Tag: SFWA

The Galileo List

Won’t the SFWA be proud to have made the list of organizations purging the politically correct? Their purge of me is number 75 on it, which is a nice synchronicity, since when my books were still being published by Hinterlands there, Amazon listed me as the #76 most popular science fiction writer.

Swirskyella: a review

Dave Truesdale reviews Apex Magazine and is absolutely appalled by the sight of a feminist authoress releasing her rancid, overstuffed bowels all over a classic fairytale:

Rachel Swirsky’s “All That Fairy Tale Crap” gives us another female author who is, let’s say…severely disgruntled at stuff she cannot change in the real world. Her focus here is the “ideal” female as portrayed in fairy tales who make it impossible for the contemporary woman to live up to such high standards—the fairy tale of Cinderella being the chosen target here and which seems to be the one getting the author’s panties in a twist.

Rather than acknowledging that such models of purity and innocence as Cinderella might be something toward which to aspire, or look up to as an ideal, the author has decided to destroy that which she cannot attain in real life. Envy? Jealousy? A desperate, angry attempt to knock from her pedestal a fairy tale princess realizing such is not to be in her own life? Just another writing assignment for an anthology to make a buck or two and let’s take a contrary viewpoint and run with it? Anyone’s guess. But the lashing out at the seeming unattainable, to make mockery of the ideal, to bring down to one’s own level rather than striving to raise one’s own station is something the immature adolescent is prone to do, not the mature adult….

 Sadly, there are those who lash out and can think only low thoughts of mockery or destruction, the cutting down to size those who profess or portray what we might be, or become, because they have, in one way or another, given up on themselves and wish to destroy that which gives others inspiration or hope. Tis a pity their glass of Life is always half empty and at every opportunity they feel an unrepentant urge to share their from-the-heart (“There! Take that!”), disappointment-with-life vision with those who strive to set their sights higher.

“All That Fairy Tale Crap” is a fine example of this view and is more likely to find its target audience among an uncritical, morally ambivalent adolescent crowd (if not adolescent by age, then by psychological maturity). In this respect I give it a Well done. Stories like this, in the final analysis, reveal to the careful reader more about the author than anything worthwhile to be revealed or added to the canon of the fairy tale itself.

This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong and evil and degraded about SF/F today. Then realize that the authoress is the Scalziette who was elected to the SFWA Board by the pinkshirts earlier this year. Rachel Swirsky happens to be the vice-president of the SFWA.

Perhaps Swirsky believes she is “subverting” Cinderella. If so, that would only serve to demonstrate the lack of talent in modern SF/F. This is how you subvert Cinderella if you have genuine literary talent. Swirsky has less story-telling ability than the average porn director shooting four films in an LA mini-mansion rented for the day.

There is no getting around it. The SFWA is run by a group of fat and freakish losers who write mediocre fiction about soldiers swapping blow jobs and Cinderella going down on her stepsisters. If you didn’t believe me before when I said I didn’t mind being kicked out of the organization after my failed attempt to salvage it, perhaps you will now.

UPDATE: I am informed that when she’s not writing poisonous crap, Swirskyella enjoys sock-puppeting her own Wikipedia page. As my emailer noted, these people are charlatans down to the bone.

The fearful fatted cows

Even if the pinkshirts in the SFWA are too dense and short-sighted to see the truck about to run them over, it appears the Author’s Guild isn’t quite so clueless. In much the same vein as James Patterson’s appeal for federal protection, they’re mooing and seeking safety in numbers. And it’s just delightful to see those who have been protected by the gatekeepers for decades openly fretting about being forced to compete on even terms with those they have so long despised.  This would seem to be just a little strange, in light of how they so often claimed that the reason they were chosen for publication was because their writing was so much better than the writing of those not permitted past the gatekeepers: 

An Open Letter to My Fellow Authors

 It’s
all changing, right before our eyes. Not just publishing, but the
writing life itself, our ability to make a living from authorship. Even
in the best of times, which these are not, most writers have to
supplement their writing incomes by teaching, or throwing up sheet-rock,
or cage fighting. It wasn’t always so, but for the last two decades
I’ve lived the life most writers dream of: I write novels and stories,
as well as the occasional screenplay, and every now and then I hit the
road for a week or two and give talks. In short, I’m one of the blessed,
and not just in terms of my occupation. My health is good, my children
grown, their educations paid for. I’m sixty-four, which sucks, but
it also means that nothing that happens in publishing—for good or ill—is
going to affect me nearly as much as it affects younger writers,
especially those who haven’t made their names yet. Even if the e-price
of my next novel is $1.99, I won’t have to go back to cage fighting.

Still, if it turns out that I’ve enjoyed the best the writing life
has to offer, that those who follow, even the most brilliant, will have
to settle for less, that won’t make me happy and I suspect it won’t
cheer other writers who’ve been as fortunate as I. It’s these writers,
in particular, that I’m addressing here. Not everyone believes, as I do,
that the writing life is endangered by the downward pressure of e-book
pricing, by the relentless, ongoing erosion of copyright protection, by
the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, by
spineless publishers who won’t stand up to them, by the “information
wants to be free” crowd who believe that art should be cheap or free and
treated as a commodity, by internet
search engines who are all too happy to direct people to on-line sites
that sell pirated (read “stolen”) books, and even by militant librarians
who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to “lend” our e-books
without restriction. But those of us who are alarmed by these
trends have a duty, I think, to defend and protect the writing life
that’s been good to us, not just on behalf of younger writers who will
not have our advantages if we don’t, but also on behalf of readers,
whose imaginative lives will be diminished if authorship becomes
untenable as a profession.

I know, I know. Some insist that there’s never been a better time to
be an author. Self-publishing has democratized the process, they argue,
and authors can now
earn royalties of up to seventy percent, where once we had to settle for
what traditional publishers told us was our share. Anecdotal evidence
is marshaled in support of this view (statistical evidence to follow).
Those of us who are alarmed, we’re told, are, well, alarmists. Time will
tell who’s right, but surely it can’t be a good idea for writers to
stand on the sidelines while our collective fate is decided by others.
Especially when we consider who those others are. Entities like Google
and Apple and Amazon are rich and powerful enough to influence
governments, and every day they demonstrate their willingness to wield
that enormous power. Books and authors are a tiny but not insignificant
part of the larger battle being waged between these companies, a
battleground
that includes the movie, music, and newspaper industries. I think it’s
fair to say that to a greater or lesser degree, those other industries
have all gotten their asses kicked, just as we’re getting ours kicked
now. And not just in the courts. Somehow, we’re even losing the war for
hearts and minds. When we defend copyright, we’re seen as greedy. When
we justly sue, we’re seen as litigious. When we attempt to defend the
physical book and stores that sell them, we’re seen as Luddites. Our
altruism, when we’re able to summon it, is too often seen as
self-serving.

But here’s the thing. What the Apples and Googles and Amazons and
Netflixes of the world all have in common (in addition to their quest
for world domination), is that
they’re all starved for content, and for that they need us. Which means
we have a say in all this. Everything in the digital age may feel new
and may seem to operate under new rules, but the conversation about the
relationship between art and commerce is age-old, and artists must be
part of it. To that end we’d do well to speak with one voice, though
it’s here we demonstrate our greatest weakness. Writers are notoriously
independent cusses, hard to wrangle. We spend our mostly solitary days
filling up blank pieces of paper with words. We must like it that way,
or we wouldn’t do it. But while it’s pretty to think that our odd way of
life will endure, there’s no guarantee. The writing life is ours to
defend. Protecting it also happens to be the mission of
the Authors Guild, which I myself did not join until last year, when the
light switch in my cave finally got tripped. Are you a member? If not,
please consider becoming one. We’re badly outgunned and in need of
reinforcements. If the writing life has done well by you, as it has by
me, here’s your chance to return the favor. Do it now, because there’s
such a thing as being too late.

Oh, boo-freaking-hoo. Just get a real job like everyone else and write when you can. And “altruism” my fourth point of contact. I’ve lived on three continents and the only people I’ve met who are more self-serving than professional writers are international bankers. Although I slipped past the gatekeepers myself and was treated very well by the good people at Simon & Schuster, I very much disliked a lot of what I saw on the other side of the gates. Now I’m happily on the outs, surrounded by a blue-painted gang of Vandals and Visigoths, and very much looking forward to the slaughter of the fatted cows and shambling shoggoths that is about to begin. It does rather look like they’re getting their asses kicked now, and I, for one, expect to do some of the kicking next year.

Now that the playing field is being leveled by technology, it appears they’re suddenly not so confident that they’re markedly better than the competition. Amusing, is it not? In any event, with all due respect, I believe I shall politely decline the author’s invitation to join the Guild, continue to proudly fly the flag of an independent Blue SF/F author, and let my books sink or swim on their own merits.

In case you’re in any doubt about how the fatted cows really thought about the competition before they realized they were about to be overrun by it, here are just a few of their unvarnished thoughts about the unwashed and “unprofessional” masses of independent writers, which I cite here for the purposes of commentary and criticism.

“I don’t think SFWA should extend a full membership option to
self-published writers. It seems to me that the organization cannot
exist as an organization for professional writers if our doors are open
to writers who don’t meet any professional standards.”

“SFWA members cringe a bit at the idea of admitting self-published writers without some form of screening, no matter what we think about the changing realities of publishing.”


“Why would a self-publishing writer want to be a member of SFWA, assuming
they were self-publishing exclusively”


“It seems to me that the SFWA is on solid, rational, defensible ground
when it says that self-published writers are operating outside the world
that the SFWA was created to police, and thus their membership in the
organization doesn’t make sense.”


“I am categorically opposed to accepting self-published writers as SFWA
members at any level IF that is the only cedit(s) they have…. there’s a significant difference between Joe Wannabe offering his
“novel” to potential readers from his website without the benefit of any
professional-level editorial oversight and someone who’s had the chance
to run hers past an established and well-regarded author.”


“the great majority of self-published work is simply bad”


“I do not want to become an organization of aspiring writers”


“I for one am worried that if we follow your suggestion and double,
triple, or quadruple our membership by allowing self-published authors
to join, we’ll wind up with either (1) an organization that’s so divided
it can’t function or (2) two groups of members whose needs and
interests conflict as often as they overlap.”

Needless to say, I opposed this widespread anti-self publishing attitude as a part of my campaign for SFWA president. This was in direct opposition to the vociferously anti-self publishing position taken by the organization’s previous three-term president.

The irrelevance of SFWA

Well, I think this should suffice to explode any remaining vestiges of the perceived importance of the SFWA concerning one’s prospective career in writing science fiction. Barely one week after the release of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, Amazon has ranked me as the ~1* author in Science Fiction. First time that’s ever happened.

It also demonstrates, to a certain extent, the lack of an absolute need to distribute books through bookstores. As it happens, the 96 94 ranking applies to all books; the ebook-only ranking is 77. Conventional print distribution is still desirable, of course, but it isn’t absolutely necessary anymore. And it is going to become even less important when Barnes & Noble finally goes the way of Waldenbooks, Borders, and B. Dalton.

The punchline is that in addition to relative nobodies like me cracking the top 100 Most Popular Books in Science Fiction, the #1 author in the category is someone nearly as well-beloved by the SFWA pinkshirts, Orson Scott Card. And the #3 author in Fantasy? None other than the SFWA-spurning master Monster Hunter himself, Larry Correia. Note that the SF author listed just above me, Aaron Johnston, is playing in Orson Scott Card’s universe.

Sure, the pinkshirts have still got George R.R. Martin to top the fantasy list and Tor will continue dutifully trying to push its dreadful Pink SF on everyone, but how long will that last? While it is still easier to make obeisance to the pinkshirts and their ever-changing PC standards, the point is that their approval is no longer necessary and will eventually become undesirable. By way of example, look at how rapidly and completely McRapey changed his tune with regards to self-publishers. Were we not all creators last year too? Now that the gatekeepers are crumbling and people are given a broader range from which they can choose what sort of science fiction and fantasy they prefer, I expect Blue SF to absolutely foxnews the hell out of Pink SF.

And setting aside new distribution models, just wait until the effects from the new shared revenue translation model begin to come into play. There are already no less than 10 translations in the works from Latin to Bahasa Indonesia; here is a short selection from one of them:

Vuonna 2810 ensimmäisen kerran asutettu ja terraformoitu Rhysalan kehittyi nopeasti tärkeäksi planeetaksi Kantillonin alasektorissa Terran Laajemman Keskusvallan reunamilla. Strategisen sijaintinsa vuoksi planeetta oli kiivaan sotilaallisen toiminnan kohteena ja vaihtoi haltijaa useita kertoja ennen kuin lopulta vakiinnutti asemansa itsenäisenä planeettana vuonna 2935 Keskusvallan 21. laivueen amiraalin Beze Davenantin, ensimmäisen Rhysalan Herttuan, alaisuudessa.
— Thucidean Marc, ”Rhysalan Herttuoiden historia”

It was certainly a fascinating discussion trying to determine whether ‘valtapiiri’, ‘valtakunta’, ‘imperiumi’ or ‘keskuvallan’ was the best way to translate ‘Ascendancy’. As you can see, we went with the latter. Also, if you’re ever being chased by a Finn, just tell him he’s got an extra umlaut in a word and be sure not to tell him which one. It’s like scattering salt in front of a leprechaun. If the Russians had only known this trick back in the days of the Talvisota, they would have captured Helsinki in a week.

As one translator wrote: “I’m interested in being an active part in the Blue SF Revolution”. There are no shortage of languages still unaddressed, so if you’re a native speaker of one of them and you want to take an active part too, get in touch.

*For varying quantities of ~. To be more specific, No. 94.

We are not fooled

Larry Correia totally feigns putting on a supportive face while pretending to play down the fact that Steve and I actually managed to OUTGUN the master Monster Hunter. But we are not fooled. We all know this has lit a fire burning deep within the man, the green-hot flames of fury fed by envy, disbelief, and outrage:

I know the author online. I’ve participated in many email chains with
him, Sarah, Mike, and Tom. I’ve got a copy, but I’ve not had a chance to
read it yet. I wanted to read the review copy, but I’ve got a deadline
and I’ve been slammed. I’ve heard good things about it though…. I offend people on the internet for being an unabashed right winger. Vox sends them into hyperbolic rage spirals. He is their devil. They hate him more than Scott Card or George Bush, so that is saying something. Anybody who has caused that many panty twists is deserving of royalties just for the entertainment value of watching the literati have come aparts. 

Needless to say, I’ll be watching my six with extra caution given the likelihood that Larry will be sending magic kanji-enhanced Shadow Guard after us. Now, where did I put that Benelli-Mossberg Area Suppression Expediter-5K? One of those city block-sweepers could come in handy right about now.

In truth, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe Quantum Mortis as Alien Hunters Intergalactic in Space. We had a nice little SF murder mystery going, but after reading MHI and the Grimnoire Chronicles, I realized that it had two major flaws.

  1. Too few bodies.
  2. Too small guns.

That is how Graven Tower received a transfer from the Trans Paradis Police Department to the Military Crimes Investigative Division. My reasoning was that the police can only get away with so much collateral damage before the public refuses to put up with it. But the military, well, all they have to do is cry “planetary security” and they can get away with damn near anything.

Pink SF vs Blue SF

A few people have asked me what I mean by differentiating between Pink SF and Blue SF.  Pink SF is the dominant form of science fiction today. Or rather, more properly, the currently dominant form of SyFy. It is necrobestial love triangles. It is using the superficial trappings of science fiction or fantasy or war fiction to tell exactly the same sort of goopy, narcissistic female-oriented story that has already been told in ten thousand Harlequin novels and children’s tales and Hollywood comeuppance fantasies.

Pink SF primarily concerns a) choosing between two lovers, b) being true to yourself, or c) enacting ex post facto revenge upon the badthinkers and meanies who made the author feel bad about herself at school. Pink SF is about feelings rather than ideas or actions.

Pink SF is an invasion. Pink SF is a cancer. Pink SF is a parasitical perversion. Pink SF is the little death that kills every literary subgenre. And Pink SF isn’t limited to SF; there is a very good reason the Sports Guy’s meme “Women Ruin Everything” applies so perfectly to most forms of literature. The one exception is the One True Female Genre, which is the Pillow Book. Read Murasaki Shikibu or Sei Shonagon; women have been writing the same thing over and over for more than 1,000 years now and very, very few do it as well as the Lady Murasaki did. Pink SF is the girls coming to play in the boys’ sandbox and then shitting in it like cats.

Consider the way Pink SF has now invaded even that most masculine of subgenres, War Fiction. Books 1, 3, and 5 on Amazon’s War Fiction Top 100 free list are not genuine “war fiction” any more than Pink SF is actual science fiction. It’s WereSEAL porn. It’s 50 Shades of Sexy Soldiers.

So what, in contrast, is Blue SF? Blue SF is a return to the manly adventure fiction of the past. Blue SF says “fuck that” to strong independent female protagonists who ride rainbow-farting unicorns and flex their nonexistent muscles when they aren’t being mounted by corpses and canids.  Blue SF says “fuck that” to sexual equality, salutes la difference, and doesn’t deign to throw bones to women who might feelbad that their oh-so-tender feelingses isn’t being gently massaged. And Blue SF says “fuck off” to every idiot of either sex who whines about it being too this or not enough that.

Blue SF does not apologize for being male, for being insufficiently inclusive, or for refusing to fall in line with the dynamic demand for character quotas concerning sex, race, religion, and sexual preferences. Unlike Pink SF, Blue SF is sufficiently confident to be what it is rather than deceptively market itself as what it manifestly is not. Can you even imagine genuine science fiction trying to sneak into the romance market and pretending that it’s all proper romance when actually there is little more than action and technology and ideas under a very thin and superficial veil of romantic intrigue and self-centered drama?

At the Baen Bar, a retired airborne infantry master sergeant left a comment about QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted that perhaps is not irrelevant in this regard: “I read it and enjoyed it greatly. Baen might want to talk to the authors because they would fit right in. These guys like guns and prefer big guns. Guns that leave big body counts and lots of wreckage. They like hand-carried particle beams, lasers, slug throwers and vehicle-mounted missiles, cannons and chain guns. MCID would fit right in with Monster Hunters International only with better weapons. But the attitude is there. The simple arrest in the park is an all-time classic. I’ll buy the sequels.”

That’s right. Quantum Mortis actually outgunned Larry Correia. And that, in a nutshell, is what Blue SF is all about. Masculine ideas. Masculine challenges. Masculine action. Masculine energy. And, of course, masculine competition.

Pink SF, on the other hand, is the female equivalent of writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and somehow failing to realize that it is a parody.

Saving SF from Strong Female Characters V

The fifth part of the ongoing series, in which John Wright makes it clear that the Strong Female Character in SF/F is nothing less than the written feminist version of Soviet Realism:

Now, I do not mean to sound cynical, so I will ask rather than speak my opinion. Is there any strong woman character which meets with the approval of the Politically Correct who also happens to be, as the characters in Lewis and Tolkien, reflect a Christian worldview, or, as happens in Burroughs or E.E. Smith, to reflect what one might call the traditional heroic worldview, a worldview reminiscent of the Stoic and Military virtues of the ancient Romans and Greeks?

I have heard some Leftists praise the female characters of Robert Heinlein, who, with one exception, I myself find to be somewhat demeaning to women. (The one exceptions is  Cynthia Randall in ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag’, perhaps the only honest portrayal of a woman throughout his whole oeuvre.) Others despise his portrayals.

My cynical question is this: when they ask for ‘strong’ female characters, are they actually honestly asking for strong female characters, Deborah from the Bible, Antigone from myth, Britomart from poetry, or are they only asking for Leftist female characters, poster children for Leftist causes?

If so, what they are asking for is Political Correctness, which means, substituting true narratives about the real glories and sorrows of the human condition for a false narrative, an advertisement for Leftwing political causes, which tell lies about the glories and man, bemoan with crocodile tears only the sorrows of their particular mascots and special causes, and make false promises about the cure for the world’s pain.

If so, they are giving up art for an ad.

Myself, I want to see women writers not because they are women, but because I would like to have the genius of distaff half the human race writing new and brilliant science fiction stories for us to enjoy. But, as far as I can tell, this is akin to the complaint that Science Fiction is meant for juvenile audiences. That has not been true during my lifetime. I have not seen even the slightest trace of the all-boy club mentality ever, neither in any writer nor in any editor nor in any reader.

I have seen plenty of people like me, who are annoyed with the cheerless preachy monotony of Political Correctness and would like the dullards to stop ruining good stories with their sucker punches and pauses for their political advertisements, but, hey, the PC types answer any criticism of PC  by calling the complainer a sexist, or saying he is paranoid, or saying that PC does not exist. Any lie will do, just so long as it is an accusation.

To tell the truth about what they are doing, which is informal censorship, that is, thought policework, is the one thing they fear.

As I said before, they think they are fooling us into thinking they are honest and compassionate people, and we know they are not, and they know they are not, but they do not know we know, so when one of us mentions, for the umpteenth time, that the Emperor has No Clothes, they react with exaggerated fear and fury. Because they are afraid of anyone, no matter how humble or obscure, who punctures their little daydream of make-believe, their land of colored cloud where they are the saints and the saviors of the world.

The fact of the matter is that those who demand Strong Female Characters don’t actually want genuinely strong women possessed of the feminine virtues. They simply want to substitute a nominal woman for a man and claim the masculine virtues for their Mary Sues in order to make themselves feel better about themselves.

Remember, most Pink SF is written in order to let the gamma male or shambling shoggoth author retroactively triumph over his persecutors from junior high and high school. Hence the lack of credible action and the interminable focus on “witty” dialogue that always allows the author stand-in to come out on top. To say nothing of the inevitable love triangles focused on the Mary Sue. It is wish-fulfillment of a very different kind than the adventurous fantasy of Blue SF.

Now, few Pink SF writers go so far in their wish-fulfillment as McRapey, who in addition to having male infantry soldiers swapping blow jobs as currency has now apparently paralyzed his female characters in his next novel. (A subconscious confession due to the weight of all that Rohypnol plaguing a guilty conscience?) The two primary focuses of the fantasy in Pink SF are the sexual desirability of the author/Mary Sue and the belated revenge of the author on his real-life enemies. These take the place of the Blue SF triumph of the protagonist over the environment, his fictional enemies, and himself.

Knowing themselves weak in life, the writers of Pink SF stride confidently through their fantasies as the demigods they wish themselves to be. And anyone who dares to observe that those fantasies bear no resemblance to reality is not merely mean, but indubitably evil.

Saving SF from Strong Female Characters IV

The fourth installment in John C. Wright’s detailed explication of one of Pink SF’s barbaric ills and the various ideological and religious reasons that underlie it:

My objection is to falseness, insincerity, propaganda, bad drama, bad art, and treason against the muses.  My objection is to using art for propaganda purposes. My objection is to Politically Correct piety. My objection is to the Thought Police.

My objection is to the spirit of totalitarianism.

For about ten years now, I have been writing and posting essays and articles on my electronic journal, and in all that time, I have been subjected to the Leftist mob tactics of mass hatred once and once only. It was the time I mocked the Sci-Fi Channel for kowtowing to Political Correctness. My motive for objecting was perfectly clear to everyone: I would like to write without censorship, formal or informal, based on political considerations. Formal censorship is state enforced; informal is enforced by organized mob-tactics, minority pressure groups, yelling, screaming, boycotts, hysteria mob-tactics and general bullying.

Because I would like to write without informal censorship interfering with my livelihood, I objected to Sci-Fi channel, or anyone in my field, surrendering to the minority pressure groups screaming and yelling and mob-tactics and bullying. So I mocked the Sci-Fi channel for encouraging the bullies by bowing in the knee to them.

And in return the mob tried to bully me, of all people. As if I give a tinker’s damn for the opinions of these yowling halfwits. (There was exactly one person of the seven hundred or so who wrote in to me who seemed sincerely offended, and to him I apologized. To remaining six hundred and ninety-nine or so, I offered defiance in public, and in private prayed for their fool souls, hoping despite all appearances they were not damned fools.)

This taught me a lesson, but not the one the mob organizers wanted to teach. It taught me what they were afraid of. Not of me: no one can be afraid of a fat and balding nearsighted science fiction writer with a dull swordcane.

Nor were they offended by calling sodomites sexual perverts, which I have done frequently before and since, never eliciting a single angry comment in reply, or attracting the slightest notice.

Since my legions of drug-maddened terror troops are all stranded on Salusa Secondus, the third planet of Gamma Piscium, 138 lightyears away, surely they are not afraid of any physical force I can bring to bear. Neither am I in a position to deny any man any economic opportunities, nor am I influential enough to provoke public opinion or create any controversy. I doubt I could even do as much myself against them as they have done to me, such as hack a Wikipedia page or send around an open letter and expect it to be published and reprinted.

To explain what they are afraid of, I am afraid I have to explain something of the pathology of Leftism.

They actually think they are fooling us.

Pink SF/F is a crystal-clear picture of Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Which is ironic, considering that the pinkshirts love to cite that effect, almost always inappropriately.  As Wright wryly notes:

“They think they are smarter than us. These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three
steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the
difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read ORIGIN OF
SPECIES or DAS KAPITAL or THE REPUBLIC and who do not even know the
intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose
arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote
and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of
all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.”

Because degrees. Never mind that these magic credentials primarily consist of being willing to go into debt in order to obediently listen to serial monologues by poorly-read academics with no experience of the real world.


I don’t think I’ll ever forget being called “parochial” by a fan of a monolingual Canadian who grew up in the sticks of Western Ontario, graduated with an MA from the University of Western Ontario, and now lives in Canada’s 15th largest municipality, which happens to be located in southwestern Ontario. That, more than anything, made it obvious that Pink SF not only has no interest in reality, but can’t recognize it even when it is standing right in front of them, poking them in the nose.

The barbaric nature of Pink SF

I will soon have to write a post delineating the many differences between Blue SF, which is classic SF of the sort written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert and the other SF greats of the past, and Pink SF, which is the modern offense against literature committed by gamma males and snarky shambling shoggoths and inevitably features one or more of that quasi-literary abomination known as The Strong Female Character.

In a very long and powerful essay, John C. Wright explains that the Strong Female Character is not only an offense against literature, but an intentional crime against civilization itself:

Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.

As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.

These discussions have an ulterior motive. Either by the deliberate intent of the reviewer, or by the deliberate intention of the mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police to whom the unwitting reviewer has innocently entrusted the formation of his opinions, the reviewer who discusses the strength of female characters is fighting his solitary duel or small sortie in the limited battlefield of science fiction literature in the large and longstanding campaign of the Culture Wars.

He is on the side, by the way, fighting against culture.

Hence, he fights in favor of barbarism, hence against beauty in art and progress in science, and, hence the intersection of these two topics which means against science fiction.

It’s pretty easy to determine how infected an SF writer is by the Pink SF disease. If his work features women in the futuristic Armed Forces serving on an equal basis with men, it’s Pink SF. If her work involves having sex with animals and corpses, it is Pink SF/F.  And if any female character ever physically bests a bigger, stronger, faster male character without supernatural powers or technological enhancements, its Pink SF.

And if it involves soldiers bantering about providing each other with the sort of services that resulted in a man being beaten to death in the Roman legions, it is most definitely Pink SF.

Orson Scott Card on SFWA

The author of Ender’s Game expresses the reasons he disdains the SFWA, but perhaps more importantly, he echoes my previous point about why the post-80s SF authors repeatedly show themselves to be unable to produce fiction that is as compelling or as relevant as their predecessors even when they are expressly trying to mimic it:

What I find interesting is the people who commit and keep their commitment at great personal cost, the grown-up story, the story of parents, the story of people who sacrifice for community but stay in it and have to live in the mess they made. … They don’t take off their mask and go back into society under another name. They have to be who they are, wear their own face in their community.

This has made some critics very uncomfortable right from the start. And as my politics diverged from the political correctness that has captured the left — I mean, (in) 1976 I was a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal Democrat — and without changing any of my principles, I’ve now become quite a right-winger in the eyes of the left. And I’m a little baffled by it because I’m a liberal and they’re not. They’re repressive, punishing, intolerant of the slightest variation, absolutely the opposite of what it means to be a liberal. But that’s the way it goes. They still get the label. I am the fact of what it meant to be a liberal. I find the most liberals who feel like I do among people who are labeled as conservatives. It’s a very odd thing.

But that political thing has affected the criticism of my work. And it would just make me crazy to read asinine, irrelevant comments by critics who think they’re saying something intelligent.

You see, what happens is, if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. And that’s all I get from science fiction literary elite. If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing since they’ve never actually formed the kind of community bonds that my fiction always depends on. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They couldn’t produce that fiction if they tried because they don’t share those values.

This is absolutely true. “They have no idea what I’m talking about.” That’s precisely what one sees wherever the SFWA fascists are discussing something written by Card, me, or some other outlaw of SF. They literally don’t understand it. Look at how many people threw a hissy fit about my comments concerning NK Jemisin and thought that I was saying I was more homo sapiens sapiens than she was. It’s not worth bothering to explain it to them, because the whole point is to take offense in order to justify taking action.

As he observes: “Just writing honestly makes them attack me because they can’t bear a
favorable depiction of someone they disagree with. It’s intolerable to
them. They are arch-fanatical puritans. They can’t bear the thought that
someone somewhere who is intelligent might not hold the same idea as
them. It’s the essence of intolerance, and that’s the way they are.”

It is the way they are. And it drives them absolutely insane that more successful, more intelligent people not only don’t hold the same ideas as them, but hold them in complete contempt. The fact is that they are nothing but parasites. Consider: after openly ripping off Heinlein, John Scalzi has openly declared his hopes that Old Man’s War can catch a ride on the coattails of the Ender’s Game movie… and Scalzi’s mediocre derivatives are literally the award-winning best that the current SFWA community presently has to offer.