Tag: SFWA

The End of an Era

Life is not a 1980s fantasy novel. Sometimes, the Dark Lord triumphs. After giving up writing science fiction in favor of cat porn, my onetime blog traffic rival, John Scalzi, has laid down his blog pen and passed on the Whatever torch.

In 2012, John Scalzi’s blog was the place to be for anyone interested in science fiction. His blog popularity and traffic as an influencer led to him getting massive multi-million dollar contracts at Tor Books and industry insiders giving him multiple Hugo Awards. In 2016, Scalzi revealed a small chink in the armor of his online presence, as he reported his blog traffic as falling, coinciding with the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. With his push toward extreme liberalism and social justice, Scalzi turned off a portion of his originally military sci-fi reading audience as he pivoted toward what he perceived to be mainstream clout.

His blog saw an 11% traffic drop from a 2015 self-reported number of 5.8 million site visits (close to 500,000 a month) in that year, but it seems to have gotten far worse in recent years as his online persona has made sure that half the country or more is not interested in what he has to offer with his extreme political takes. It’s gotten so bad that he doesn’t report his blog stats at the end of the year anymore, instead giving updates about his life in general. He vows in 2025 he will “spend more time on friendships and community,” which is usually a self-reflection that things are not going very well.

Despite his not posting his stats, using online statistical sources, Fandom Pulse estimates his monthly traffic to be anywhere from 150,000-200,000 on an average month, less than half of what it was only eight years ago. Fandom Pulse, by contrast, is doing well over 300,000 per month in our first month full time, making this Substack the most trafficked blog in science fiction.

Another sign John Scalzi doesn’t view his blog traffic as doing well is that he’s now conscripted his daughter to take over Whatever. She posted, “Hello, everyone! If you saw my father’s post yesterday, then you know that some changes that have been in the works for a while now are finally here. Mainly, I have been passed the torch that is Whatever, and I plan to carry it proudly.”

I wish both The Artist Formerly Known as… well, in the spirit of leaving history in the past, let’s just call him Neil Gaiman’s good friend, and the new Whatever blogger well. No, don’t laugh. I have absolutely nothing against Athena, and it was always Scalzi’s fans who used to infest the blog comments here that were more in my sights than the man himself. He mostly served as a useful metric, given Whatever’s onetime status as The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction.

It’s a little sad, actually. Beating up on Brandon Sanderson is redundant; the man self-flagellates more than one can possibly kick him, and I couldn’t even name most of the SJW pets and never-weres that have replaced Scalzi as Tor’s Award-Winning authors. The transformation of Whatever truly represents the end of an era, a stupid and mediocre era, to be sure, but an era nonetheless. David Weber is gone, Neil Gaiman is done, George RR Martin is done, John Scalzi is petering out, Brandon Sanderson has gone rogue and is nuking his fan base; the genre publishers simply never developed my generation of fantasy and science fiction writers and there is very little coming up behind them in the mainstream.

And yet, we not only survive, we thrive. Whatever is gone. Tor Books is next. But you can be absolutely certain that the dark empire of Castalia will continue to grow and expand.

The silence was the most terrifying thing. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of life. Birds no longer sang, their vibrant melodies replaced by an eerie stillness. Laughter, once a common thread weaving through the tapestry of human existence, had vanished, leaving behind a chilling emptiness. The whispers of the wind through the trees, once a comforting lullaby, now sounded like mournful dirges. Even the gentle hum of the world, the subtle symphony of existence, had been extinguished, leaving behind a suffocating vacuum where hope and joy once thrived.

And somewhere beneath his black velvet hood, in the shadows where no one could see, the dark lord smiled.

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The Downward Spiral Continues

There will be more than one “Mysterious Big Thing” but only one of them is due in December and when it’s time you’ll know. Trust me. ❤️ NG’s troubles aren’t going away any time soon.

Neil Gaiman fans are bracing for the next round of disclosures concerning the Sandman author’s alleged shenanigans. In the meantime, the woman to whom the Gamma male glommed onto in a failed attempt to parley his moderate success and celebrity into a romantic relationship has finally spoken out and begun to publicly distance herself from him, although her actions fell well short of the complete condemnation and disavowal for which her fans, and Gaiman’s disaffected former fans, were hoping.

Tori Amos breaks silence on allegations against longtime friend Neil Gaiman

In July, writer Neil Gaiman found himself at the center of a legacy-tarnishing scandal when five women stepped forward to share their stories of alleged sexual abuse at the hand of “The Sandman” author.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, musician Tori Amos made a rare statement on the accusations against her longtime friend and collaborator, calling them “shocking,” and expressing a willingness to walk away from the friend she thought she knew if everything that’s being said about him by his alleged victims is true…

“And if the allegations are true, that’s not the Neil that I knew, that’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know. So in some ways it’s a heartbreaking grief. I never saw that side of Neil. Neither did my crew. And my crew has seen a lot. I haven’t publicly said anything because: what do I say? I didn’t hire the nannies. I wasn’t there. I’ve never met these people. And I’ve never received a letter – of the thousands of letters I’ve gotten in 33 years – I’ve never received anything that was about Neil, except praise for his work and how much his work meant to people. That’s all I ever knew.”

It’s not surprising that even such an outspoken advocate for rape victims would be hesitant to publicly condemn a longtime friend and benefactor. I understand the outrage of the few who genuinely expected better from her, but people are always people. Even those who feel most betrayed by Neil Gaiman will never give Jon Del Arroz and I any credit whatsoever for our early, public, and forthright condemnation of Neil Gaiman, nor will most of them criticize Tori Amos for taking four months to even address the panoply of very creditable allegations of rape and sexual assault.

The labels of people who are considered “good” and those who are considered “bad” will always dictate how people perceive their actions. From the perspective of the average Neil Gaiman fan, JDA and I are very bad indeed, and therefore our condemnations of an accused serial rapist and sexual assaulter are intrinsically suspect, and since Tori Amos is very good in their eyes, her reticence to do so is, for the most part, considered understandable, and perhaps even laudable.

But for those who are not emotionally invested, the facts are what they are. My opinion is perfectly clear. On the basis of the currently available evidence, Neil Gaiman is a mediocre literary talent who appears to have been systematically elevated due to his various connections, whose success appears to have been mostly manufactured, and, given the multiple accusations that have already been made public, appears to have abused his social position to take advantage of gullible and vulnerable women of various ages to assuage his own psychosexual desires.

And I simply don’t care what anyone happens to think about me or my motivations. That’s my opinion, and I fully expect events to eventually confirm it in due course.

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SFWA Melting Down

It looks as if SFWA is rapidly going the way of RWA, which is to say, toward extinction. Fandom Pulse has covered the resignation of the last TWO presidents in the last three weeks, now it’s got some inside information as to what appears to be going on.

For the first of the inside information Fandom Pulse has gotten on the situation, we have a post to the SFWA forums from Michael Capobianco that exposes troubles within the organization. Capobianco wrote a series of novels in the 1990s and was married to fan-favorite Star Trek novelist A.C. Crispin before she passed. In this post, Capobianco exposes former President Jeffe Kennedy’s gross incompetence and mismanagement at running SFWA, and paints a story of disaster through the recent years of the organization. He said:

Since I think a lot of people are taken aback by Jeffe’s sudden resignation and lack some of the context of what’s been happening lately, I wanted to post here with my own perspective. Please note that this post is not an attack on any board member, on Jeffe, or on the board as a whole...

However, I just wanted it on the record that her resignation letter (attached here as a PDF in case you haven’t seen it) ignores the fact that some past members of the board and former staff, as well as numerous SFWA members, were asking for her to be removed from her position for a number of reasons. I would even say that her email is a great example of why folks were asking for her removal—it places the blame for what’s happening squarely on something else and makes her seem like the victim, rather than accepting any accountability for how her own actions have led to the current circumstances.

The immediate event that kicked this off was Terra LeMay being terminated from her staff position after putting in a 90-day notice due to being denied reasonable disability accommodations, and then banned from Discord and blocked from accessing her SFWA email (presumably by Jeffe) after she asked for an explanation on Discord in the ask-the-board channel. Prior to that, several former board members and staff have also resigned from their positions, although I do not know for certain these resignations were related to Jeffe and actually did not realize the staff had resigned at all until this happened. (AFAIK Kate is currently the only SFWA staff member.)

Communications from the board have been slow and opaque in general for the past few years, and the Nebulas conference seems to always get cited as a reason not to do anything. But on top of that, a number of volunteers or former volunteers (myself included) have been frustrated with a lack of transparency from the board and the fact that some board members have tended to consistently blame volunteers for projects failing when it was the board that canceled them—or even for projects succeeding if they caused extra work for the organization or its board members and volunteers—despite also frequently pushing extra-heavy workloads onto those volunteers and providing them with zero support. (As an example of this, see Jason Sanford’s post about his withdrawal from running SFWA’s annual auction.)

It seems like a part of the issue is that everyone serving on the board and in some volunteer positions is asked to sign a really broad NDA, which they feel stops them from being able to ever talk about anything. My personal opinion is that in this case, that NDA and the opaque environment it creates resulted in a space in which staff and board members did not feel empowered to speak out about their own poor treatment, and which allowed Jeffe to continue acting in ways that did not necessarily benefit the organization as a whole.

You know, back in 2013, SFWA had the opportunity to elect a smart business- and technology-savvy author who had a pretty clear vision for the way the industry was headed as its president. Not only did they not elect me, they even pretended to kick me out of the club for my effrontery in thinking that a very different course of action to prepare for the coming changes in the industry was in order. Of course, like everything the SFWA Board does, they did it incompetently and ineffectively, as they never held the membership-wide vote on expulsion that the state bylaws required at the time. Like it or not, I’m still a Life Member, at least for the next 6-9 months it takes for SFWA to completely collapse.

Needless to say, I’m only surprised it has taken this long, as I pointed out 11 years ago.

I certainly wish Steven Gould good fortune in piloting the organization, although given his support for the status quo and his stated opinion that SF/F is not in any trouble as an industry, my concern is that his victory will tend to increase the probability that the organization will founder upon the very shoals my platform was designed to avoid. But that is Mr. Gould’s concern now, not mine.

So, I founded and focused my attention on a little organization called Castalia House instead. At this point, I’d say that was a pretty good tradeoff. And if you want to have a look at our beautiful new WAR AND PEACE stampings for the pair of upcoming Library and Libraria editions, as well as the lovely new sign on display for the 2024-25 season at Meadowbank Stadium, check out the Castalia Library substack.

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Racists Running SFWA

This news about former SFWA President Cat Rambo’s rant is absolutely hysterical, especially in light of the fact that Rambo was one of the most active members of SFWA pushing the Board to vote for my expulsion over a considerably less-controversial offense:

According to an attendee of the convention who sent an exclusive report to Fandom Pulse, Cat Rambo started ranting about Jews outside of one of the writing panels at the gaming convention. 

“Cat Rambo went off on an antisemitic tirade in the Writers Symposium lounge in front of multiple witnesses,” the whistleblower said. “It took all of two minutes to go from discussing how ‘the sci-fi community needs to do more for Palestinians’ to an utterly unhinged rant about there being ‘too many New York Jews in publishing’… complete with a patronizing addendum to name-drop a few famous editors as ‘some of the good ones, if misguided.’”

If this report is accurate, having an organization that is obsessed with race and has often labeled opponents as racist, SFWA now has a massive problem on its hands. Speaking this way about an entire race of people but saying there are merely “some” good ones is shocking, to say the least.

SFWA removed Hugo Award-nominated editor Vox Day for merely replying to attacks on his person from N.K. Jemisin in which he declared the author to be a “half-savage,” but this seems far more egregious of racism than anything that can be construed out of a personal feud between authors.

The question looms—will SFWA take action against blatant racism and anti-semitism allegedly spoken at Gencon?

Looks like Cat might be the first member to get expelled from SFWA. While the SFWA Board unanimously voted for my expulsion, the membership never held any vote on the matter as was required by the bylaws at the time. I’m still a Life Member, the organizations false claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

Then again, they never expelled the convicted pedophiles in their midst, so perhaps Rambo is safe.

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Birds of a Feather

Wowzers, they made quite the creative pair… the publisher disappeared Kramer’s name at some point, just as SFWA tried to claim that the convicted pedophile wasn’t still an active member of the organization when he was still in their member’s address book, both print and online. Birds of a feather and all that…

EDITORS

Neil Gaiman has been awarded more Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards than any other creator, took the World Fantasy Award for The Sandman #19 (making it the first comic ever to win a prose literary award), and has awards for his comics from England, Finland, Canada, Austria, Spain, and Brazil. His miscellany, Angels and Visitations, was nominated for two World Fantasy Awards, and was awarded the International Horror Critics Guild for Best Collection. In addition to The Sandman he is the author of such graphic novels as Signal to Noise, Mr. Punch, and Violent Cases. He cowrote, with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, a funny novel about how the world is going to end and we’re all going to die. He just made a six-part TV series for the BBC called Neverwhere, and is working on a Neverwhere novel. He has just finished his first book for children, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and was surprised to find himself acting in the BBC Radio adaptation of Signal to Noise. The Sandman collection Dream Country was picked by Waterstones and The Observer as one of the ten coolest books of the 1990s. He is 35 years old, and is intimately familiar with jet lag in all its forms.

On July 3, 2024, Neil Gaiman was accused of sexual assault by two women in a four-part podcast series by Tortoise Media. Neil Gaiman is reported to have denied the charges, but has yet to make any public statement about them.

Edward E. Kramer is a writer and coeditor of Grails (nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology of 1992), Confederacy of the Dead, Phobias, Dark Destiny, Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, Excalibur, Tombs, Dark Love, Forbidden Acts, and many additional works in progress. Ed’s original fiction appears in a number of anthologies as well; his first novel, Killing Time, is forthcoming from White Wolf. His credits also include over a decade of work as a music critic and photojournalist. A graduate of the Emory University School of Medicine, Ed is a clinical and educational consultant in Atlanta. He is fond of human skulls, exotic snakes, and underground caves.

Kramer was arrested on August 25, 2000 and charged with molesting three teenage boys. The ensuing investigation revealed that Kramer had previously been accused of molestation in 1997 before the alleged victim recanted. On December 2, 2013 Kramer pleaded guilty to one charge for each of the three victims. On February 27, 2019, Kramer was arrested by officers from the Lawrenceville Police Department for allegedly taking photos of a young boy at a doctor’s office. Kramer was later charged with possession of child pornography.

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman has reportedly hired the same US lawyer who has represented Prince Andrew and Danny Masterson. The same Danny Masterson who got 30 years in prison. Since he’s not currently facing any charges this strongly suggests that he’s expecting to be arrested and charged for crimes committed in the USA.

UPDATE: A third accuser has now come forward about her experience with Gaiman after meeting him at a book signing in 2014.

Claire uses a pseudonym to share her story about being groomed and sexually coerced and manipulated by world-renowned author Neil Gaiman. We discuss the power of stories and fame, and she shares how journaling, therapy, and friendships have helped her find her center in her own story. We originally spoke in 2022, and at that time she decided she wasn’t ready, but said that if other survivors came forward, she would join them. Several weeks ago two women came forward and shared abuse stories about Neil Gaiman. Claire reached out to me to support herself and them and all survivors by sharing her story today.

There will be more. There will very likely be dozens more.

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The Rehabilitation of a Pedo

Not only does SFWA resolutely refuse to eject the pedophiles, past and present, convicted and unconvicted, from its midst, but the morally-depraved science fiction community is now even trying to rehabilitate the reputation of confirmed dead lesbian child-abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley, upon whose work the new Star Wars Acolyte is obviously based.

After her death, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter, Moira Greyland accused her not only of aiding and abetting her second husband in child molestation, but in herself molesting their daughter. Since Ms. Greyland made this accusations only after MZB was dead and could no longer defend herself or refute the charges, MZB had no opportunity to go to court and clear her name. Some authors have donated the money earned from sales to Bradley to various child-related charities. Given that she edited Breen’s book, Greek Love, and edited and contributed at least one article to his journal, The International Journal of Greek Love, she had to at least suspected his unhealthy interest in boys. “Greek love” is an old euphemism for male homosexuality, especially the relationship between an older man and a boy or youth. Many who knew her well said they had never seen or suspected anything untoward. However, others believed the accusations. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., the publisher of Bradley’s digital backlist, donated all the profits to the British charity Save the Children. Author Janni Lee Simner donated the money she earned from sales to MZB to the American anti-sexual assault organization Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network. Other writers chose to keep the money they earned…

She was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000 posthumously.

After her death, she was cremated, and her ashes, appropriately enough were scattered on Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England.

Her influence as a writer will last so long as her stories are in print. Her influence as an editor continues to spread, as the writers she mentored are now mentoring a further generations of writers.

Remembering Marion Zimmer Bradley on Her Birthday, SCIFI.RADIO, 3 June 2024

If her influence as a writer continues to bear fruit such as Acolyte, she’ll be completely forgotten, and deservedly so, before the end of the decade. No one reads Darkover anymore and the market for lesbian pedophile space witches isn’t likely to survive Clown World’s collapse.

It’s fascinating to observe how the same freaks who believe and assiduously repeat obviously false information about those of whom they assiduously disapprove will openly deny and attempt to discredit the direct and convincing testimonial evidence of the actual victims of the criminals they are defending.

The dead lesbian pedo Marion Zimmer Bradley has never been disavowed by SFWA, is still recognized as a Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and there are at least two known pedophiles who are honored as SFWA Grand Masters. The real reason the SF community hates me to this day with a white hot passion has nothing to do with Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, my open contempt for their diversity pets, or even my ideological views. It’s because I published this book and they know their attempts to rehabilitate their fallen heroes will never, ever succeed.

There is a perfectly valid argument for separating the art from the artist in many cases. The problem, in the specific case of MZB, is that it is not possible to do so when so much of her art was steeped in her particular wickedness and written with the avowed objective of infecting society with it.

UPDATE: From Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how many of these SF authors join the rehabilitation efforts going forward. And notice that there is no mention of me being one of the authors who has publicly condemned her.

A number of science fiction authors have publicly condemned Bradley. Among the first was John Scalzi, who within a day of the allegations being made public, described the allegations as “horrific”. Hugo Award winner Jim C. Hines wrote that Bradley’s positive effect on her readers and associates “makes the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley protecting a known child rapist and molesting her own daughter and others even more tragic.” G Willow Wilson, who along with Bradley is a fellow World Fantasy Award winner, said she was “speechless”. Diana L. Paxson, who collaborated with Bradley on a number of novels and who continued to write novels set in the Avalon Series after Bradley’s death, said that she was “shocked and appalled to read Moira Greyland’s posts about her mother… I never personally observed, nor had any reason to suspect, that (Bradley) was abusing either of her children.”

UPDATE: In response to this post, SciFi.radio has memory-holed the article. But the Internet remembers…

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An Accurate Review

In which a reviewer of fantasy books tries, and quite understandably fails, to finish reading the award-winning masterworks of one N.K. Jemisin:

I believe that the Broken Earth Trilogy specifically the fifth season which is the first book is so bad
that it’s essentially unreadable. I don’t remember a book that I’ve read that I believe personally is as bad as this one, and it shocks me that not only is this book extremely popular, but every single book in the trilogy won the Hugo award for the best book. This is a beloved series that many people claim
this is the best fantasy series of all time and I could not have a more contrary opinion to my feeling about
this book.

The fact that a third of this book was written in the second person is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing. The second person does not work when it comes to books, it works in some other forms of media, it works in video games, it works quite well in video games where you can picture yourself into the main character and people are talking to you in that way, but in a book it comes off so odd that it’s off-putting and difficult to suck in. There is a reason that virtually no books utilize the second person, and it’s not because they’re not as smart as NK Jemisin that they haven’t been able to pull it off, it’s because it doesn’t work.

I believed, constantly, as I read this book, that Jemisin was trying to be too smart and it came off as ridiculous. The second person is horrible, the way that she writes is atrocious. At times where she uses these italics and bolds and all caps within the text to really drive home a point, to really make this strong emphasis, you shouldn’t have to rely on that to make a really strong point. It comes off as kind of crazy.

I thought the twist that was in this book, and there is a major one, and I still don’t know if it actually occurs because I didn’t finish the book. I got 95 percent of the way through, and I said ‘I cannot bear to finish this book’ but I’m about 100 percent confident that there is a major twist that happens at the end of this book that is so obvious that it becomes one of the most telegraphed and poor choices for a twist that I’ve ever read. I can’t say what it is, but I can say that myself, and I suspect a great many readers figured out what it is within the first 50 or so pages. It’s not so much that the twist is ruined, you know. I’ve figured out twists before and it’s disappointing, it doesn’t happen a lot for me. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I’m oftentimes the last person to pick up on these things, and I really do like it that way. I prefer to be surprised, I don’t want to figure stuff out, I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I want to be, you know, the dummy that is the last one to get it, but man, it’s obvious.

The problem is that the way that the book is structured with this bouncing around in a timeline is ruined
because of the twist. It’s a really poor way to tell the story and the story would have been much preferable to be in a more cohesive, clear, linear fashion, and I don’t think that’s true for all books. I think some books that use time jumps and these different point of views and these things can be very very good, some of my favorite books utilize that, but I think the book sacrificed a great deal in quality to do this and it didn’t work. The twist did not achieve its stated goals.

Now when I’ve said this before, I heard a lot of people in the comments say ‘you’re supposed to figure it out.’ No, you’re not! That is a retrospective retelling of the events to try to justify what occurred in this book. Now the last thing I’ll say about a major reason that I disliked this book is the way that characters move on from traumatic events. I think it’s horrible, some horrible things happen in this book, and this book bills itself as being a tear-jerker and just very depressing and these bad things happen, and that
that’s true for the large part, but the characters have these horrible things happen and they reminisce about them for a moment, and they take it in, and then they just move on. That’s crazy, that’s not real life. When horrible things happen people sit with them for great amounts of time, and maybe in later books they reinvestigate this, but in this first book, man, it didn’t work well.

So I can’t say enough negative things about this book and I am absolutely floored at how popular this book and this book series are.

The secret is that the book and the book series are not even remotely popular. By her own admission, N… K… Jemisin can’t making a living off them. This is the problem with manufactured “success”. It simply isn’t real, and no amount of fakery and propping up pets, poster children, and other imposters is going to fool anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

And yes, the reviewer is correct. One of the cruelest things I have ever done is inspire the SFWA crowd to demolish their own awards by handing a Best Novel award or two to N… K… Yes, I knew “the indirect backlash and overcorrection” would happen. Yes, it was intentional. But no, I never imagined that they would do it THREE straight years in a row. That really exceeded my expectations.

The only thing that would have been funnier would have been if they’d actually followed through on their rhetoric and given an award to Chuck Tingle. But even that would have been less damaging than what they actually did.

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May the Fourth

Owen Benjamin comments on the nerdiest fake holiday since Kwanzaa was invented.

To celebrate May the 4th we should all appreciate what a Boomer institution Star Wars is:

  • Luke forsook his rural upbringing to take part in a political campaign he had no place in.
  • Leah was a strong independent feminist.
  • Obi-Wan was a childless hippie who devoted his life to eastern mysticism.
  • Han is a wandering deadbeat who lives with his dog and is obsessed with his car.
  • Darth Vader abandoned his family to pursue his career.
  • The robots are in an openly gay relationship.
  • Everyone treats the empire like the great evil while fully enjoying the comforts and protections it provides.

In retrospect, Star Wars may have been a much darker commentary on the realities of Clown World’s politics than most of us realized at the time.

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SF Freaks Gonna Freak

Dave McCarty, the head of the Hugo Awards, has been accused of sexual assault by several women in the literary ghetto formerly known as the science fiction community. The only real surprise is that children are not, as yet, reported to be involved:

There’s been a months-long campaign to discredit the Hugo Awards and Chengdu Worldcon from the establishment elites including cross-dresser John Scalzi, former SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal, and Neil Gaiman again, which has caused many who have been disillusioned with Worldcon and the Hugo Awards to laugh at how inept this group in charge of science fiction publishing has become.

It was revealed through a chain of emails that several participants were disqualified from the Hugo Awards for the very woke identity politics that were championed by this group, including orders to spy on the social media and political activities of the people involved. This led to mass apologies and several people stepping down from convention activities because of their corruption.

Now, Dave McCarty, who headed this Hugo Awards committee, is being accused of multiple instances of sexual assault.

Posting to the left-wing echo chamber BlueSky, artist Meg Frank said, “Dave McCarty is emotionally abusive, generally manipulative, and has sexually harassed myself and numerous others. I’ve spoken openly about this and made CoC complaints when possible. He is not a missing stair, he is a creepy handyman who has been using his previous community service as a shield. The hugo shit is awful, and I feel terrible for many people but he is worse than all that.”

Not to be outdone in the victim Olympics, Jesi Lipp quoted the post and said, “I’ve never made it a secret that he groped me at a Smofcon in 2011 and it has always been largely treated as a non-issue.”

Fandom Pulse seems skeptical. I simply note that longtime Hugo-centric SF fandom site File 770 is named, by the owner’s own admission, after what was either an orgy of sorts, or even more tragically, just the first party that the sort of losers whose social lives revolve around an annual science fiction event ever attended.

File 770 is named for the party in Room 770 at the 1951 Worldcon that upstaged the convention.

ROOM 770

— This was a St. Charles Hotel room registered to fans Max Keasler, Roger Sims, Rich Elsberry and Ed Kuss at the 9th Worldcon — nicknamed NOLacon — held in New Orleans in 1951. Frank Dietz had been hosting a room party which was asked to quiet down by a hotel detective, and Dietz resolved the matter by taking eveyone to room 770 circa 11:00 PM Saturday night, whereupon a massive party developed which lasted till 11:00 AM the next morning. Numerous fans drifted in and out, including the legendary Sam Moskowitz, and just possibly, Canada’s Norman G. Browne for whom this was his first convention.

Ain’t no party like a Hugo Party. And thank God for that!

Anyhow, I’m sure it’s no problem that giving another Best Novel award to an angry black woman devoid of any vestige of literary talent won’t solve.

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