA supporter Samuel Delaney is a criminal child molester than there is to indicate that any Sad or Rabid Puppy nominee, much less supporter, is racist, misogynistic, or homophobic, much less a Fascist, a neo-Nazi or a Nazi. I have repeatedly denied all of those charges myself and no one has ever been able to prove otherwise because they are all false. Whereas, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Delaney has never once denied having had sex with a minor as an adult… and gay sex with minors, both voluntary and involuntary, is a frequent feature of his books. Among various and sundry other unpleasantries.
We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that many Puppy Kickers have direct personal ties to “Chip” Delaney, to convicted child molester and SFWA member Ed Kramer, and to the late child molester, Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose estate is listed in the SFWA directory. And they were not, they are not, the only child molesters in science fiction.
Listening to these criminal sex deviants and psychological train wrecks whine for months about what terrible people the Puppies are to steal their awards is surreal. It’s going to be amusing to see how they react when the media attention they have so assiduously courted starts looking in their direction and begins finding the many child-sized skeletons in their closets.
At File 770, a glimpse of the Sasquan committee’s view of the Puppies, which is surprisingly accurate:
There’s been a lively discussion on my Facebook about this all. In particular an explanation of part of the thinking of the committee –
Glenn Glazer Christopher: I put three simple facts before you:
1) The puppies have a strong tendency to _retaliatory_ action.
2) The puppies are crazy, but they are not suicide terrorist crazy.
3) Antonelli has a long history of being an online asshat, but no history of physical violence, including at Worldcon in San Antonio, which he was at.
1) This is correct. Leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. Attack us unprovoked, and we won’t let it go until either a) you publicly and unconditionally submit to the Supreme Dark Lord or b) the Vile Faceless Minions have lapped up your blood and devoured your corpse. Your call.
2) We’re not crazy at all. We simply have different motivations and different objectives, and we operate on a longer time scale than most. If you still think the goal of Rabid Puppies is to win science fiction awards, you’re the one who is observably crazy. We care as much about them every bit as much as #GamerGate cares who wins Kotaku’s Game of the Year.
3) Now, Lou Antonelli would appear to be crazy, or at the very least, stupid. We don’t support his letter to the police, we don’t support his apology, and we don’t support his subsequent attempt to make nice with his new BFF David Gerrold. We may be, in fact, we indubitably are, Evil, but we are not stupid. In any event, we don’t care whether Sasquan bans him or not. He is not, by his own account, a Sad Puppy, a Rabid Puppy, or an SJW, and therefore we’re no more interested in him than in Black Gate, Guardians of the Galaxy, or any other non-Puppy on our lists.
As for Sasquan, we have no interest in disrupting it, but we do expect our attendees to be prepared for any SJWs inclined to violate the posted Sasquan harassment policy. That is why I encourage every VFM, Puppy, and Dread Ilk attending Sasquan to keep a recorder running at all times on your Android or iOS phone. If you’re subsequently subject to any verbal or physical harassment, you’ll have material evidence on hand to bring to the relevant authorities. More importantly, you’ll also have a strong defense to present against the inevitable SJW lies concerning your own behavior.
This map by Camestros Felapton is rather clever. I always pictured Rabidonia as being more northern, but he does a good job of placing the various relationships. Moreover, if Voxpopoli were in the upper right, it would be right where Lord Bane is in Illuria.
To them, too, we owe our thanks. It’s tremendously amusing to listen to the science fiction SJWs projecting and declaring the Puppies to be pathetic losers while they whine and cry and gnash their yellowed, decaying teeth. A sniveling SJW named Chris M. Barkley is only the latest to strike the usual poses:
Contrast this with Mr. Beale, who, on the surface seems to have some moderate amount of talent as a writer, editor and publisher, who has gone out of his way to trumpet and advance notions of homophobia, sexism, racism with provocative slander, libelous insults and threats, wildly delivered with what I can only describe as a pseudo- intellectual flair. However, those talents, which could have been used for the betterment of literature and culture, are instead being used to soil and defame it. Beale’s latest attempt at seeking attention, a worldwide call for a boycott of all TOR authors and books, is as pathetic as it is futile.
All of the activities of the Sad and Rabid Puppies might have been easily laughed off, had they not made good on their threats and effectively gamed the Hugo Award nominations this year.
Millions of words have been spilled, pounded, spit out, spit upon, leveraged and expounded upon this subject by thousands of commentators, bloggers, pundits and literary critics since the nominations were announced.
I tell friends and acquaintances that are not familiar with sf fandom that this is not the first fannish feud to spill out into the consciousness of the public, nor will it be the last. With internet connectivity, hair trigger tempers and the willingness of people to stay up WAY PAST their bedtimes to correct stuff on the internet, it is certainly the most public display of asshattery in fandom that general public has ever seen.
I consider what Brad Torgenson, Larry Corriea and Theodore Beale have collectively done, is a direct attack on what fans, writers, editors, publishers and literature itself. And I consider this attack on fandom and the Hugos is a personal attack against me….
I do not obsess about it but I have been wondering whether he really understands that a life is a legacy for those who follow him.
There is room in fandom for rational discussion, debate and even dissent. There is no room however, for empty rhetoric and false conjecture, death threats, bullying, hateful and blatant racism, sexism and gay baiting, which is what the Sad Puppies now stand for, forever tarred with the same brush as and the Rabid Puppy crew, whether they like or not.
Moreover, this means that while we may have to listen to the inane and idiotic diatribes of Theodore Beale/Vox Day, we do not have to endorse or accept them.
Margaret Keifer’s life is an exemplary example of what every fan’s, every person’s life should be.
What Theodore Beale and his followers have forcefully shown, is that they are incapable of empathy, kindness or human decency.
They have my pity, and little else.
So brave. Thank you for this. Of course, what they don’t recognize is that one can’t soil sewage. And one can’t defame the infamous with the truth. And I would correct him: the SJWs not only don’t have to endorse or accept anything I say, they quite clearly aren’t listening to anything I have said. I’ll try again:
I am not one of you. I do not want to be one of you. I don’t want your attention, I don’t want your awards, I don’t want your respect, I don’t want your pity, and I don’t want anything to do with you. I have never wanted anything to do with you. In my opinion you are left-wing human wreckage whose worldview is outdated, irrational, nonsensical, and ignorant.
You are neither my intellectual nor moral superior. You are not even my intellectual peer. Your morality, to the extent it can be called that, is a parasitical parody of the real thing. I do not respect you, I do not value your opinion, I reject your values, and I deny your competence to judge me in any way.
I turned my back on your freakish community and everything it stood for as soon as I had the opportunity to see it clearly for myself at Minicon in 1997. I dutifully did my panels and never went to another SF convention or attended another SF-related event ever again. I don’t associate with losers, child molesters, or creepy rape enthusiasts, and SF fandom consists of little else. I never submitted a short story to a science fiction magazine or submitted a novel to a science fiction publishing house because I didn’t have any professional respect for most of the community’s incompetent institutions.
All the SF community had to do was leave me alone and I would have left it alone. I did so, more or less, for 16 years. You didn’t. For over ten years I was repeatedly attacked, unprovoked, by various members of your weird little community. I ignored most of their repeated jabs, their libels, their false accusations, their nasty insinuations, and their insults. Out of sheer contempt, I ignored most of their attempts to obtain my attention. But when John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, N.K. Jemisin, and Steven Gould, among others, made an attempt to publicly destroy my reputation, I decided I would not ignore it any longer.
So, you’ve got my attention now. And you should have known better to draw the contemptuous eye of the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil upon you. Because the Rabid Puppies, and the Dread Ilk, and the Ilk, and worst of all, my 391 397 Vile Faceless Minions, are coming for you. Not just this year, not just next year, but always and forever until you are gone. By all means, cry more about how much we hurt you; the VFM like nothing better than the taste of your tears.
The Sad Puppies want to fix what the SJWs have done to the detriment of science fiction over the last three decades. I respect that, although I think it makes more sense to demolish a building and build anew rather than attempt to shore up a termite-infested structure. But Rabid Puppies are not Sad Puppies. We want nothing more than to crush SJW bones, drink SJW blood, and leave a smoking hole where every SJW institution used to be.
We’re not incapable of empathy, kindness or human decency, we simply have no mercy for SJWs. There will be NO PLACE in science fiction for SJWs.
And that is why, on behalf of the Rabid Puppies, I wish to personally thank every SJW in science fiction who voted for No Award in any category this year and award you this badge as an expression of my personal gratitude.
The puppies lack of empathy and self righteousness will ensure they are
unaware of what they have wrought or feel they are entirely justified in
doing so. Their dogmatic certainty of certain “truths” makes it
impossible to have a rational discussion with them since there isn’t a
common set of assumptions on which to base a discussion.
You know, of all the SJWs in science fiction, I would have thought that John O’Neill would have known me well enough by now to understand that I am an accomplished player of games. I mean, I contributed to Black Gate for several years and a fair number of my posts were game-related. I thought he knew me better. But, in any event, he explained his 2015 Hugo ballot at Black Gate.
I’ve explained my rationale elsewhere, and I won’t rehash all that again, but in short — regardless of how the voting goes, the Puppies have made it abundantly clear that their primary goal is to have their ballot accepted. Having the bulk of fandom acknowledge their ballot as legitimate, and having their nominees read and voted on, paves the way for future Hugo ballots to be decided the same way: through the Puppies aggressive form of slate voting, which I feel drowns out far too much worthy fiction in favor of the Puppies extremely narrow selection process (dictated almost entirely by two individuals).
Or to put it another way: Any slate in which Vox Day puts eleven works from his own tiny publishing house on the Hugo ballot — and nominates himself for two Hugos — will have a hard time convincing me that it is anything other than a naked Hugo grab, poorly masquerading as a reactionary literary movement.
Now that the voting is complete, I will simply quote Mr. Correia.
“Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is
incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and
built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I
don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication
with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down
out of spite.”
I like Larry. I like Brad. They’re good men. I respect them both. And out of my respect for them, I agreed to play it straight this year, support Sad Puppies, and refrain from nuking the Awards. (The VFM were champing at the bit to burn SOMETHING and there was a category that eminently had it coming, so I graciously acceded to their humble requests and unleashed them.) That is why I wish I was more surprised to observe that the science fiction SJWs were dumb enough to do what the Dark Lord wanted in order to teach Brad and Larry a lesson.
See, now that’s what a fucking Xanatos Gambit looks like, bitches.
Note to Richard Brandt: I am not the habit of keeping my self-appointed enemies informed of my true intentions at all times. I said I would support Sad Puppies. I supported Sad Puppies. I kept my word. That’s what I do, even if it means running the risk of delayed gratification. Fortunately, as I anticipated, the SJWs were almost as outraged by Brad’s recommendations as they were by mine.
My intentions were always right out there in the open for anyone with the wit to see it. Based on some of his wry commentary, I suspect Mike Glyer knew. The Dread Ilk certainly understood. I even warned the SJWs that if they went No Award this year on the basis of their disapproval of our award pimpage, they’d have no grounds to complain about our utilization of their tactics in the future, only not in revenge, but because that was the goal. In addition to not voting No Award across the board, we also didn’t respond to any of their shady tactics, not Mary Kowal’s vote-buying, not the various proposed rule changes, not the spurious disqualification of John C. Wright’s sixth Hugo nomination.
The reason is that I wanted our hands to remain entirely clean this year and to gauge the true strength of the motivated opposition. Why buy 500 votes when we’ve learned that Kowal only bought 75?
Next year, we bring the noise. Sad Puppies won’t be led by the Cuddly Care Bear, but by Kate the Impaler. The VFM will grow in size and malice, and the GG-inspired counterattack will spread into new industries. Next year, Rabid Puppies will utilize every useful tactic, explore every potentially usable angle. Because we’re not here to win awards, we’re here to kick ass and chew SJWs. John O’Neill has never grasped that. For some reason, he still thinks we are craving the approval of the human wreckage that risibly deems itself a literary elite.
The last few months has been a remarkably dynamic and exciting time for fandom. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies accomplished something absolutely incredible: joining together to make a resounding statement about the current state of science fiction awards, and forcing the entire industry to sit up and take notice. They have, without question, been the single largest story in fandom this year.
Unfortunately, the subsequent discussion has been a Public Relations disaster for the Puppies. When the eyes of the world were upon them (and while they were admittedly being unfairly criticized by people who misunderstood what they were really about), the Puppies responded by relentlessly going on the attack, hurling bombs at “SJWs,” liberals, secret cartels controlling the Hugos, and (especially, and rather senselessly) Tor, the publisher that has tirelessly promoted and sold many of the authors they championed.
In short, four months ago the Puppies grabbed the microphone and stood on stage in front of the entire industry. They seized the genre by the throat, and had a golden opportunity to make their point. And instead, they simply proved that they had nothing of any real value to say.
Today, the Sad Puppies are already seen as a spent force. Irrelevant, misguided, and not particularly very interesting. Perhaps I’ll be be proven wrong, and when the Hugo Winners are announced at Sasquan in Spokane, Washington, on August 22, the Puppies will sweep again, just as they swept the nominations.
But I don’t think so. I think the result will be quite the opposite, and the Puppies will be swept aside in a wave of NO AWARDs. When that happens, I’m sure there will be plenty of dark muttering about “next year.” But by then, the microphone will have been turned off, and the audience will be long gone. The Puppies are part of history; they just don’t know it.
Yeah, they said much the same last year too. The problem is that John still thinks we seized the genre by the throat in order to make a point. We’re not making a point, we’re strangling an evil and obnoxious ideology. And we have only begun to squeeze.
Later this month, one of two things will happen. Either one-third of the Hugo Awards will be obliterated or the twenty-year dominance of the science fiction SJWs will be publicly shattered for the world to see. The former is a win for Rabid Puppies, the latter is a win for everyone except the SJWs, but in particular for the Sad Puppies. And if the former result is not quite as dramatic as I would have liked, well, we can always seek to do better next year.
On a tangential note, I appreciated this response to one of O’Neill’s sillier statements in the comments:
“In short, the Puppy slate just doesn’t measure up.”
“Riding the Red Horse is the first great mil-sf anthology since Jerry Pournelle tapered off back in the 90′s.”
To summarize: We are the reavers and the renegades, the rebels and the revolutionaries, and we
don’t give a quantum of a damn about pieces of plastic or the insider
approval they represent.
If you are, for any reason at all, interested in perusing my 2015 Hugo ballot, which I have already cast, you are certainly welcome to review it. If you are registered with Sasquan, you can vote at the link here.
As I told the lady from the publication covering the developing story to whom I spoke last night, whatever happens, we have already won. No Award was the original objective for Rabid Puppies, and with the exception of Best Novel, that is now the worst case scenario for us. The best case scenario is that we publicly break the perceived power of the science fiction SJWs and demonstrate their impotence by denying them the ability to do what we originally sought while seeing the awards go to various meritorious works and individuals.
Which, of course, was the Sad Puppies goal. It’s more than a bit ironic that the SJWs rushed to do the Rabid Puppies’ bidding in order to teach the Sad Puppies a lesson, but then, no one ever said they were smart.
The Sad Puppies’ victory condition may be unlikely, but it is still in play. We simply don’t know how all the 5,599 supporting members are going to vote and neither does anyone else. There are nearly as many new supporting members as there were total votes last year. Loncon had 10,826 members, of whom 2,882 were supporting, and 3,587 cast Hugo votes. Consider, for example, the reaction of one neutral reader to the various nominees:
I read the Best Novel nominees (and Ancillary Justice), the Best Novella nominees, the Best Novelette nominees, the Best Short Story nominees, the Best Graphic Story nominees (and Saga vols. 1 and 2), and every story by a Campbell nominee I could get a hold of (the only works I had read before the nominations were announced were Ancillary Justice, The Lives of Tao, and Rat Queens vol. 1). The oft-maligned Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies nominees held up well against the non-Puppy nominees, with the large caveat that four of the six categories were dominated by Puppy nominees and one was dominated by non-Puppy nominees.
After reading all that, what do I think? First, I was somewhat surprised to learn that, for those six categories, the average rankings I gave the books were almost identical. My average ranking for the works not on a Puppy slate was 2.8, my average ranking for the Sad Puppy works was 3.0, and my average ranking for the Rabid Puppy works was 3.2. I wasn’t blown away by the Puppy nominees, but I wasn’t blown away by the non-Puppy nominees either. I would have more sympathy for anti-puppies if better works were being nominated.
But regardless of what happens, the fact remains that the Puppies howled and the world of science fiction will never be the same again. The cultural war in science fiction isn’t over, in fact, it has barely begun in earnest. They thought they’d won, but we hadn’t even begun to take the field.
And it’s necessary. I read The Year’s Best Science Fiction #18, edited by David Hartwell and published by Tor Books. (Never fear, I respected the boycott, and believe me, with a few exceptions, this was research, not pleasure.) I’ll post my analysis here in a few days, but I can assure you, many of the “best” stories were outright Pink SF message fiction. We have accomplished far more than anyone expected already, but a long march through the SF institutions remains ahead of us.
My hope is that Tor Books will one day follow Gawker’s lead in publicly announcing that they have learned the error of their ways, and force its SJWs to abandon their objective of thought-policing science fiction and fantasy while enforcing diversity of identity and uniformity of ideology.
Politics took the prize a long time ago and the Puppies are a response to the politicization of science fiction. Compare and contrast the latest Hugo mewling by The Guardian with Mike Glyer’s count of conservative Hugo-winners:
The Hugo awards will be the losers if politics takes the prize
The controversy stirred up by science fiction’s ‘Sad Puppies’ means there will be no winners at this year’s Hugo awards
The latest furore to consume SF fandom will reach a conclusion on Friday, when voting for the Hugo awards – arguably one of the genre’s most prestigious accolades – closes. Spats around the awards are nothing new. The nominations are chosen by fans, and every year authors are accused of campaigning to get their names on the list. This year a gang of rightwing authors known as the “Sad Puppies” have taken campaigning to a whole new level. Calling on their fans to stack the nomination slate with candidates who share their political agenda, their main beef is that they believe too many genre awards go to lefty, ideological fiction, and not enough to more “swashbuckling” books. Authors and fans on both sides of the divide have written endless blogs about the controversy, big names including George RR Martin have weighed in against the Puppies, and the story has been picked up by the mainstream press.
It raises the question: who should nominate works for awards anyway? A select jury (a la the Man Booker or Clarke) or the fans who actually buy the books? Clearly there should be enough room – and integrity – for both. Yet this year’s Clarke award shortlist was almost universally praised, while, in contrast, the Hugo nominations were met with derision and incredulity (for example, so-called “rabid puppy” Vox Day, who has called women’s rights “a disease to be eradicated”, is up for two awards). You might say that this is democracy at work – the fans have spoken! – and that would be all well and good, but, tellingly, two authors recommended by the Sad Puppies have already pulled their work from the nominations, saying that they want their writing to be judged on merit and not on their assumed political affiliations. It goes without saying that all books, whatever their authors’ political stance, should be judged on whether they’re any good or not; but with some factions suggesting fans vote “No Award” on categories that they believe have been hijacked, and the Puppies urging their stormtroopers to stick to their guns, the whole thing has slipped into farce. And this is a great pity. The Hugos have always been a popularity contest, a showcase of SF fandoms’ favourite fiction, and skewing the lists for political point-scoring makes a mockery of them. Whether the Sad Puppies win the day or not, it’s the awards’ legacy that will suffer, along with the future work that would have benefited from their now damaged prestige. That’s what is truly sad.
19 of the 266 Hugo Awards that have been given out since 1996 have gone to political conservatives. And the legacy of the awards has already suffered, because they have been regularly given out to inferior work for at least the last 15 years. When Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Charles Stross, and John Scalzi have more Hugo nominations in far fewer years of professionally writing and editing than Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, it is patently obvious that something is seriously wrong.
Meanwhile, women have won 65.7 Hugos in the same time. And keep in mind that conservatives outnumber liberals by a factor of 1.6 in the USA, which means that conservatives are underrepresented by a factor of 11.3, versus women being underrepresented by a factor of 2.
Now, if the SJWs in SF are to be believed, this is evidence that sexism is a serious problem but
there is absolutely no evidence of left wing ideological bias. They keep
repeating this despite the fact that the anti-right wing bias in
science fiction is observably 5.6 times worse than the purported sexism
about which they so often complain.
Of course, SJWs always lie.
Because other than occasionally sending emails to their dwindling pool of advertisers, I pay no attention to Gawker, I completely missed the fact that the Gawker Review of Books addressed the Puppies and the Gallo attack in Gawker’s inimitable – and yes, libelous – style back in June.
The Sad Puppies are also closely associated with neoreactionary, Gamergater, and notorious white supremacist Vox Day (he says he’s not a white supremacist, but he also says “Racism is neither a sin nor is it a societal evil. Race-based self-segregation is not only the observably preferred human norm for all races throughout the entirety of recorded human history, it is inevitable,” so go ahead and draw your own conclusions) who both played a part in picking the Sad Puppies nominees and started his own Rabid Puppies slate. Coincidentally, a number of the Rabid Puppies nominees have been published by Day’s obscure, Finland-based publishing house, Castalia House.
“I don’t mind being linked to Vox, because I don’t hate and fear Vox like a little schoolgirl who’s been stung by a wasp,” Torgersen has written.
And that’s who the most powerful publisher in sci-fi apparently decided to appease at the expense of one of its own employees.
But why?
Puppy supporters have been talking shit about Tor from the beginning of their campaign, largely because Tor editors Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden have been openly critical, and were among the first to note that Gamergate and the Puppies were making common cause. In April, Larry Correia, who started and named the original Sad Puppies campaign two years ago, had to tell Puppies supporters to chill out with their attacks on the publisher, because—as Tom Doherty also pointed out—Tor has published Puppy favorites like John C. Wright. Wright rode the Puppies slates to a record-breaking six Hugo nominations this year.
The frenzy started again last week, though, when Vox Day reignited it with a screencap of Irene Gallo’s Facebook comments, calling them “libel.” (He calls a lot of things libel.)
I don’t call “a lot of things libel”. I simply happen to be libeled on a regular basis by liars in the media at places like Gawker and The Guardian. For example, I’m not a “white supremacist”, I am a “red reservationist” who supports the right of my tribe and others to keep our racially segregated reservations established by treaty with the U.S. Federal Government.
If Jay Hathaway opposes the right of Native Americans to retain their racially segregated reservations, then he should come right out and say it. And he should also apologize for libeling me and correct his piece. But I won’t hold my breath; Gawker may well be history once Hulk Hogan gets through with them.
And notice classic SJW inversion at work. The Puppy supporters have been “talking shit about Tor” because Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and FORMER Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, to say nothing of various Torlings, have been “talking shit” about various Puppies for more than ten years now.
Like a swan swimming across a pond, what looks like serenity from the outside often masks a tremendous amount of activity going on beneath the surface. Over the last few weeks I’ve had several conversations with executives at Tor Books, Macmillan, and Macmillan UK, and I can assure you that there is a very good reason for Mr. George Martin’s sudden and repeated calls for supporters of Irene Gallo and others at Tor Books to “denounce and oppose” the ongoing Tor boycott.
For those who want to stand up to the bullies and rabids and their Tor boycott, please note that SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH was published by Tor. (They were also Jack Vance’s publisher for most of the last few decades).
That was a pretty good anthology actually. Despite the best efforts of the various authors it seldom rose to full-blown Vancean heights, but I quite liked the Tanith Lee and John C. Wright stories it contained. What Martin appears to be trying to do with his multiple posts on the subject is make it harder for the executives at Macmillan to hold anyone at Tor Books responsible for their repeated violations of the Macmillan Code of Conduct or for their attacks on Tor’s authors and customers. And although Martin is unwilling to come right out and say it, he is offering an implicit threat that if Macmillan does the right thing and jettisons the unprofessional parties concerned, he and other SJWs will launch their own boycott of Tor and take their future books to other publishers.
The reason George is doing this now is because he knows what’s going on inside Tor thanks to his various contacts there. Things are getting very heated, as it has been reported that Patrick Nielsen Hayden has threatened to take his Scalzi (and other writers) and go elsewhere if either Irene Gallo or Moshe Feder are fired or forced to resign. Whether John Scalzi backs PNH to this extent or not (and if he is even aware of this threat on his behalf or not), I do not know, but I personally find it very difficult to believe that Scalzi would ever consent to put his ten-year contract with Tor Books in jeopardy for anyone’s sake. He may be grateful to PNH for launching and repeatedly propping up his career, but he’s not THAT grateful.
If it’s true that PNH is threatening to take his ball and go to DAW or some other publishing home, it’s an amateurish move that demonstrates the very sort of entitled unprofessionalism and poor decision-making that has put Tor Books into the current situation in the first place. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that PNH might be taking this line, as he would not be the only Tor-affiliated individual who to take such a stance. For example, Tor author Mary Robinette Kowal has already publicly threatened to return the advances for her next two books and take them elsewhere if Ms Gallo is fired.
@RizziWorld How about this. If they fire Irene, I will return the advances on my next two books and pull them.
7:23 AM – 14 Jun 2015
What a noble gesture in support of an employee’s right to publicly attack the company’s customers! Anyhow, if Mr. Nielsen Hayden was in fact foolish enough to threaten his superiors in any way, I expect he will soon receive an object lesson in the realities of corporate power.
And for the witch hunters at Tor who are desperate to learn with whom I have been speaking, I am kind enough to give you one little hint. Go to my Twitter account, search through it, and see who has commented on my tweets. I think you will find the results to be illuminating.
George Rape Rape Martin takes time out of his daily fetish-writing to urge everyone to oppose the Tor boycott, which is totally irrelevant and futile and doesn’t matter in the slightest, which is precisely why it must be denounced and opposed. It’s frankly a shame that he’s been distracted in this way, as old RapeSquared had been working on a smashing scene involving the violation of Arya Stark wearing the face of Cersei Lannister by two Sparrows, seven nuns, Ser Robert Strong, and King Tomas’s adopted kitten. It was really going to blow everyone’s socks off when West of Eros: The Epic Rapes of George R. R. Martin appears in 2017.
In one of the more recent developments, the Rabid Puppies and some of their allies and fellow travellers have declared a boycott of Tor Books. I say “Rabid” here because Beale is backing the boycott, while Larry Correia says the Sad Puppies are not boycotting anyone… though Correia and some of the other Sads certainly seem deeply sympathetic to the boycott.
I am not, needless to say. Neither is most of fandom.
Which makes this a perfect time to BUY SOME TOR BOOKS!!
So if you would like to strike a blow for free speech and decency, and support all the good people at Tor, go ye forth and buy a book today… from the Cocteau, or Amazon, or anywhere… and let your voice be heard.
[Martin adds in the comments:] “The Tor boycott is an ugly attempt to try and cost some good people their jobs. It needs to be denounced and opposed.”
Good people? On what planet can the likes of lying, libelous, Code of Conduct-violating individuals such as Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden be reasonably described as “good people”? Observably not this one. And as for the “free speech and decency” Martin claims to be defending, let’s recall the speech itself:
“There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad
Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end
of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are
unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve
been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate
of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.”
– Irene Gallo, Creative Director of Tor Books and Associate Publisher of Tor.com
That is a clear and undeniable violation on several counts of the Macmillan Code of Conduct. It is a completely unprovoked, absolutely unprofessional attack on Tor’s customers as well as several of Tor’s own authors. If Irene Gallo was a fry cook at McDonalds or a minimum-wage greeter at Walmart, she’d be gone already, and it is as disingenuous as it is stupid to pretend otherwise.
RapeSquared was promptly called on his little omissions by a few of his readers and didn’t hesitate to take some liberties with the facts. Because, after all, George Martin is an SJW, and SJWs always lie.
lordevaco
Jul. 7th, 2015 09:00 pm (UTC)
I just thought it was weird to leave out why there is a boycott in the first place, so I googled it. I didn’t even know about it, but apparently it’s because someone at Tor denounced all of them as “neo-Nazis” and “unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic” and Tor didn’t do anything about it.That’s not cool at all either.
grrm
Jul. 7th, 2015 10:45 pm (UTC)
If you googled it, you should also have read that not one but TWO apologies were issued for that tweet, one by the person who posted it, one by the publisher of Tor. That should have closed the book on the affair. Instead we have a boycott and calls for firings.And I have yet to see anyone on the Puppy side apologize for anything, though their name-calling has far exceeded that coming from the fans.
lumbridge
Jul. 8th, 2015 12:43 am (UTC)
Why are the sad puppies boycotting Tor books? By the way which fantasy titles would you recommend that Tor publishes?grrm
Jul. 8th, 2015 01:27 am (UTC)
It’s the Rabid Puppies boycotting Tor, not the Sads. Plus some unaffiliated or semi-affiliated allies.I will not attempt to explain the whole thing. In a nutshell, a Tor employee categorized the Puppies in a nasty way, some of them got outraged and demanded an apology, an apology was issued, but the Rabids decided that was not enough and now want resignations and firings. (Which they are never going to get, by the way).
We’ll see. Corporate actions tend to move along very slowly and then happen all at once. Macmillan’s CEO just returned from his sabbatical this week and I have been directly informed by a Macmillan executive that no decision on how to address the situation has yet been made. And while I suppose it is possible that Mr. Sargent could simply throw out the company Code of Conduct in order to retain the services of an arrogant, entitled employee who believes she can treat his company’s customers and authors with total contempt and still retain her job, I tend to doubt it.
I will not be even remotely surprised if both Ms Gallo and Mr. Nielsen Hayden leave Tor Books in the near future. Macmillan quite clearly had no idea what sort of inmate-run asylum it has on its hands, and it’s not surprising that it would take a little time for them to figure out what needs to be done in order to set it straight.
If it were my problem, I would clean house. After all, how many of the big SF/F franchises of the last 20 years has the biggest publisher in SF/F published? If one considers how hit SF/F franchises Tor Books has missed on, including Martin’s ASOIAF, it’s not as if their management team can considered irreplaceable. But it’s not my problem and not my decision. I’m simply not going to buy any Tor Books, not even those written by the excellent Mr. Wright, while Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden are still employed there.