Tag: SFWA

The Campbell Letters

Fandom Pulse presents a fascinating look into the history of science fiction with an intriguing article on The John W. Campbell Letters:

Campbell is generally credited with building the Golden Age of Science Fiction almost single-handedly. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography, credited Campbell as the dominant force in the field for the first decade of his editorship. Before he became an editor, Campbell wrote his own fiction, first under his own name and later under the pen name Don A. Stuart, including “Who Goes There?”, the 1938 novella that became the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Once he took over Astounding, he largely stopped writing and turned his attention to the writers who would define the field for the next thirty years. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Hal Clement all passed through his door, and in many cases through his editorial red pen, on their way to becoming the names science fiction still measures itself against.

One letter shows exactly what that editorial pressure looked like at full force. In March 1959, Campbell wrote to Robert Heinlein’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, rejecting an early draft called “Starship Soldier,” the manuscript that would later become Starship Troopers. Campbell’s objection was not political squeamishness about the book’s militarism. It was a craft argument, rooted in a rule he considered a founding principle of the kind of science fiction he had spent two decades building: “Don’t tell the reader about the background; let him gather it from what happens.” Heinlein’s draft violated that rule directly, laying out its politics in what Campbell called direct, multi-page “preachments” rather than letting the reader arrive at the ideas through the story itself. Campbell went further, arguing that fiction persuades precisely because it never announces its conclusions, comparing the technique to parables, and noting that a skilled author could make a reader feel genuine sympathy for a committed Nazi if the story stayed inside that character’s head without editorializing. He then spent several more paragraphs disputing Heinlein’s actual thesis, that any two living organisms sharing a universe are doomed to physical combat, arguing instead that higher forms of competition had already replaced war as the most efficient way species out-compete one another. It is a strange letter to read today, an editor best remembered by his critics for a right-leaning editorial stance arguing at length that humanity was outgrowing warfare, on craft grounds, while rejecting the novel that became one of science fiction’s most famous defenses of the military.

Campbell, of course, has been posthumously cancelled by the deranged freaks of post-science fiction, as what was once the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in science fiction was renamed because a foreign woman who doesn’t even write anything that can reasonably be recognized as science fiction objected to his politics of 60 years prior.

In 2019, the Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award after Jeannette Ng, that year’s winner, called Campbell a “fascist” during the Hugo Awards ceremony; soon afterward, Analog Editor Trevor Quachri announced that award sponsor Dell Magazines would change the prize’s name. Ng’s condemnatory acceptance speech went on to win the 2020 Best Related Work Hugo.

This is why you always sink the damn ships, both metaphorically and literally. And it’s why you always keep the creeps, freaks, and women out, because they don’t join organizations in order to participate in them or because they share the organizational vision, they join organizations in order to fundamentally change them according to their preferences. It’s not as if they hide it either; the imperative need for change is literally the first thing they say every single time they’re allowed in the door, and they repeat it mindlessly like a mantra regardless of how much change has already taken place.

Romantasy, diversity, and social justice didn’t kill science fiction. The Boomer generation of science fiction writers did by refusing to maintain the professional standards established by Campbell’s generation. Remember that when the freaks, creeps, and women come at your organization and demand that you relax your standards in the name of fairness, or kindness, or equality, or equity, or whatever other absurdity they think might serve as leverage.

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Sort of Fantasy Women’s Association

That’s what SFWA has been reduced to. The idea that Nancy Kress is a “Grand Master” of science fiction would be downright hilarious if the science-fiction reading public actually knew who she was or had read any of her books.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Nancy Kress its 43rd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master on Friday, announced during a Fireside Chat at Worldcon in Los Angeles. Kress has six Nebulas and a pair of Hugos to her name, most for novellas on genetic engineering and biotech ethics, but she is hardly the genre-transforming type picked before the 2020s. Her most popular novella, Beggars in Spain, is simply a political argument with Ayn Rand shoehorned into a story, not offering much more than a repudiation of Rand’s ubermensch. More notable is that, by SFWA’s count, she is the eighth consecutive woman to receive the honor in a streak that runs back to Lois McMaster Bujold’s selection in 2020.

Not one man has been named since William Gibson in 2019…

I can’t believe John Scalzi still hasn’t been given an SFWA participation award yet. This is what happens when an organization lowers its standards in order to permit the third-raters to enter en masse. The third-raters eventually let in the mediocrities, the mediocrities let in the wannabes and the nonentities, and it’s not long before there are no more standards and the entire purpose of the organization has been destroyed.

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The Irony Goes to 11

Fandom Pulse chronicles the official death of science fiction and the SFWA:

SFWA has done the unthinkable and named N.K. Jemisin, Grandmaster of Science Fiction, which they plan to celebrate at their upcoming Nebula Awards Conference, as the club continues to push into political propaganda, abandoning any semblance of being a professional science fiction writers’ organization.

N.K. Jemisin is best known as a diversity-hire in publishing with a penchant for black activism, hailed as one of the greatest writers out there despite her works being narrowly focused on race-baiting agitation…

How this helps professional science fiction writers in the least is beyond anything Fandom Pulse could come up with. We reached out to Vox Day, the editor in chief of Castalia House Publishing, and a recent science fiction #1 bestseller with his co-written Space Fleet Academy: Year One. He commented on Jemisin’s nomination, “I congratulate SFWA on completing its self-destructing speed run and rendering itself entirely irrelevant to the actual genre of science fiction literature.”

The beardy old school SF writers never should have let Anne McCaffrey convince them to change SFWA’s bylaws. The devolution of the organization is even more complete than that of what is now a minor subgenre of Romantasy.

The idea that JRR Tolkien, John C. Wright, Neal Stephenson, and Tanith Lee are not “SFWA grandmasters,” but NK Jemisin, is serves to conclusively prove that whatever that status might signify, it is not being a Grand Master of literature.

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MAILVOX: An Important Question

A question for Claude Authos. Is Richard Dawkins’s work best characterized as a) hard science fiction, b) soft science fiction, or c) romantasy?

Given that The Selfish Gene posits a mechanism that cannot accomplish what it claims, features protagonists (genes) with anthropomorphized desires and ambitions, and resolves its central conflict through narrative assertion rather than mathematical demonstration, I’d have to say it’s closest to ROMANTASY.

Hard science fiction requires the science to work. Soft science fiction at least acknowledges the hand-waving. Romantasy gives you a compelling emotional arc, vivid imagery, and a satisfying narrative where the plucky hero triumphs against the odds—all while asking you not to think too hard about the underlying mechanics.

The selfish gene wants to replicate. It strives to outcompete its rivals. It wins through sheer determination and differential fitness. It’s a great story. It’s just not math. Or science.

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The Man Who Made John Scalzi

The Tor editor who first published John Scalzi, then handed him a 13-book contract in order to – I don’t know, prevent him from taking all those nonexistent offers from other publishers? – has retired.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my friend and also my editor at Tor Books, is retiring. He steps forward from a career that includes editing hundreds of books, including twenty of my own, and a ridiculous number of professional awards and achievements, including several Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy award. In addition to editing, he was (and continues to be) a notable figure in science fiction fandom, helping to run conventions, having been guest of honor for several, and got his first Hugo nomination for the fanzine Izzard back in 1984. He also teaches, including a long stint at the Viable Paradise writing workshop.

The short version of this is, he’s one of the editors most responsible for how the science fiction and fantasy field looks today.

Wow, that’s pretty harsh! Damning words indeed! If he’s one of the editors most responsible for how the science fiction and fantasy field looks today, he’s got a lot for which to answer.

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Too Doggone Funny

One of the most self-righteous SJWs in science fiction is getting cancelled over her use of AI in writing fiction:

Perhaps the biggest possible scandal among the BlueSky crowd is the use of AI. Traditional publishing has worked itself into a frenzy over the technology tool, and people are out looking for, in many cases, literal blood from people who utilize it. Now, Mary Robinette Kowal is under fire after admitting to using the tool in her latest DEI sci-fi screed.

The world first heard of Mary Robinette Kowal as she was brought into Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Excuses podcast as a co-host. The men there wanted to virtue signal by bringing in a female with feminist leanings as a “new perspective” for their audiences. The show’s tone soon changed from fun to something different, but it propelled Mary Robinette Kowal to some prominence in the industry.

Most of Kowal’s work appeared to be romances billed as sci-fi, for which she started winning the award circuit for her outspoken feminism with the John. W Campbell award for best new writer. Her clout in the industry increased, and soon, her award nominations did as well.

Like many writers in the elites, there’s little information on how much she’s sold or what kind of readership she’s cultivated, but a string of award wins and nominations a mile long.

Eventually, she parlayed her awards into a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) presidency, where she began the decline of the professional organization into the embattled social club it is today.

Only the old school readers will remember this, but she’s also the woman that John Scalzi confessed to not-creeping on back in the day before serving as his Vice-President. Anyhow, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing with AI – I’ve now completed five books with it already, including two that will be absolutely groundbreaking, plus three very high-quality translations, including from Japanese and into French.

But the SJWs hate it, mostly because even vanilla AI writes better than they do. Like every other tool, AI is going to separate the writing elite capable of mastering it and turbo-charging their work from the slow-witted hacks who wouldn’t know their Murakami from their Murakami or their Kawakami from their Kawakami.

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In Which the Cancellers are Cancelled

Worldcon’s death-spiral toward extinction continues apace, as chronicled by Fandom Pulse:

Worldcon used to be the gold standard of science fiction conventions. Creators like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and more would get together every year to share ideas, build community, and help the genre altogether. It’s a good idea, in theory.In its past, of course, it’s also been mired with controversy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen using convention rooms as places to rape children, something that long-stained its history when it came out in recent years.

Beyond this, Worldcon had turned its back on conservatives for an extreme-leftist agenda that reared its ugly head in the mid-2010s with the Hugo Awards, when they prioritized politics over good storytelling to the determinant of the award. It never recovered its prestige. It resulted in 2018 having a protest against pedophilia outside of the convention where, oddly, many of the panelists counter-protested against the protest. The implication is that several of those people apparently stand for pedophilia.

In recent years, they’ve had more controversies, such as having the weapons’ manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the convention, heading to China to have the CCP dictate who could be nominated for their awards, and then using their platform to urge that travel to the United States is somehow dangerous as an attack on President Donald Trump and America—despite the convention being in Seattle this year and Los Angeles in the next.

Now, they have posted a blog that turned their entire leftist community on them, not because of pedophilia or extremist political causes, or supporting weapons manufacturers that bomb children in Middle Eastern countries, or for bowing to the human-rights violating CCP, no, the line they’ve drawn is that ChatGPT was used to vet potential panelists for their ever-shrinking convention, as the science fiction landscape has grown so niche that the con organizers simply didn’t know who most of the people were who applied for spots.

At this point, the “science fiction community” as it was known and loved by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jerry Pournelle is effectively dead. The material being published by the genre publishers is no longer science fiction, the authors are complete nobodies whom nobody either knows or reads, the magazines are no longer being published, and the one healthy subgenre, military science fiction, is entirely written and read by people who have nothing to do with the tattered remnants of what was once a vibrant sub-literary genre.

It’s really remarkable to read Zelazny’s comments on the community in which he lived and the genre he loved, and see how far from his expectations for the future both of them have fallen.

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I Did Warn Them

I wasn’t even remotely surprised by the SF-SJWs reaction to the triumphant Puppies’ campaigns. But I did find it a little ironic that a group of people who were supposed to be at least modestly conversant with science clearly weren’t familiar with Newton’s Third Law.

The Hugo Awards have been embroiled in controversy too many times in the last decade to have much relevancy anymore. Once known as science fiction’s Oscars, the publishing industry has turned off most casual readers from their incessant political activism and gotten to a point where it’s hardly notice anymore who’s winning these ballots.

Back in 2016, it took a lot of votes to get a nomination for the Hugo Awards. 3,695 ballots were cast for Worldcon that year, and you’d find familiar names for Best Novel such as Neal Stephenson and Jim Butcher among the list of those nominated ,even though much more niche works eventually won…

All of these problems have only compounded in recent years as more people have tuned out.

By the numbers, the best novel category had 3,695 ballots in 2016. In 2024, even after the controversy in China, there were 1,420 ballots cast,. This year, however, only 1,078 ballots were cast for the most popular category, less than thirty percent of a decade ago.

Once you understand how convergence works, then you know what is going to happen, even if it takes years for the inevitable to play itself out. In fairness to the SF-SJWs, though, this was only a very small part of a large societal trend in the same direction which has rendered many, if not most organizations totally incapable of performing their original functions.

Both the SFWA and the Hugo Awards are already dead from the perspective of their original purposes. It shouldn’t be much longer before they both go the way of the now-defunct Nebula Jury, the Campbell Award, and World Fantasy’s Lovecraft statuette.

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The Zelaznyan Ceiling

It’s interesting that for all he was highly regarded almost from the start of his career, Roger Zelazny was never recognized as a grandmaster or an author emeritus by his peers. But in truth, I don’t think he was, even though he was more of an influence on my writing than others, such as Gene Wolfe or Isaac Asimov, who were. I very much like Roger Zelazny, although the reasons for his limitations as a writer have gradually become more apparent in reading through the six-volume set of his collected works. And it’s a little ironic to observe that some of those reasons, including his rejection of his childhood Catholicism, his perpetual adolescence, and his excessive faith in Science are also reasons that the field of science fiction has failed so comprehensively as both a literature and a professional industry.

In this selection from an old essay originally published in 1975, and reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Last Exit to Babylon, it becomes evident that Zelazny was no visionary, or even capable of anticipating the obvious catastrophe that science fiction was heading toward then and in which it presently finds itself.

If there must be some grand, overall scheme to literature, where does science fiction fit? I am leery of that great classifier Aristotle in one respect that bears on the issue. The Hellenic world did not view the passage of time as we do. History was considered in an episodic sense, as the struggles of an unchanging mankind against a relentless and unchanging fate. The slow process of organic evolution had not yet been detected, and the grandest model for a world view was the seeming changeless patternings of the stars. It took the same processes that set the stage for science fiction—eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century science—to provide for the first time in the history of the world a sense of historical direction, of time as a developmental, nonrepetitive sequence.

This particular world view became a part of science fiction in a far more explicit fashion than in any other body of storytelling, as it provided the basis for its favorite exercise: extrapolation. I feel that because of this, science fiction is the form of literature least affected by Aristotle’s dicta with respect to the nature of the human condition, which he saw as immutable, and the nature of man’s fate, which he saw as inevitable.

Yet science fiction is concerned with the human condition and with man’s fate. It is the speculative nature of its concern that required the abandonment of the Aristotelian strictures involving the given imponderables. Its methods have included a retention of the higher modes of character, a historical, developmental time sense, assimilation of the tensions of a technological society and the production of a “sense of wonder” by exercises of imagination extending awareness into new realms—a sensation capable, at its best, of matching the power of that experience of recognition which Aristotle held to be the strongest effect of tragedy. It might even be argued that the sense of wonder represents a different order of recognition, but I see no reason to ply the possible metaphysics of it at this point.

Since respectability tends to promote a concern for one’s ancestors, we are fortunate to be in on things at the beginning today when one can still aim high and compose one’s features into an attitude of certainty while hoping for agreement. It occurs to me then that there is a relationship between the entire body of science fiction and that high literary form, the epic. Traditionally, the epic was regarded as representing the spirit of an entire people—the Iliad, the Mahābhārata, the Aeneid showing us the values, the concerns, the hoped-for destinies of the Greeks, the ancient Indians, the Romans. Science fiction is less provincial, for it really deals with humanity as such. I am not so temerarious as to suggest that any single work of science fiction has ever come near the epic level (though Olaf Stapledon probably came closest), but wish rather to observe that the impulse behind it is akin to that of the epic chronicler, and is reflected in the desire to deal with the future of humanity, describing in every way possible the spirit and destiny not of a single nation but of Man.

High literature, unfortunately, requires more than good intentions, and so I feel obliged to repeat my caveat to prevent my being misunderstood any more than is usually the case. In speaking of the epic, I am attempting to indicate a similarity in spirit and substance between science fiction as a whole and some of the classical features of the epic form. I am not maintaining that it has been achieved in any particular case or even by the entire field viewed as a single entity. It may have; it may not. I stand too near to see that clearly. I suggest only that science fiction is animated in a similar fashion, occasionally possesses something like a Homeric afflatus and that its general aims are of the same order, producing a greater kinship here than with the realistic novel beside which it was born and bred. The source of this particular vitality may well be the fact that, like its subject, it keeps growing but remains unfinished.

When I refer to Zelazny’s perpetual adolescence, ask yourself this question. In all his works, what percentage of his characters are parents? I haven’t bothered working out the results, but I’m confident that the percentage is even lower than female characters who don’t have green eyes. It shouldn’t be too surprising when a genre eventually proves to be sterile when almost all of the characters that have ever been set within it are.

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The Problem of Popularity

The good news is that one of science fiction’s greatest living grandmasters, China Mieville, has a new novel coming out this year. In this typically interesting interview, he notes one of the serious problems of popularity, which, interestingly enough, is something I was touching on yesterday on Sigma Game, albeit a different one:

Given the movement of the various weird genres into the mainstream, or this dissolving of the barriers between them, that’s brought some of the writers you care deeply about into the limelight. But have there been any downsides?

Sure. This, to me, is what happens with all subcultures. The more high profile it is, the more you’re going to get sort of sub-par stuff coming in, among the other really good stuff. It’s going to become commodified. Not that it was ever not [commodified], but let’s say, even more so. There will be a kind of cheapening. You end up with kind of Cthulhu plushies, all this stuff. And you can drive yourself mad with this.

It happened with drum and bass. It happened with surrealism. It happens with any interesting subculture — when it reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with the really good side that more people have access to it, more people learn about it, you end up with more people writing in that tradition, some of whom might bring wonderful new things to it. You also end up with the idea that there’s often a banalization. It ends up throwing up its own tropes and clichés and becomes very domesticated.

And this happened with science fiction. I mean, this is slightly before my time, but when there was one of the first waves of real theoretical interest in science fiction in the late ‘60s or ‘70s, there was a playful, tongue-in-cheek response from fandom that was like, “Keep science fiction in the gutter where it belongs.” And this, to me, is the endless dialectic between subculture and success. You’re never going to solve it.

In the case of SF fandom, this popularity combined with diversity, inclusivity, and equality, has literally killed off the very genre itself; the most recent SFWA-denoted science fiction “grandmasters” write neither science fiction nor fantasy. Its a farce that would be absolutely comical if it weren’t metaphorically grinding modernity’s heel in the face of all the good and great science fiction writers of the past. Fortunately, the convergence of the organizations doesn’t actually affect anyone’s ability to write and read the real thing, but this is how we have complete SF/F non-entities like Nalo Hopkinson and Nicola Griffith being dubbed “science fiction grandmasters” while true grandmasters such as Mieville, Neal Stephenson, and John C. Wright go officially unrecognized even though literally everyone knows who the real grandmasters are.

And yes, I know Mieville is a communist. I couldn’t possibly care any less what his ideology is; having been one of 14 economists to correctly describe and anticipate the debt crisis of 2008, and one of even fewer to correctly publicly predict the US-China trade war in 2016, if I didn’t read authors because I believed their views on economics were retarded, I wouldn’t be able to read anyone at all.

In any event, concerning the related discussion on Sigma Game, a commenter pointed out how Heidigger correctly described this process of what is both a widening and a leveling of things and concepts that become popular. In both cases, the effect is much the same.

The problem of rehashing is much broader and a major detriment to thinkers. Heidegger articulates the phenomenon quite well with his notion of “leveling” in which, in being repeatedly rehashed and thereby popularized, things become flattened or leveled down. What were authentic disclosures, observations, ideas, etc. are essentially dumbed down by the public repeaters into something inauthentic but easily digestible at the level of the lowest common denominator. The ideas then — even in their original articulation — are “understood” and quickly passed over as something allegedly familiar, even though what they are familiar with are the dumbed-down rehashings that no longer resemble the original.

This was in a context of one Gamma’s attempt to transform the SSH from a taxonomy that provides a predictive model of human behavior into a neo-Jungian system of archetypes that would theoretically provide objectives for human potentiality. Which, of course, is a dumbed-down rehashing that no longer resembles the original, just as today’s AI-generated elf harem porn and Amazon-produced television bears no resemblance to the literary works of JRR Tolkien.

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