Tag: SF

File 770 Discriminates Against Hispanics

It’s so terrible to see the way that the science fiction community is full of hatred and discriminates against Hispanics. Mike Glyer of File 770 actually apologized for running a basic convention report about the recent World Fantasy Convention that just happened to be written by a gentleman of Hispanic descent.

How can I run a review by Paul Weimer and a week later post something by Jon Del Arroz, a writer who’s persecuted him? (Or ever?) That was a terrible choice. I apologize. And how can I do that to Cat Eldridge, who is closely associated with this blog but was completely blindsided by the post. He works with Paul all the time and absolutely would not want us to be hosting JDA. I apologize to Cat, too.

A good apology would stop there, I think. Which I say because some people want to know why I did this in the first place. And an explanation at this point in an apology is usually a backdoor justification which makes the apology worthless. All I can say is the explanation is part of my contrition.

File 770 doesn’t have that many commenters, so it often feels like I do a lot of work and all that matters is if I mention someone’s hot button topic they will jump in to reprimand me for failing their purity test. Most of the time my skin is not so thin that I react. Sometimes it is. Resentment is the issue that drives most of the problems I have in life, and when I yield to it bad things happen.

I was going through just such a season of feeling picked on when Jon Del Arroz sent me his convention report. I combed through it expecting to find takes I would refuse to publish but it was rather vanilla. Nothing to object to but the byline.

This is obviously nothing more than pure anti-Hispanic racism on the part of Mr. Glyer. There was literally nothing to object to but a Hispanic name in the byline; it was a simple and straightforward news report devoid of any political content whatsoever, as you can see for for yourself.

World Fantasy Con 2026 Friday Review
Posted on October 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

By Jon Del Arroz: World Fantasy Convention opened Thursday at the Oakland MarriottCity Center, and Friday, the first full day, delivered the small, personal kind of gathering the convention is known for. I wasn’t able to attend Thursday because of having to get work done. Robert Silverberg was the main draw for me, and he did not disappoint.

The convention is a fraction of Worldcon’s size. Programming runs two or three panels at a time, the dealer room is modest, and the convention space is compact. Organizers have been citing 775 members on Facebook. At peak times on Friday the halls held roughly 200. The staff has the operation running smoothly and were all super nice and helpful, from the info desk to programming to the dealer room, and attendees I passed all seemed to be having a good time.

The morning opened with a panel on the changing publishing world. The lineup was Silverberg, Josh Wilson from The Fabulous magazine, Teresa DeLucchi, director of marketing at Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, Betsy Wollheim, and Stephen Jones.

The panelists agreed that everything in the business is up in the air and very different than ever. They discussed the trend toward sprayed edges on books that began in the pandemic, and cited that they thought the trend had peaked, which I find entertaining and think look great and add a lot to the presentation of books. They also said physical books are staging a bigger comeback because ebooks have become so prevalent and normalized, so people want something physical and cool to hold. That matches what I see in the market: readers want premium deluxe editions, and more publishers are making them.

AI produced the panel’s one real disagreement. Jones called it inevitable and asked why anyone bothers fighting it. DeLucchi argued people should not be using it. Jones has the better of that argument. AI is not going away, and people will not stop using it. It cleans up typos fast, and it has plenty of uses that never touch the creative work. He believes eventually AI will replace editors entirely for the most part.

The AI exchange led Silverberg to talk of copy editors, and he did not hold back. He once had a copy editor “fix” a sentence he had deliberately left unfinished, and he had to get it changed back. His verdict: “I hate copy editors because I know what I’m doing.” He added that Harlan Ellison once had a copy editor change a pile of his text wholesale, and that it did not go well for the copy editor.

He also talked about meeting John W. Campbell. The business used to be personal, he said, and now it is detached and run by email. The panel noted that unlike the days of building relationships with editors to buy stories, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld buys stories only through open submissions, not by soliciting authors, so a relationship with the editor doesn’t get you a sale. Everyone goes through the same slush process. Silverberg described walking into Campbell’s office as being like going to church and meeting God. When he got to call Campbell by his first name, he thought the roof would fall in.

The dealer’s hall was modest but with a lot of cool stuff. Tachyon Publishing had a big presence there with a lot of works that were tempting, especially form Peter Beagle’s catalog. Cross Genre Books, a Portland dealer, had a deep rare-book stock: signed Jack Vance, signed Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and plenty of Heinlein. I spoke with Anthony Eichenlaub, vice president of SFWA, who had a table in the room. Artist John Picacio also set up there, and he kept a line most of the time I passed, with fans buying prints.

In the afternoon I went to a reading with Bruce McAllister, Charlie Jane Anders, and Caroline Yoachim. McAllister is a long time writer who has done wonderful work and does not get enough credit in the field these days despite plenty of award nominations for his work. Anders really worked the room before reading from a forthcoming publication in 2027 that involves vampires and time travel, thanking the moderator and the audience and getting everyone applauding, and the crowd responded in kind.

What’s great is how many of the attendees are there just as fans and not a full slate of scheduled speaking. I ran into Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, among other big names. Peter Beagle held a small meetup that filled before I could sign up, and I hope to catch him another way before Sunday. A bookbinding workshop, where attendees bound their own books, also looked good, and I missed it for scheduling reasons.

Friday night also holds a mass autographing session. Silverberg and Jones are expected to unveil an anthology there, with advance review copies on hand. Saturday brings Silverberg’s interview panel, which I expect to be a highlight of the con as well. The World Fantasy Awards banquet is Sunday to cap everything off. 

All in all, it was an excellent Friday, and World Fantasy Convention delivered. 

Now, I have zero interest in any future accommodation with the SF-SJWs, not because they quite rightly hate and fear me, but because they are such a collection of irrelevant mediocrities that there isn’t a single one of them that I would ever deem worthy of publishing in ebook, let alone in fine deluxe leather. When Castalia House is publishing excellent authors like Eiji Yoshikawa, Benito Perez Galdos, Zenaide Fleuriot, Unno Juza, and Nomura Kido in English for the first time ever, how could we possibly care about these sub-trivial SF/F wannabes who don’t even understand what science fiction is and what it is not.

Unfortunately, Mike Glyer has forgotten that his proper role is that of a science fiction historian, not a racial gatekeeper, and while it’s understandable that he would eventually fold under the hateful pressure of the yapping SJWs, it is a mistake on his part. Because, as a very kind and gentle dark lord once said, an apology is nothing more than a guilty plea in their beady little eyes.

And they are irrelevant anyhow. Despite their best efforts, Castalia House already publishes more and better titles than Tor or Baen. I will not be surprised if within three years, Castalia House is the biggest science fiction-related publisher in the world not named “Amazon”.

Sign up for Castalia Unlimited to find out why.

DISCUS ON SG

A Science Fiction Family

This sort of biographical article, like this one on Poul Anderson and his family, is one of my favorite sort of Fandom Pulse articles. It’s the kind of thing you quite literally can’t find anywhere else:

Poul William Anderson was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 1926, to Scandinavian parents. His father died when Poul was young. His mother took the family to Denmark for a period before World War Two, then to a Minnesota farm when the war broke out. He grew up bilingual, deeply attached to Danish literature and culture, and this shows up throughout the fiction. His command of Scandinavian mythology and Old Norse poetry is one of the things that separates his fantasy work from every imitator who came after Tolkien.

He took his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He was already selling stories to Astounding by the time he graduated. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, appeared in 1952. The science background is not decorative. Anderson’s fiction is rigorously scientific in ways almost nobody else in the field managed. His hard SF is calculated. His fantasy is grounded in real historical detail. His alternate histories are worked out by a physicist.

In 1952 he met Karen Kruse. They married in 1953 in Berkeley, California, moved to the Bay Area, and stayed there. Their daughter Astrid was born in Berkeley. The Andersons lived in Orinda, in the East Bay hills, for the rest of Poul’s life. He became a Californian in a way that shaped the fiction, though he never lost the Minnesota-farm sensibility either.

His Wife Karen. Born June Millichamp Kruse in Erlanger, Kentucky, on September 16, 1932, she was already deep in SF fandom when she met Poul. She coined the term “filk music,” which is what SF fandom’s musical tradition has been called ever since. She coined the term “sophont” for a generic sentient being, a word every worldbuilder in the field has since used. She wrote the first published science fiction haiku, “Six Haiku,” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1962. She was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, under the SCA name Karina of the Far West. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars for her Sherlock Holmes scholarship.

She was also her husband’s collaborator across four decades. The King of Ys tetralogy, Roma Mater (1986), Gallicenae (1987), Dahut (1988), and The Dog and the Wolf (1988), was cowritten with Karen. She contributed anonymously to the Last Viking trilogy. The collaboration was real, not honorary. When Poul died in 2001, Karen continued as an editor and fan community figure until her own death on March 17, 2018.

Their daughter Astrid Anderson Bear married the science fiction novelist Greg Bear in 1975. Greg Bear was one of the leading hard SF writers of his generation, author of Blood Music, Eon, Darwin’s Radio, and Moving Mars. He died on November 19, 2022. Astrid remains active in the SF community and coauthored an authorized biography of her father, Starfarer, in 2024.

I personally consider Anderson to be in the second tier of the classic SF writers, but I’ve always enjoyed his stuff. I really liked his contribution to There Will Be War, for example, and he had a range that tended to exceed most of the writers of his day. He was able to blend fantasy and science fiction in a manner very different than urban fantasy or magical realism, and yet it always worked somehow.

Anyhow, if you’ve never read any Poul Anderson, I’d highly recommend that you do so. His son-in-law, Greg Bear, is a little more of a conventional SF writer and his work is a little more of an acquired taste. But it, too, is at the very least worth trying if you’re looking for a new author to read.

DISCUSS ON SG

Interview with Orson Scott Card

Fandom Pulse sat down for an interview with one of the last living greats of science fiction, Orson Scott Card.

The Alvin Maker series is more explicitly tied to American spiritual and folk tradition than almost anything else in fantasy. Do you think today’s readership is equipped to receive that material, or has something been lost in how we read myth?

What’s been lost is a knowledge of our own history. I remember my wife’s and my amusement and shock when we got a fan letter early in the Alvin Maker sequence, in which a reader said how much she loved the way I was dealing with American history, but then added, “And I never knew that George Washington had been beheaded.” What? She thought that bit of alternate history was true? Hadn’t she studied American history in high school? How can an alternate fantasy history of America resonate properly with readers who don’t know real American history in the first place?

Your book Characters and Viewpoint remains required reading decades later. How has your own understanding of character changed since you wrote it?

I think the techniques laid out in Characters and Viewpoint remain true and useful. I’m sad to see some of the nonsense that has begun to pervade the teaching of writing in the universities. Present tense narrative is NOT part of the American tradition. Past tense is the way we tell the truth. Idiotic nonrules of grammar have perverted our language. Yes you CAN and sometimes MUST end sentences with words that are often used as prepositions. To merrily split infinitives is one of the treasured traditions in English; poor Latin couldn’t split their infinitives. But that’s no reason to deprive ourselves of such a useful device. I sometimes think that my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson, was the last American teacher giving students a grounding in grammar and structure. I did love diagramming sentences.

Ender’s Game has become one of the defining works of 20th century science fiction. At what point did you realize the book had taken on a life entirely outside your control, and how do you not let that dominate your creativity?

Early in the life of the novel Ender’s Game, I was at an event in Utah Valley, when a librarian from a local Junior High School confided to me, “Ender’s Game is our ‘most-lost book.’” I thought: If young readers can’t bear to part with the book, it must be touching something deep in their souls.

I’m happy with the number of people who tell me that Ender’s Game was important in their youth. There are also people who feel that way about Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. If I knew what worked so well in those books, I’d do it every time. Instead, I do as I’ve always done: I tell a story I care about and believe in as clearly as I can, and then hope that readers will find value in it.

Prolific authors often say their best work gets buried under their most famous title. Do you have a book or series you wish more readers would find, something you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?

I don’t resent the popularity or success of Ender’s Game, I’m grateful that any of my books has won readers’ hearts. Yes, I think I’ve written better books; Yes, I’m proud of all my stories. And some few people have told me, over the years, that their favorite of my books is one of the less well-known ones.

Read the rest of it there.

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