Tag: SFWA

No likely futures

I’ve pointed out many times, and demonstrated on more than one occasion, that the Left is considerably less intelligent and educated than it believes itself to be. To further demonstrate the conceit, dishonesty, and self-deception of the Left, consider Damien Walter’s inept responses to criticism of his most recent hit piece aka Guardian column.

Commenter:  Not quite sure I agree with the conclusion “The future is queer”. Given the current balance of power in the world, it must as equally be likely that future generations may revert to traditional gender roles, however advanced the tech gets. For example, in 75 to 100 years, it’s quite easy to imagine a society which regards historical sexual freedom as a contributing factor to the failure of our capitalist paradise. Revisionism which twists historical events is not new, and it’s entirely possible some future government/state will twist our present when it’s their history. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the progressive liberalism talked about here affects only a tiny percentage of the world’s population. When the Chinese buy up the UK in a fire sale 50 years from now, how much mind are they going to pay such freedoms?

DamienGWalter: Of course, there are no absolutes when it comes to the future. But putting aside “collapse” scenarios, I can’t see any likely future where gender isn’t radically changed from its current norms. I think expecting otherwise would be like expecting feudal social structures to carry over in to industrial society. We can already see the structural changes being wrought by technology, the social changes are then almost determined.

There are 83 countries where homosexuality is criminalized. There are 20 countries where homogamy has been at least partially legalized. The countries where homosexuality is criminalized have growing populations. The countries where homogamy is legal have declining populations. And yet, Mr. Walter can’t see the possibility of a future where the larger trend is in line with demographic growth.  No wonder he is a mere SF wannabe rather than a bona fide SF writer; his imagination is too limited.

Any doubts that he was engaging in pure rhetoric are answered in this exchange:

Commenter: It’s Larry Correia being discussed, so let’s use his handy Internet Arguing Checklist to examine this article. Points #1 (Skim until Offended), #4 (Disregard Inconvenient Facts), and #5 (Make S——t Up) are fairly well represented here. In particular, compare Damien Walter’s misrepresentation of Correia’s article:

    But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”.

to an excerpt from the core of Larry’s actual essay:

    “Now, before we continue I need to establish something about my personal writing philosophy. Science Fiction is SPECULATIVE FICTION. That means we can make up all sorts of crazy stuff and we can twist existing reality to do interesting new things in order to tell the story we want to tell. I’m not against having a story where there are sexes other than male and female or neuters or schmes or hirs or WTF ever or that they flip back and forth or shit… robot sex. Hell, I don’t know. Write whatever tells your story.

    But the important thing there is STORY. Not the cause of the day. STORY.

For extra entertainment, read Larry’s brilliant counter-fisking of Jim C Hines’s post.

DamienGWalter: Counter-fisking? Hmmm…sounds kinky.

Deep and insightful stuff there. But Walter gave his propagandistic game away in an earlier essay: “The challenge for writers of science fiction today is not to repeat the same dire warnings we have all already heard, or to replicate the naive visions of the genres golden age, but to create visions of the future people can believe in. Perhaps the next Nineteen Eighty-Four, instead of confronting us with our worst fear, will find the imagination to show us our greatest hope.”

What is his greatest hope? Based on his recent column, a queer future. Kathryn Cramer of Tor.com correctly pegged Walter as a propagandist rather than a writer with anything to say about the human condition on Tor.com.

“Walter says he wants SF to do more than “reflect” the world, but rather fiction that seeks to “influence” it.”

And that is what fundamentally separates Pink SF/F from Blue SF/F. We tell stories to entertain the reader and make him think. They print propaganda to lecture the reader and stop him from thinking. We ask “what if?” They assert “it will be so!”

Dogmatic and dishonest

Ross Douthat points out the moral defect being exhibited by a corporation and a university in the New York Times, which happens to be identical to that previously demonstrated by a writer’s organization:

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. … Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. …”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements … are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

It was precisely the same pattern of behavior with the SFWA. The rhetoric was fuzzy and muddled, and the accusations were incoherent. No actual reason was ever given for the purging of the nameless member; if I had not announced the identity of the expelled member on my blog, no one outside the inner circle of the organization would have even known who had been successfully targeted for removal by the SFWA president and his obedient Board.

The reason for the deceit is twofold; it is first necessary to preserve the self-conceit of the individuals involved. They do not wish to admit that they are hypocrites who are failing to live up to their professed ideals. It is no different than the reason priests who commit child abuse, teachers who have affairs with their students, and con men who perpetrate frauds are reluctant to confess to their misdeeds even after they are caught red-handed; they are ashamed of their idealistic failures and seek to hide those failures from the knowledge of those who will judge them for it.

And second, the self-deception is vital because admitting their failures means sacrificing the moral high ground in criticizing other organizations and losing their ability to hold other organizations accountable for doing the same thing they are doing.

Both reasons are why it is vital to continue to flaunt their actions in their faces, without mercy, until they admit what they have done and make an open and public choice between their supposed ideals and their ideological dogma. SFWA thought it was marginalizing me by purging me from its ranks, but instead, they elevated my stature, increased my readership, delineated the ideological lines in SF/F, and handed every critic of their dishonesty and dogma an effective weapon to use against them until they either a) come out of the closet concerning their ideology, or b ) correct their self-destructive course.

I think the interesting question to ask here is not why these organizations are behaving in this morally defective fashion, but rather, why now?

Another hit piece

Lest you wonder about the tangible reality of the Blue SF/F- Pink SF/F divide, observe that Damien Walter has penned another hit piece in The Guardian aimed at a right-wing SF author, this time Larry Corriea, entitled “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer“.

Does it now? That is an odd title, especially considering that a queer future is no future at all, given what we know about biology and human reproduction. But let us permit Mr. Walter speak his piece:

I spent most of my youth being told to get a haircut. As a boy of slight build who usually had hair down around my shoulders, I looked a bit too much like a girl for the comfort of the home counties. Society gets angry when gender roles are blurred, precisely because those roles are a fragile act put on with clothes, hairstyles and makeup. If they weren’t enforced, clearly defined gender roles would not exist.

I take comfort in the idea that most of the young men telling others to get a haircut today are rushing home to play at being buxom dark elf warrior maidens in World of Warcraft. Gamer culture has gained a bad reputation for misogyny, but it seems male gamers are more than a little curious about playing out female gender roles. It makes perfect sense. The real world enforces gender roles, but virtual worlds let gamers express the feminine parts of themselves that don’t fit in with their masculine identity.

Solipsism alert! Translation: Effeminate little boy is treated as if he’s a freak and a queer because he looks like a girl. Spends the rest of his life attempting to get back at society because he can’t figure out how to get a haircut and act like the other boys. And apparently he knows so little about online games that he doesn’t realize most male gamers play female characters because: a) if they’re going to spend hours looking at their character’s ass, they would prefer it to be an attractive female one, and, b) people give female characters lots of free stuff.

As proof of the fact that Walter simply doesn’t know what he is talking about, I note that while there are High Elves, Night Elves, and Blood Elves in World of Warcraft, there are no dark elves. Nor are any of the elves “buxom”.

The kind of virtual worlds that video games allow us to enter have been commonplace in science fiction for decades. But the way that the virtual inevitably blurs the representation of sex and gender is never explicitly dealt with. Science fiction is torn between its higher mission to explore the future, and its lower function as mass entertainment. Deep Space Nine may be the gayest Star Trek, but in common with most of sci-fi’s major franchises, it still keeps homosexuality and queerness of all kinds off screen.

Science fiction novels have gone much further in exploring queer futures. From the 1960s onwards New Wave authors like Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin and Thomas Disch began to push forward the representation of LGBT themes in science fiction. Russ’s 1975 novel The Female Man used the tool of alternative universes to explore how gender roles are socially constructed. As liberal democracies like Britain welcome their first gay marriages, queer visions of the future look prescient. But despite the success of these authors, SF still clings to an unrealistically straight vision of the future.

First, SF is rife with a broad variety of sexual freaks, fairies, and flamers. If one troubles to count up the number of sexually abnormal characters in SF, there are almost surely more than the two percent that they represent in the real world. Second, Walter’s article is parochial in the extreme. As countries from southern Africa to northern Eurasia criminalize homosexuality, it defies belief to claim that the sexual libertinism that has belatedly infested the demographically dying West is likely to represent the future, much less is certain to do so.

When author and historian Alex Dally Macfarlane made a call earlier this year for a vision of post-binary gender in SF,
her intelligent argument was met with predictably intractable ignorance
from conservative sci-fi fans. For writers and fans like Larry Correia,
whose virulent attack on MacFarlane was excellently dissected by Jim C Hines,
sex is a biological imperative and the idea of gender as a social
construct is a damn liberal lie! But Correia boils it down to a much
simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors
must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they
want to be “commercial”.

It is readily apparent that Walter is not only a dishonest propagandist, but he is an inept SF author as well. He clearly violates the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule here, as he first claims that Macfarlane’s piece was intelligent – read it, it wasn’t – then claims that it was met with “ignorance” while refusing to provide any actual examples of said “ignorance”. Notice that while he describes Larry’s critique as a “virulent attack”, he fails to link to it, instead linking to what he inaccurately describes as McCreepy’s excellent dissection – read it, it wasn’t.

Which is of course nonsense. The science fiction novels of Iain M
Banks were bestsellers many times over, in part because the future they
explored was openly queer. Citizens of Banks’ future society the Culture
have the ability to change their sex at will, and frequently shift
between sexes and gender roles. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 became both a
bestseller and multiple award winner with a vision of the future that
included fluid non-binary gender. And Nicola Griffith’s historical epic
Hild, nominated for this year’s Nebula awards by members of the SFWA, is
built around a bisexual protagonist.

The best science
fiction literature explores a future of fluid gender identity that is
much closer than many imagine. Genetic researchers have already
discovered the two genes that battle to determine the sex of every human,
opening the possibility of biological sex change in adult humans at the
genetic level. Combine these scientific advances with the changing
structure of our society and the gender shifts of virtual worlds and,
far from being the lifestyle of a minority, queerness looks very much
like the mainstream culture of the future. If science fiction has a role
at all, it’s to reflect that reality, not deny it.

First, the novels of Iain M Banks were not bestsellers because the futures they explored were infested with homosexuality. Indeed, sexuality in the Culture was largely irrelevant in light of the irrelevancy of biology, the human body, and indeed, the human mind. Banks’s future was primarily “queer” in that the AI-controlled Culture was sterile and, like Star Trek, required interactions with societies outside the Culture to provide any drama.

Nicola Griffith’s Hild tends to prove what Larry was saying: despite the benefit of its Nebula nomination and the Guardian coverage, it is presently ranked 42,234 on Amazon. Hardly evidence that “queerness looks very much
like the mainstream culture of the future”.

But his various moral and intellectual failings notwithstanding, the most offensive thing that Walter does in this article is question if science fiction has a role at all. It does have a role, an important role, but Walter, being one of the morally vacuous Autumn People described so vividly by Ray Bradbury, will never understand what it is. And the idea that science fiction’s only possible role is to reflect reality is downright laughable; if that were the case, so much for these common SF tropes: faster-than-light travel, alien life, secular societies, peaceful race relations, benign world government, and, of course, legal homosexuality.

So you see, we’re not the ones drawing the battle line. Though I am, as it happens, quite content to see Pink SF/F go headlong in this direction. Because if it does, it won’t be in the mainstream for long. And we’ll be more than happy to pick up the shattered pieces of what was once their market.

Combative and confrontational

Since we are all about the evidence here at VP, be it scientific, documentary, or testimonial, here is a documented example of the sort of thing that a certain Baen author pointed out a certain Tor author is prone to overlooking on the part of the Tor editors when he is busy on pinkshirt patrol policing the behavior of other SF/F publishers.

The Baen author wrote: “Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and
divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often
combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much
division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective
and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls
in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?”

Then someone sent me this little rant, courtesy of Teresa Neobatrachia Hayden, as she threatened those who dared to criticize her husband, the self-declared racist, Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

There’s been a big LJ thrash recently, one of those maelstroms of online
stupidity that take on a life of their own. All kinds of good people
got trashed, starting with Elizabeth Bear. Patrick got involved when he
posted some consoling remarks to Lisa Spangenberg. In the course of
those remarks, he observed that (1) some people are stupid; and (2)
some people don’t argue as well as others. The mob took this personally,
and lit into him.

What would you expect from a group that’s
self-selected for agreement with the statement, “I’m stupid, and I don’t
argue well”? Things got extremely ugly.

I wonder whether any of
those draggletailed loudmouths have noticed that Patrick has now deleted
his entire Live Journal, all the way back to the beginning. I doubt
they have. They don’t strike me as the sort to go back and see the
damage they’ve done. Patrick has as usual taken them seriously; whereas
they, knowing themselves better than he does, will have known they
weren’t worth listening to, and assumed they’d had no effect.

I
tender them my congratulations. Whatever good there was in Patrick’s LJ
is gone now. Those members of the mob who actually wanted someone to
listen to them now have one less person to do it. The junior literary
critics and wanna-be writers have lost one of the central editors in
science fiction from their conversation. And if any of that lot
professes to care about Patrick personally — please understand I’m not
rating that probability very high at the moment — it should be obvious
to them what kind of effect they’ve had.

I know Patrick better
than anyone else. This is serious damage. The nithings who’ve hurt him
will have moved on to some other inane topic by now. There’s nothing
worthwhile I can do to them. It wouldn’t take away his hurt — and
besides, they wouldn’t understand most of what I had to say to them.

One
other issue: when Patrick and I first registered our Live Journal
accounts, it never occurred to us to use anything other than our real
names — or rather, our real initials, which are easily traced to us,
and which we’ve used as userIDs in other forums where our identities are
or were known. Has it not occurred to the people attacking him that
they can say anything, whereas what they say about him will show up
whenever someone Googles his name? In terms of public reputation,
they’re playing with Monopoly money, and he’s playing with the real
thing.

Some of the people who are using false names are known to
him. Some of them are known to or evident to me. In those cases, I’ve
told Patrick who they really are. It’s only fair. Just on the other side
of the boundary for people whose identities he can figure out are
people whom he can almost figure out: this one is a VP student. This one
is someone he knows at conventions. This one is a reviewer he’s had
dealings with. And so forth.

Do any of those safely pseudonymous assholes ever stop to reflect that if he can tell they’re a former VP student, but not which one,
all former VP students become “people who may be traducing me on LJ at
this very moment”? The same thing goes for people he knows from
conventions, or wanna-be writers who might submit something to him.
Entire classes of people become potential attackers. That’s why I
identify everyone I can: it exculpates everyone else in that class.

Those
of you I can’t identify are not off the hook. I suggest that you never
seek to take credit under your real name for anything you’ve done or
written under your LJ pseudonym, because it’s unlikely that I will ever
forget you or what you’ve done.

Did Toni Weisskopf ever threaten anyone in the industry or publicly question the extent of their sexual experience? Alternatively, did Mr. Scalzi ever wax outraged and hold his very own editor to public account? Meanwhile, the overweight amphibian croaks about hurt… what about the terrible pain her husband inflicted on us People of Color? What about the FeelBad he has caused us? What about the way our tender feelings are bruised, even years later, by Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s cold declaration of racism?

It certainly explains a lot about the rot in SF/F over the last three decades to know that this pair of half-witted lunatics were editors at the largest publisher in the genre. Between them and the Peter Jacksons, it is a tossup as to which marriage was more disastrous for modern science fiction and fantasy.

Speaking of Mr. Nielsen Hayden’s reputation, I find it more than a little amusing that one has only to type “patrick nielsen h” into Google and the fourth autocomplete suggestion is “patrick nielsen hayden racist”. Despite all the pointing and shrieking that has been directed at me over the years, the accusation doesn’t even come up that quickly for me. What a grand editorial legacy to leave behind: racism and McRapey.

SFF Net separates from SFWA

This is interesting news in light of the number of professional writers who have quietly been leaving SFWA:

Steven Gould, President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Jeffry Dwight, President of Greyware Automation Products, Inc. announced that they are severing the formal ties between the writer’s organization and the legacy SFWA discussion discussion boards still hosted at SFF Net (a Greyware service).

Gould said, “SFF Net was the host of SFWA’s online home for many years. We are incredibly grateful for the years of support from Jeffry and his team. When SFWA moved over to managing its own domain at sfwa.org in 2009, the organization continued to maintain the old discussion boards for a transition period. The SFWA board of directors were discussing the appropriate time to separate when I received Jeffry’s email on the same subject.”

Dwight said, “SFF Net initiated this separation. We have no immediate plans to shut off the private.sfwa hierarchy, nor to remove access from those who already have it. SFF Net will continue to offer discussion areas to professional writers, but based on each individual’s writing credentials rather than membership in SFWA or any similar groups. Our goal is for the transition from sff.private.sfwa to sff.private.pro to be both gradual and gentle, so that no one is disenfranchised.

It’s a smart move by SFF Net. Being tied to SFWA prevented non-SFWA writers like me and many others from participating on SFF Net’s formerly active pro writing forums. And many of the most experienced writers who were already there simply never migrated to the SFWA forums, which were mostly infested by the activist junior members who don’t actually write or publish much science fiction.

It won’t be surprising if within six months, there are two- or three-times as many pro writers active at SFF Net than there are in the SFWA forums. Even though their individual credential requirements will probably be more stringent as well. And thus SFWA’s slide into further irrelevance begins….

UPDATE: This book feature from SFWA.org says it all about the modern SFWA. It’s now the Romance Writers of America’s little league.

FEATURED BOOK: “Post-apocalyptic biopunk romance from the RWA RITA Award nominated author of GHOST PLANET. Coming from Tor in April 2014.

The problem of engagement

Toni Weisskopf, the Baen Books editor and one of the voices of sanity in traditional SF/F publishing, provides her perspective on the inevitability of war between the rabbits of Pink SF/F and the rationalists of Blue SF/F in a guest post at Sarah’s place:

The latest fooforaws in the science fiction world have served to highlight the vast cultural divide we are seeing in the greater American culture. SF, as always, very much reflects that greater culture.

It is also nothing new. When fandom was first starting there was the “Great Exclusion Act” when a group of young, excitable, fanboys attempted to spread their political/fannish feud propaganda at the first Worldcon in New York, and were not only prevented from doing so but not allowed back into the con. All fandom was aflame with war! (The fact that this line is a cliché is also a clue that fandom is not, and never has been, a calm peaceful sea of agreement.)

The reason we have a fandom to disunite now, is because calmer heads prevailed. Bob Tucker in particular, with intelligence and humor, led fandom to the idea that it ought have nothing to do with greater world politics, but should concentrate on the thing we all loved, that being science fiction. (Mind you, his sympathies were with the ones who were excluded, but he was able to overcome his own political inclinations for the best of fandom.)

The fact that fandom as an open culture survived more than seventy years is a testament to the power of that simple, uniting concept. That we are once again looking to be rift by a political divide was perhaps inevitable. But as fandom has grown, expanded and diluted itself, we may have won the überculture wars and lost our heart.  We have not been able to transmit this central precept to new fans. Geeks are chic, but somehow we’ve let the fuggheads win.

And, from my observations, this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of any kind of fandom, from tattoos to swords to us. There is a thing people like. Thing people make initial contact with each other to discuss things and thingishness. At some point a woman (and it’s usually women, no matter what the thing) organizes gatherings, and thing fandom grows bigger and better. At some point, the people who care not about things, but merely about being a big fish in a small sea, squeeze out the thing people. Sometimes thing fandom just dies, sometimes it fissures and the process is recreated. So the fuggheads always win. The only question is how long can we delay their inevitable triumph?

Forget delaying them. I agree with what she is saying about the inevitability of the attempted infiltrations, but I very much disagree that their triumph is inevitable. We don’t have to let them in. We don’t have to let them oh-so-helpfully volunteer to make things easier for us and take those weighty responsibilities off our shoulders.

And most of all, we don’t have to sit back and lament the fact that they’ve taken over and ruined the organizations and institutions that we used to love. We can walk away without looking back, leave them to their inevitable implosion, and build new and better ones. But we have to learn from the failures of our predecessors. When the bureaucrats and the activists and the whiners start in with their usual routine about access and fairness and reaching out, we need to kick THEM out, not foolishly listen to them and let in the destroyers.

Don’t throw pearls before swine. Don’t attempt to engage rationally with madmen and fools.

#SoButthurt

The humor, it simply refuses to stop happening:

The outcry over LonCon’s decision
to ask controversial British talk show host Jonathan Ross to host the
Hugos just won’t end. After a week filled with accusations of bullying
and harassment on all sides, a new wave of backlash swept the sci-fi community Thursday evening after one noted author used the wrong Twitter hashtag…. The convention apologized to everyone and apparently satisfied no one: First to Ross and his family for the harassment they received, then to those who were upset that Ross was chosen, and to those who were upset he would not be hosting. Additionally, the convention seemed to abjure full responsibility for the decision, claiming that “we did not consult widely or promptly enough within our own Committee or with external parties.”

This seems to contradict a now-private statement by one committee member that she argued with the chairs for days over their decision, and resigned in protest after gathering that the decision was not up for debate.

Many members of the sci-fi community felt the apology rang false and accused LonCon of catering to Ross (and to celebrity author Neil Gaiman, who Ross claimed asked him to host). Others blamed easily-offended Americans for the brouhaha, despite the time zone difference. And still others blamed social media for causing the whole situation to spiral out of control.

Social media has continued to drive the debate in the days since Ross’s withdrawal, and it has predictably catalyzed the latest turn of events. Perhaps as a result of what writer Chuck Wendig called “social PTSD,” last night, bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss, known for his Kingkiller Chronicle series, asked the community to simmer down:

    Um, guys? Can we all stop being dialed-to-11 offended about everything? Then being offended that people are offended we’re offended? Please?
    — Pat Rothfuss (@PatrickRothfuss) March 6, 2014

    @wilw I know these conversations are important. But it feels like I’m awash in an endless sea of butthurt all the time these days. #SoWeary
    — Pat Rothfuss (@PatrickRothfuss) March 6, 2014

Twitter user Rose Fox took the hashtag and issued a sarcastic response:

    You know what I’m #SoWeary of? Talking about “being offended” like it’s a bad choice. As though there’s something wrong with giving a shit.
    — Dandy McFopperson (@rosefox) March 7, 2014

Rothfuss may have just been trying to soothe the community. Instead, he drew a number of raised eyebrows as the sci-fi community weighed in.

    .@PatrickRothfuss That’s a good attitude to take toward one’s own behavior, but a problematic one to apply to less powerful folks. + @wilw
    — P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) March 6, 2014

    .@PatrickRothfuss + You or I can get a lot of instant attention to a problem if we choose. Most people have to raise their voices. @wilw
    — P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) March 6, 2014

    @pnh @PatrickRothfuss @wilw And even when we do, we’re called shrill, or hysterical. See the hash tag #iaskedpolitely
    — Beth Bernobich (@beth_bernobich) March 7, 2014

The ironic thing is that the freak show these freakshows put on is more entertaining than anything they write. FAR more entertaining. Someone used the wrong Twitter hashtag? LET THE PURGING BEGIN!!!!

It’s more than a little amusing to see the Tor editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, leaping in and wagging his finger as he desperately tries to stay on the good side of the rabid rabbits. It’s only a matter of time before they turn on him and McRapey, their best efforts to disguise the fact that they are Powerful White Men notwithstanding. McRapey can lie low and wear dresses, and Nielsen Hayden can cleverly feign marriage to an amphibious abhuman to try to hide the fact that they possesses alabaster male sex organs, but eventually someone is going to notice.

I would add #freakshow to this post, but since I’ve already added #SFWA, that would be redundant.

Sounds just like SFWA

What is happening in Birmingham, England is pretty much what happened over the last 20 years at the SF/F publishers, and what is happening right now in SFWA:

Islamic fundamentalists are allegedly plotting to convert Birmingham schools so that children are taught according to strict Islamic codes by ousting teachers through a dirty tricks campaign and replacing them with radicals. The city council and the Birmingham Mail have received documents which purport to show that jihadists – or those fighting against non-Muslims – are targeting schools and orchestrating false allegations against staff, including non-Muslims, in an operation dubbed Trojan Horse.

The SFWA knows all about false allegations; it has an entire report full of them. Notice that even on Wikipedia, the SFWA action is falsely reported.

“In June, Beale used the SFWA Twitter feed to post several controversial links to his blog, in which he called an African-American author a “half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog.”. After complaints from members, in August, the SFWA Board announced that they were expelling Beale as a member due to violations of their by-laws. Beale posted a letter from the SFWA president to his blog.”

Let’s count the errors:

  1. I used the @swfaauthors feed, not the official SFWA one. They are two different Twitter accounts.
  2. I did not post several controversial links to my blog. I posted one link and it contained nothing controversial. It was the blog post that was controversial, not the Tweet.
  3. The SFWA Board did not announce that they were expelling me. They did not name the member expelled in their announcement. As Locus Online correctly noted, I was the one who announced my expulsion.
  4. The SFWA Board did not announce I was expelled due to violations of their by-laws. The SFWA Board did not give any reason for the expulsion of the unnamed member expelled.
  5. To be complete, I referred to N.K. Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of
    what it took to build a new literature by ‘a bunch of beardy old
    middle-class middle-American guys’ than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman
    has of how to build a jet engine” and I stand by the assertion. I also pointed out that she is a liar.
  6. In addition to her resemblance to an overweight amphibian, I also observed that Teresa Nielsen Hayden is “grotesquely malformed” and does not appear to belong to the same species or phylum as my wife.

The SFWA are irreligious fundamentalists, they just happen to be softer, squishier, and more cowardly than the Islamic variety. And this is why diversity is always and everywhere doomed. Let one rabbit in, and its priority is always to get another rabbit in there with it. Once accomplished, the breeding begins. And when they feel they have sufficient numbers, they begin forcing all the not-rabbits out.

SF Fandom is “cleaning house”

It’s a pity to see that someone who writes pretty good neo-Lovecraftian pastiches, who wrote the brilliant Accelerando, should nevertheless show himself to be so deeply and profoundly absurd with regards to politics, public relations, and simple civility:

So today Loncon 3 announced that Jonathan Ross would be toastmaster at the Hugo awards this August in London. And lo, twitter melted down in outrage for some reason.

I agree with Farah Mendlesohn (who resigned from the committee over this choice) that he’s a very bad choice for Hugo toastmaster.

My reasons for thinking this differ slightly from hers.

Regardless of Mr. Ross’s personality and track record, it is clearly the case that he has a history of scrapping with tabloid journalists, then being quoted out of context.

The problem I see is that while fandom is in the process of cleaning house, inviting him — or anyone with a controversial media profile — to be Hugo toastmaster is like rolling out a welcome mat at the Worldcon front door that says “muck-rakers welcome”. There’s a lot of muck to be raked, even before we get into Daily Mail photographers stalking cosplayers: just look at the recent SFWA fracas (plural), the Jim Frenkel/harassment scandal at Tor, and so on.

Worldcon should be safe space for fans, and inviting a high profile media personality who has been targeted by the tabloids is going to cause collateral damage, even if nothing happens, simply by making many fans feel less safe.

We’re seeing a huge explosion of anxiety on twitter right now. If Ross is toastmaster, I can predict that at least one major Hugo nominee/past winner who was planning to be there won’t be present at the ceremony, because Ross has past form for using women with weight issues as the butt of his humour. She says she doesn’t feel safe, and I believe her: I wouldn’t want to be there in her shoes (and I’m an ancient has-been who hasn’t been on the shortlist for a couple of years, now, so I’m unlikely to be in the front row). I don’t like seeing my friends mocked, so I probably won’t be there either. And this is regardless of whether the mockery would come from the toastmaster, or the tabloid journalists in the back of the audience.

The sad fact is, however well-behaved Mr. Ross is on the day, inviting him into a pulpit that has been misused in the past is sending a really bad signal. (And anyway, what happened to our community’s supposed newfound commitment to diversity? Isn’t it about time we had a toastmaster who wasn’t a white privileged male? Someone like, say, Jane Goldman?)

The amusing thing is that even AFTER the debacle was concluded and Ross declined the invitation, Stross believes it was good to have hounded him from the event:

His appointment was probably a bad move, but the way he was hounded out was, in my opinion, much worse.

Would you rather the Hugo ceremony went ahead with a toastmaster trailed by tabloid journalists looking for scandal, with half the nominees missing (either because they were afraid of the toastmaster, or out of solidarity with those who were afraid, or out of fear of the tabloid press), under a cloud of ill-tempered back-biting about privilege and contempt for minorities?

It’s better to get it out of the way right now, the same day that the bad decision was made public, than to wait.

Keep in mind that Johnathan Ross’s politics are much closer to theirs than to mine, but that didn’t prevent them from chasing him out too.  It’s no wonder most of these creepy little people live hand-to-mouth, afraid to leave their safe spaces. They are literally too stupid and frightened to go out and make a living among normal people. In the end, it’s Us vs Them. K-selection vs r-selection. Fit vs fat. The sane population vs fandom.

If you have to ask, then yeah, you’re probably on the list to be ideologically cleansed too.

So be it. I went to one SF convention once, back in 1996. Needless to say, once was more than enough. One fan came up after a panel and told me I didn’t look like an SF writer. After glancing looking around, I couldn’t disagree with him. I had to resist the urge to ask him: “why, because I’m healthy?”

Speaking of the Hugo Awards: Warbound for Best Novel!

The implosion continues

Fresh from embarrassing itself by naming Redshirts last year’s best novel, the weird little people who are running this year’s Hugo Awards have managed to chase off the biggest media figure ever to pay them any attention. Keep in mind that Jonathan Ross is basically the equivalent of the British David Letterman; he hosts one of the biggest talk shows in the country.

    I have decided to withdraw from hosting the Hugo’s @loncon3 in response to some who would rather I weren’t there. Have a lovely convention. — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    @wossy We accept your resignation, with regret. — Loncon 3 (@loncon3) March 1, 2014

    We regret to announce that Jonathan Ross @wossy has graciously withdrawn from his role as Master of Ceremonies for @TheHugoAwards #loncon3 — Loncon 3 (@loncon3) March 1, 2014

    @stdesjardins @tinytempest @loncon3 you mis-understood. I think I was an excellent fit. But others didn’t. Including, presumably, you — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    @barefootorbust no. It isn’t. Stop being afraid of what hasn’t happened . I agreed because I love sf. And because Neil Gaiman asked me. — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    So @wossy has stepped down from hosting the Hugos at #Loncon3. Great to see that genre folk hate rudeness but are fine with cyber bullying. — Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) March 1, 2014

Yeah, that sound you hear is me chortling at the increasingly tattered remnants of the Pink SF/F world. I warned the Old Guard about the problems of the Scalzification of the genre, but did they listen? Only about ten percent of them. Now the lunacy is coming ever faster and furiouser. Well done, Steven Gould, well done indeed!

It’s all just too freaking funny.