Tag: SFWA

Fictitious profit

Some SFWAns around the Internet have been pointing to this profit calculation to “prove” that rapacious publishers are ripping them off by more than doubling their hardcover royalties on ebooks.  As one has learned to expect from the fun bunch, they have no absolutely idea what they’re doing.

Look at Harper’s own numbers:

$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author
$14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.

So, in other words, at these average price points, every time a
hardcover sale is replaced by an e-book sale, the publisher makes $2.20
more per copy and the author makes $1.58 less. If the author made the
same $4.20 royalty on the e-book sale as he/she would have on a
hardcover, the publisher would STILL be making an improved profit of
$6.28.

Now, I have less use for mainstream publishers than just about anyone who publishes books these days, but this calculation is completely misleading for the obvious reason that it is using the wrong price from which to calculate the profit.  As per DBW:


“After months of consistent declines to a low near $6.00, they’re on the rise again. This week, the average price of an ebook best-seller is $9.48, up slightly from last week, which was the first time the price was north of $9.00 in all of 2013.”

Since the average price of an ebook is more like $8.00 on average, this means that if we plug it into the Harper model, the ebook generates $4.50 profit to the publisher and $1.50 to the author.  And it has gone as low as $3.15, although we can safely disregard this lower figure because it was unduly influenced by low-priced, self-published bestsellers. Regardless, both figures, you will note, are less than the $5.67 in gross profit minus author’s royalty generated by the hardcover sale.

This inability to grasp the basic facts of the rapidly changing market for books is why the SF/F writers are going to be taken completely by surprise when more publishers “unexpectedly” go the way of Night Shade.  These authors think ebooks have made their publishers nearly 40 percent more profitable, all at the expense of the royalties paid to them, when the reality is that despite the ebook’s much lower cost of production, (which, keep in mind, has no impact on the publisher’s overhead), the publishers are actually running somewhere between 20 percent and 45 percent LESS profitable on a per-unit-sold basis alone.

If the publishers were to do as the post’s author suggests and pay the same $4.20 royalty on the ebook that they presently do on the hardcover, they’d make a profit margin of 7.1 percent instead of 42.6 percent.  That would barely pay their rent and utility bills, never mind their payroll.  Note that historically, commercial publishers have run at 40 percent profit margins; even the powerful academic publisher, Elsevier, has seen its operating profit margins slip to 36 percent.  SF/F genre publishers aren’t doing anywhere nearly so well.

Falling retail prices and shrinking profit margins are why the publishers have been cutting their midlist authors and offering fewer, smaller contracts.  They simply can’t afford to publish moderately successful authors anymore, and if average ebook prices fall to $4, as I expect them to within the next 2-3 years, they will not be able to afford publishing anyone who hasn’t already proven to be a reliable bestseller… usually through self-publishing.

Deen proves Hoyt right

Prof. Stephen Clark writes in to Instapundit:

The cancellation of Paula Deen’s book at this time is about avoiding
being seen as enabling what appears to be an evolving protest as
expressed through the advance orders, coupled with a desire to flip off
the protesters. Just another page in the ongoing cultural aggression
being waged by the bicoastal elite. It does, however, neatly illustrate
the inherent viciousness of the class.

Taken in
combination with the complete inactivity concerning Alec Baldwin’s
recent comments on Twitter, it also shows the utter hypocrisy of that
class.  By the elite’s standard metric, Baldwin’s speech was every bit
as hateful and unforgivable as Deen’s theatrics, if not more so, but he
hasn’t been fired from his show or lost any endorsement contracts.

Now,
I certainly don’t pity Mrs. Deen in the slightest, as like James
Frenkel, she is simply reaping the harvest that she helped sow with her
active support of progressives and the establishment of today’s
political elite.  And there are worse fates than being paid millions of dollars to not write a book or two. But she does serve as what should be an educational
example to all the Scalzis and Hineses and Goulds of the world; no
amount of goodthink, political posturing, or progressive flag-waving is
going to save you when the pinkshirts and/or savages you have championed
turn on you and tear you apart without warning.

John
Scalzi was very fortunate that his inept political satire last year was
accepted as such. That didn’t have to be the case; it was far more
potentially offensive than the “lady editor” comment that sparked
Bulletingate. If it had served the whims of the pinkshirts to destroy
him, (for example, if they had had a candidate for SFWA president they
wished to push), he would have found himself the bewildered recipient of
the same sort of ideological hysteria to which Messrs. Resnick and
Malzberg were inflicted.  As readers here have probably noted,
pinkshirts tend to fall silent and run away as soon as they meet with
direct opposition willing to openly confront them; the only thing even
the most abject apologizing accomplishes is to inspire them to go into a
feeding frenzy.

In fact, because he has shown obvious Scalzi-like weakness in his obvious desire to appease the pinkshirts, I think it
quite likely that Steven Gould, the incoming president, will soon come
under attack from the organizational left for one reason or another.

To return to Mrs. Deen, the cancellation of her book, which at the time was Amazon’s #1
bestseller prior to its release, also shows that Sarah Hoyt was
absolutely right and that “business reasons” have absolutely nothing to
do with the ideologically driven decisions of the publishing
gatekeepers.  That defense, which was never the least bit convincing to
anyone with actual experience of mainstream publishing, has now been
exploded in a very public and undeniable manner.

And it also demonstrates the importance of building distribution channels that circumnavigate the attempts of the gatekeepers to control what is made available to the public.

It’s not science, but it sure looks like fiction

Now, I’m not at all surprised that the SFWA warren is hopping madly with news of a shocking sexual harassment scandal now that it has been made clear by the SFWA owsla that it is open season on all non-crossdressing men in the organization – and at the annual gathering of angry land whales known as WisCon, no less – but even I assumed it would take more than a few weeks before the next inevitable pinkshirt scandal exploded all over the increasingly dysfunctional organization’s face.

As it happens, I may actually have met know the woman who is accusing a Tor editor of sexual harassment.  If Elise Matthesen is the same the Elise I knew back in the late nineties, she was a completely useless and not terribly ornamental member of an otherwise excellent writing group in Minneapolis, she never actually did any writing, and all she wanted to do was talk about herself and babble about feminism, sexual harassment, and so forth.  And if  since it is her, I will not be at all surprised if it is eventually determined by the publishing house and the convention alike that the “harassment” was nothing more than a product of her fevered but uncreative imagination.

According to Ms Matthesen, the gentleman who sexually harassed her was a Tor editor, albeit one of the old school Tor editors who actually published genuine science fiction once upon a time: “My name is Sigrid Ellis. I was one of the co-hosts of the party Elise
mentions. The person Elise reported for harassment is James Frenkel.”

Now, I have no idea what actually happened, nor do I care in the slightest, but I have to say, I’m a little bit dubious surprised to learn that it is the Elise of my erstwhile acquaintance, not because she appears to have made a false claim of sexual harassment, (if you’d asked me about her yesterday, I’d have told you that I’d be surprised if she didn’t have dozens of them to her credit), but because the following account would make for the longest piece of fiction she has ever actually managed to write:

 “We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at
WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you
ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night
at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking
about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist
theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house
joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I
reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to
check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what
had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company
the harasser was representing at the convention.

The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I
knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who’s
been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be
listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I
was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.

There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn’t
like the thought of more of this nonsense (there’s a polite word for
it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He
asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with
me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was
nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to
stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I’d like to
make a formal report. I told him, “I’d just like to tell you what
happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do.”

It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention
when one has just called somebody’s employer and begun the process of
formally reporting there, but that’s how it was. I think I was a little
bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, “Dude, seriously??”)
So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively.
Partway through my account, I said, “Okay, open your notebook, because
yeah, this should be official.” Thus began the formal report to the
convention. We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of
other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety
person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level,
checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.

I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and
the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting
there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were
twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just
starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor?
Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What
if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn’t make nice
and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by
people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have
been able to report it at all?

Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn’t have. I know
this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties.
I didn’t report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There
are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I’m not going to
tell someone they’re wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to
do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is
considering reporting. We’re geeks, right? Learning something and
sharing is what we do.

So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked,
“Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh,
hell yes.”
This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.

The Safety team kept checking in with me. The coordinators of the
convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the
first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I
was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that’s
the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to
keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.

Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch
with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously.
Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the
incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report
and wanted my name used. Again I said, “Hell, yes.”

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks. HR
called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them
“your good friends at HR.” They also followed through on checking with
the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was
stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed
there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for
certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate
behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous
reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal.
Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that
had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by
the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at
least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and
here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened
before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because
for formal purposes, it was.

I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports
could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion
around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then
the person at Legal clearly said that “the past is past” is not an
accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other
people listed in the company’s publically-available code of conduct)
would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the
behavior took place last week or last year.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If
you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT
acceptable business-as-usual. I have had numerous editors tell me that
reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the
bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to
them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay.
The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the
field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many
professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of
social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when
faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was
thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation
of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much
worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field,
if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse. So I took a deep
breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.” And
while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried
that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the
knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.

It should be fascinating to see just how interested the pinkshirts are in continuing their crusade, not against elderly writers and maverick outsiders, but an editor at the largest genre publisher who is married to one of the finest female SF writers.  Especially in light of the fact that his accuser is a well-known whack-job.  Which, of course, doesn’t mean she’s lying or delusional, only that she’d better be able to produce some evidence or eyewitnesses to back up her claim.

The best part is that the SFWA leadership genuinely believes that it is people like Resnick, Malzberg, and me who are the problem.  They don’t realize that they can get rid of every single non-crossdressing male who has ever published in the genre and that won’t even slow down the more radical pinkshirts, as those women are so angry, narcissistic, and delusional that they are capable of seeing racism in a stiff breeze and sexual harassment in a handshake.

If I ever went to an SF/F convention, I can only imagine the pinkshirts would no sooner catch sight of me in the distance before they’d burst into tears and start racing for the “mandated reporters” to be the first to claim that I beat them to death and abused their corpses.

Ideology of the gatekeepers

Amanda at the Mad Genius Club notes the connection between the rise of the Left’s ideological gatekeepers in publishing and the alarming discovery that boys no longer read books:

I’m happy with just writing stories folks want to read. After all, isn’t that really what we’re supposed to be doing? Writing
stories that entertain? If a story doesn’t entertain, folks aren’t
going to read it — or at least not finish it. If they don’t read it,
then what good is any message we might put into it? That message will be
lost because it was never read.

But that isn’t enough for the literati, for all too many editors and,
unfortunately, for the boards of too many professional organizations
these days. No, you have to be socially relevant and enlightened in your
writing. You have to promote what is “right” — as is defined by those
who have the loudest voice. Heaven help you if you write something that
might offend someone else, especially if you are a male of a certain
age.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned (and I know that means I have the wrong
beliefs and should probably be silenced now. Sorry, I’m a loud-mouthed
woman who isn’t afraid to exercise my First Amendment rights). But I
still feel that the story is the thing we should be concerned with and
not the message. As I said earlier, folks won’t read the message if they
don’t read the story. The corollary to this is: why is publishing in
trouble? Because it forgot that readers, on the whole, read to be
entertained and to forget about their troubles….

Don’t believe me, ask yourself why so many in publishing are trying
to convince us that boys don’t read….

Then we have those publishers and editors and writers who feel that
we must address all of society’s ills with our writing and “educate” our
readers so there will never be any racism or sexism or any other ism
they don’t approve of ever again.

She’s merely pointing out the readily apparent, but in light of how some writers have nevertheless attempted to deny there is any ideological bias in the SFWA and in SF/F publishing, and it is either a) one’s imagination, or, b) just a complete coincidence to observe that the field is now policed by gatekeepers who assiduously work to prevent the publication of any makehurt or crimethink, I think it is useful to have a look at what sort of works the publishers are actively seeking:

Here is an informative example from one publishing house that freely admits it is “of a progressive bent”:

What are we looking for?

As mentioned above, we’re now considering submissions within any
genres. We’re specifically looking for novels or collections which
demonstrate a significant crossover between genres – as the name or our
press suggests. CGP has always been a press with a progressive bent. Bearing that in mind, here are some things we want to see MORE of:

  • Queer Main Characters
  • MC’s of Color
  • Women MC’s
  • Disabled MC’s
  • Science saves the day!
  • Far future
  • Stories set outside North America

Beyond that, there is no hard-and-fast rule; any story that follows the above guidelines will be considered.

What are we NOT looking for?

  • Stories based off the assumption that any particular religion’s beliefs are real
  • Weak women being rescued by macho guys
  • “Science-as-villain”
  • Vampires, zombies, werewolves, Arthurian retellings, Eurocentric faeries, or ghost stories
  • Time travel

Though it should go without saying, any submissions promoting
discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, and/or hatred will be deleted without
notice or consideration.

Now, consider how many works of the Golden Age are unpublishable by these standards, particularly in light of the opinion of the majority of SFWA members that using the term “lady” as an adjective is competely unacceptable misogyny. And notice how the publisher is not only expressly anti-religious and anti-American, but is actively looking to publish secular science propaganda.  Religion can be the villain – so long as its tenets are shown to be false – but science cannot be.

Obviously, this is a small publisher, but don’t deceive yourself.  The major genre publishers may be much more open to vampires, zombies, and time travel than this one, but their standards, the books they have been publishing, and the books they are looking to publish, are all based on the same ideological standard even though they are less open about it.

Speaking of gatekeepers, if you’re submitting for ing-game publication, please keep in mind that we’re focused on action and story uber alles; the objective is most certainly NOT to become the mirror image of the conventional gatekeepers.

B&N totters

It was interesting to notice during the recent SFWA campaign how
completely clueless most of the authors were about the present state of the publishing industry.  They
genuinely believed that the status quo remains viable, which was part of why
Random House was accused of creating Hydra simply because they are obviously wicked and evil.

Nor did they rethink their position when Nightshade Books went under.  As I said at the time, it would probably take the bankruptcy of Barnes & Noble and the concomitant effects on the genre publishers to get them to realize that the traditional publishing game is all but over.  But that could happen sooner than even a skeptic like me had imagined:

Barnes and Noble has not had an easy go of it. The brick-and-mortar stalwart has seen its revenues and profits steeply decline as we’ve entered the age of the e-book. In fact, profits haven’t just shrunk; they’ve disappeared. During the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013, the company suffered a net loss of $118.6 million, down significantly from the already poor showing it posted in 2012 when it lost $56.9 million in Q4. For the year, that put Barnes and Noble’s losses at $154.8 million — more than double what it lost in 2012.

It’s somewhat of a pity, as some of my favorite memories include spending Friday evenings wandering through the stacks with Spacebunny.  The only book signing I ever did was at Barnes & Noble and I was told it was one of the most successful ones that branch had ever had.  When I first graduated from college, I used to set myself a $50 monthly book budget that I would spend there; I’d usually manage to spend it by the second or third week.

But then, I still recall my last visit there, and walking out without buying anything.  The SF/F section was full of media tie-in novels and fantasy novels with badly Photoshopped covers, the history section had all but disappeared, and most of the remaindered hardcovers were picture books.  So perhaps the structural rot that is now apparent had already set in.

I imagine the executives at Barnes are already trying to figure out what sort of pitches they can make to Amazon and Google.  Anyhow, if you’re an SF/F writer who writes actual SF or epic fantasy, feel free to contact me about publishing through our in-game store.  We’ve already got some excellent original works of fiction, including a few set in Selenoth, but we’re looking for about 20 more.

A novel excuse

The SFWA’s Damien Walter has produced a novel excuse for not being able to defend his beliefs in public:

You’re only as intelligent as the cretin you’re arguing with on the
internet. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to debate Vox Day.

His excuse makes no sense at all. If one is arguing with a cretin, it is very, very easy to demonstrate that he is a cretin and to point out the flaws in his arguments.  And it is even easier for unbiased third parties to not only observe whose arguments are better, but which of the two interlocutors is more intelligent.

This ease of observation, in fact, is why most people, including more than a few who are not terribly well-disposed towards me, readily acknowledge that I am extremely intelligent.  Not so much because I can successfully defend my own positions, but because I am usually able to demonstrate that I understand my opponent’s position much better than he does himself.  That’s one of the things that has rendered the inflation/deflation debate so interesting in comparison with past debates; both my opponent and I are reasonably well-versed in most of the arguments on both sides.

People like John Scalzi and PZ Myers don’t run away from public debates with me because I am insufficiently intelligent, but because they know, on the basis of their past encounters with me, that I can easily shoot down their arguments while they cannot even scratch mine.  Such individuals are intellectually careless and their positions are largely emotion-based, which makes it very easy for any logically-minded individual to detect the flaws in their argument and exploit them.

Remember, it was only last week that I publicly humiliated PZ in his very own field of biology, and moreover, did it in passing.  Although I have to admit, that was a surprise to me.  As as low as my opinion is of the man, it never occurred to me that anyone with a PhD in biology could possibly fail to recognize that “human” and “homo sapiens sapiens” are not perfect synonyms.

The “crackpot” excuse doesn’t hold up well in the eyes of anyone who has read my blog for more than a week. And, of course, the “platform” excuse rings increasingly hollow because my own platform is already considerably larger than most of my critics. So it’s interesting to see this has resulted in new and increasingly nonsensical excuses being produced by the likes of Walter.

Notice that for all the posturing and shrieking of the crowd that Mike Resnick described as “screamers”, not a single individual, not a single white knight, has dare to even attempt to defend their equalitarian position or substantively address my inequalitarian one.  They have a growing panoply of absurd excuses, but the real reason is they don’t because they know they can’t do it successfully.

UPDATE: It’s amusing how the Left is so convinced that their views must be the popular perspective that they retreat to delusional positions rather than admit the obvious:  “I think a half decent data analyst could also prove that most of VDs followers are sock-puppets as well.”

He most certainly could not.  First, I have no followers, I have readers.  Second, none of them are sock-puppets.  Unlike numerous lefties, I have no need to sock-puppet because a fair number of people enjoy reading my opinions, and some of them, over time, come to agree with a few of them. But neither my readership nor my wife are fictitious. Just deal with it. Denial only makes one look insane.

Mailvox: Mike Resnick clarifies

One of the chief targets of the SFWA pinkshirts corrects two misconceptions and explains a few things concerning Bulletingate:

A couple of corrections. I -asked- Laura not to get involved in this. I
know how much vituperation can get spewn by the hatemongers.

Also, I had nothing to do with the Campbell Award. I never created it, administered it, or won it.

For
those who haven’t read the offending articles (in which case, you have a
lot in common with the screamers): in issue #200, at the request of our
(female) editor, we wrote a very complimentary article about editors of
that gender…but we had the temerity to call them “ladies” rather than
“females”, and to state that Bea Mahaffey, who edited Other Worlds 63
years ago and died a couple of decades ago (and was a close personal
friend of mine) was beautiful. Those were sins #1 and #2. After the hate
mail began appearing, we committed Sin #3 in issue #202: we defended
our right to call Bea Mahaffey beautiful, and our (female) editor’s
right to run a generic, non-naked, non-bare-breasted warrior woman on
the cover. They’re still screaming for our deaths by slow torture. 🙂

It
got so bad that our editor, Jean Rabe, resigned, not just as editor but
as a member of SFWA. And for the record, I hired her as my assistant on
the Stellar Guild line of books 5 minutes later.

Corrections duly noted. Although one can only imagine the shrieks of outrage when Mr. Resnick’s shockingly sexist paternalism becomes known to the pinkshirts.  I think it goes without saying that neither Jim Hines nor John Scalzi would ever be so appallingly sexist as to attempt to silence a woman’s voice in this oppressive and demeaning manner.  They’re much more inclined to hide behind, or wear, a woman’s skirt than to protect her.

Mr. Resnick, on the other hand, is sufficiently old school to wish to shield his daughter from the hatemongering pinkshirts, for which one can only commend him.  And his Stellar Guild line promises to be a significant step up for Ms Rabe from the Bulletin. The idea of publishing collaborations between established writers and their proteges is a good one and something I can fully support, having been the beneficiary of a similar collaboration with the Original Cyberpunk in the early days of my SF/F career.

It is amusing to note that despite SFWA being an organization originally founded to professionalize the relations between SF writers and SF publishers, this latter-day parody finds itself engaged in furious attacks on new model editors and publishers like Mr. Resnick and myself.  One suspects that one factor contributing to the pinkshirts’ unmitigated rage is their shattered dreams, as Judith Tarr describes in the following manner:

Now, of course, there are so many more options. Chances are the
author will still go broke–all those stories of ebook gold mines are
exceptions, not the rule, especially for authors without large
followings or very up-to-date, popular, trendy subject matter. But the
books will see the light of day as ebooks, print-on-demand books,
audiobooks, even games or graphic novels. That doesn’t help the authors of ten or twenty or more years ago who
saw their hopes crushed, their dreams shattered, and their books
rejected by the one standard that validated them in publishers’ terms:
money and sales.

It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of SFWA members who Mr. Resnick describes as “screamers” are complete nonentities in the field, most of whom have published little more than the bare minimum to qualify for membership. They’ve taken over the organization just as it has become entirely irrelevant to the wider SF/F market.

Devouring their elders

Instapundit urges support for Malzberg and Resnick and quite rightly suspects “that the real ‘radioactive aura’ is more likely to attach to the SFWA”, while Andrew Fox excoriates the recent attempt of the SFWA’s pinkshirted stormtroopers to mau-mau their feminist forebears in considerable detail:

I feel compelled to point out, or at least suggest, that a vocal and
very cyber-visible portion of the SF pro and fan community have not been
covering themselves in glory recently. In fact, they have been acting
like a mob. A cyber-mob. And a mob is an ugly thing….

Given the prevalence of academic jargon from Cultural Studies or
other Studies departments in their comments, I imagine a goodly number
of the criticizers on the SWFA discussion boards and the broader
Internet are either university instructors or possessors of an advanced
degree from one of those programs. For many individuals under the age
of forty who have been through the university system, mau-mauing may
seem normative, or at least unremarkable. They have seen it at work
through divestment campaigns of various kinds (divestment from Israeli
companies or U.S. companies which provide goods to Israel which might be
used in security operations against Palestinians, or from companies
involved in fossil fuel production, or from companies connected to
certain figures active on the Right, such as the Koch brothers) and
through shout-downs and other disruptions of speakers invited to campus
whose backgrounds or viewpoints are contrary to those favored by student
activists.

Many of the criticizers may not consciously realize that they are
mau-mauing Mike and Barry, but mau-mauing is what they are engaged in.
Some commentators have pointed out the criticism is not censorship.
True; but in this instance, rather irrelevant. Other commentators have
stated that freedom of speech does not imply a right to a paid platform
(such as that enjoyed until now by Barry and Mike with their quarterly
columns for the Bulletin). Again – true, but irrelevant. For
what the protesters either seek to do or end up abetting is not
censorship, but what can be called shunning and shaming, an application of a radioactive aura to these two men which will make not only the future editors of the Bulletin
but also editors at other periodicals and publishing houses, organizers
of conventions, literary prize juries, and media outlets shy away from
wanting any connection with these two and their works. Remember, this
story has now broken out into mainstream outlets such as Salon and the Guardian;
people who previously had never heard of Mike Resnick or Barry Malzberg
or any of their books will now have their initial (and most likely
only) impression of them branded with a scarlet “S” for “Sexist,” as
detrimental a negative label in our time as “Adulterer” was in the time
of the Puritans. As Barry himself stated in the column “Talk Radio
Redux,” the most potent form of censorship is self-censorship,
the type that occurs in a writer’s head before he or she sets fingers to
keyboard. The mau-mauers, consciously or not, are using Mike and Barry
as cautionary examples – “Look what we’ve been able to do to the
reputations of a WorldCon Guest of Honor and to a man who has written
close to a hundred novels and over 250 short stories, several nominated
for Hugo or Nebula Awards. If we could do this to them, what do you
think we could do to you if you commit ThoughtCrime?”

The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling.
So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming
got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on
the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared
moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals
and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they
are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not
merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions
which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they
are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.

I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of
Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha
is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar
during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his
dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe,
based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry
considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s
“own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the
other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism
(especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much
worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in
all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in
science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A.
Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to
old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must
feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders
(as so frequently happens, it seems).

The amusing thing about this is that the SFWA folks involved, from Scalzi on down, genuinely believe that it was Mike and Barry making the organization look bad.  But they’re doing a fabulous job of doing that all on their own and they just keep digging the hole deeper… especially in light of the recent announcement of a 5-Year 4-Step Plan in which the SFWA Bulletin has been put on hiatus for up to six months while the pinkshirted task force ideologically cleanses redefines the “goals and mission of the magazine.”

As for devouring their elders, Fox may not realize quite how literally that has been true.  Although, to be fair, if Laura Resnick has not deigned to publicly defend her father, she has at least refrained from throwing in with the pinkshirted maenads.

Mailvox: time-preferences and civilization

JC is is wondering at the intrinsically anti-scientific bent of the SFWA:

I’m a white, Christian, American male of slightly above average
intelligence – but far from a super intelligence.  I’ve been ejoying
your writings since the WND days.  Since you left them, and I was forced
to discover and follow your Vox Popoli blog – my mind has been quite
blown away by the content.  I eagerly digest (or attempt to follow) the
economic posts, and love the cultural posts.  The science fiction
generally doesn’t interest me, but this latest uproar re: SWFA makes me
sick.  I just wanted to drop a note of thanks and support.  Between you
and Ann Barnhardt, I truly feel blessed to be able to see the examples
you set in steadfastly standing for Truth.
Thank you.
Now for a question.  I may have missed it, but your “h8ers” seem to
imply you’ve conferred a superior/inferior distinction to the various
human sub-species.  I don’t recall seeing anything of the sort, I
thought you just noted that they are provably different.   I
would personally assume that different groups should have nothing
approaching “equality” for quite a number of characteristics, in general
from a statistical perspective.  An overall ranking of
“superior/inferior” doesn’t seem like it would make any sense at all
unless we are discussing specific characteristics.  For instance, a
Jimmy the Greek foul in discussing fast twitch muscle fiber and athletic
performance, or perhaps predisposition to certain hereditary medical
conditions.  Or demonstrated contributions to advanced science.  
There’s nothing in my mind that would necessarily judge one of
God’s children as better/worse from an overall intrinsic value sense
simply by noting a particular subspecies (or intermingling thereof, such
as with my mixed heritage children), but it’s absurd to say we can’t
talk about relative comparisons of discrete characteristics.  I’ve
wandered a bit here, but I assure you I’m no rabbit or troll.  I guess
my question was about the conclusions drawn from the variations in
subspecies:  you never made any claims that the homo sapiens sapiens are
just dirty pieces of shit with no worth, as your critics seem to be
claiming, right?  I don’t know how you put up with these clowns without
having their insanity rub off on you just a little bit.

I have repeatedly stated that it is absolutely meaningless to claim general superiority or inferiority for any of the various human subspecies, (or, if you prefer, genetically distinct population groups), because it completely depends upon the specific metric involved.  Is a Great Dane superior to a Siberian Husky?  Is a bluebird superior to an eagle?  It all depends upon what the basis for comparison is.

Now, the reason that the SFWA pinkshirts are upset is because if one chooses the metric of “civilized”, by which I mean “the ability to participate in, maintain, and build a complex, technologically advanced civilization”, one can both observe and explain which subspecies are more and less capable of it than others, and therefore it is possible to claim that Group X is superior to Group Y on that particular basis.  As it happens, that particular ability is largely predicated on time-preferences, as longer time-preferences are required in order to a) practice self-discipline, and, b) build wealth, which are two of the primary prerequisites for maintaining and building civilizations.

One can even go so far as to say that the civilizational process, which I observe appears to take around 1,000 years on average, is largely the result of artificially selecting for individuals with longer time-preferences.  If a society regularly gets rid of its short-preferenced, hot-tempered predators and its non-savers, it will eventually find that it has built up considerable wealth as well as a population capable of cooperating and living together in relative peace.  And with cooperation and wealth, a society has the wherewithal to begin advancing technologically so long as it has entrepreneurs and elects to foster them rather than crush them in the interest of established parties.

Having shorter time preferences doesn’t make anyone “dirty pieces of shit with no worth”, any more than being physically shorter does, it simply makes them human beings with the same intrinsic human value as everyone else who happen to be less able to participate in, maintain, or build an advanced civilization.  The pure savage lives entirely in the moment and does not control his impulses. The entirely civilized individual is self-disciplined and is always capable of putting off for tomorrow, or next year, options that are available today.  This may explain why Christianity tends to be a civilizing force, as it reinforces longer time preferences by extending them beyond one’s lifetime, and why atheism, despite the higher-than-average intelligence of atheists, tends to be a barbarising force. Intelligence, while not entirely irrelevant, is somewhat of a red herring in this discussion.

The idea that there are meaningfully different time-preferences between genetically distinct population groups is a testable scientific hypothesis, although aside from some very small-scale studies on children, “the Stanford marshmallow experiment”, I am not aware of any studies that have been done in this regard.  In order for it to be useful, I would recommend a study with randomly selected adults, (corrected for income and debt), who would be offered a choice between receiving $200 in cash immediately and a check for a randomly selected amount between $250 and $1,000 in a randomly determined period of time ranging from three months to one year.  A second study would then test the ranges of the time preferences of the various population groups based on the information from the first study, and a third would test children to see if the range of their time preferences were consistent with the adult ranges.

Perhaps the hypothesis that pure homo sapiens sapiens have shorter time preferences than the various homo sapiens-homo neanderthalensis blends would hold up, or perhaps not.  But that is the primary purpose of science, to formulate and test hypotheses.  It is, I think, more than a little ironic that so many self-professed “science fiction” writers are not only horrified by a scientific perspective, but are openly and avowedly anti-science whenever science threatens to upend their cherished ideological beliefs.

Anyhow, it is because the entire concept of a racial supremacist is intrinsically nonsensical that I occasionally describe myself as an “Esquimaux supremacist”.  Having grown up in Minnesota, and having lived through more than a few bitterly cold Minnesota winters, I have a particular appreciation for the obvious and undeniable superiority of that noble people of the north.

Ideological cleansing

In much the same way Sami Abu Al-Ala was recently calling for ethnically cleansing Egypt of Jews, a pinkshirt by the name of Amal El-Mohtar was calling for the ideological cleansing of SFWA the other day.  She appears to find me insufficiently enthusiastic about the equalitarian jihad and is obviously hoping to make use of Twittergate in order to expel me from the organization   I didn’t bother responding to her call initially, since El-Mohtar’s opinion is no more important to me than Al-Ala’s.

What was amusing about the post with which she followed up that call, however, was the shock and dismay it reveals about her discovery that many sane and intelligent individuals actually tend to agree with me rather than with the fascist pinkshirts of the SFWA.  A number of my critics quite clearly do not recognize how the numbers line up; they’re still babbling about the problem of giving me “a platform” and clearly failing to recognize that I already have a much bigger platform than most of my outspoken critics.  For all that the pinkshirts are desperately trying to pretend something else is at stake, this is a very clear test of where one stands on the freedom of speech and expression.

Anyhow, this brave pinkshirt is feeling drained and wearied and constrained in her speech and expression by the fact that people actually disagree with her about “the horrors” of my opinion, despite the fact that I paid her no attention at all.  So, clearly, that is a situation that requires rectifying:

There are roughly seven thousand things I would rather be talking about
right now, but nevertheless. This is very important to me.

On Wednesday I called for the expulsion of Theodore Beale,
aka Vox Day, from SFWA. The reasons and proposed methodology are
detailed in the link. In brief, he very obviously, knowingly, and
deliberately broke the rules over what kind of posts could be tagged for
inclusion in SFWA’s promotional Twitter feed by posting a racist attack
on N. K. Jemisin. This is not a one-time occurence, but part of a
pattern of behaviour that shows malicious contempt for the organization
as a whole.

While the vast majority of responses — through
pingbacks on the post, in e-mail, over Twitter — have been positive and
supportive, over the last few days I have seen the following in various
places on the internet:

– people refusing to acknowledge that there was anything racist or misogynistic about Beale’s post
–
people wringing their hands over how we shouldn’t ban people from
organizations for their opinions (when that is not the argument I am
making)
– people saying we should just ignore him — that banning him from the Twitter feed is enough of a reprimand
–
people being more outraged at the idea that I would call Beale’s post
racist than at the fact that he called a black woman “an ignorant
half-savage” who couldn’t possibly be “fully civilized” on account of
her ethnic heritage.

I have also seen people belligerently
questioning or deriding my command of the English language, my religion,
my ethnicity, and my nationality, as a consequence of having made that
post.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that like NK Jemisin before her, El-Mohtar is lying about me.  I did not deliberately break the rules concerning the Twitter feed, I simply forgot them.  Nor do I have contempt for the entire organization, as my contempt is reserved for the current set of SFWA officers who are steering the organization into self-parody and complete irrelevance, as well as for the pinkshirts, who are mostly relatively new and unaccomplished members attempting to ideologically cleanse the organization of dissenting opinions.

UPDATE: Since I hadn’t read the woman’s entire first post, I didn’t realize quite how cognititively handicapable she is.  Check out her bolding-for-emphasis:

Marking blog posts for inclusion that include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling will also be grounds for removal. (Emphasis mine.)

The woman obviously doesn’t realize that “removal” does not mean “expulsion from the organization”, but rather, “removal of the offending blog from the Twitter feed”.  Which, you will note, has already taken place.

El-Moron also lies again when she claims that I have “repeatedly and aggressively used SFWA platforms to
broadcast and disseminate these views with obvious malicious intent.”  I used the Twitter feed once.  Ever.  And I never used any “SFWA platform”, because the Twitterfeed guidelines clearly state: “While SFWA does maintain the @sfwaauthors Twitter feed for the benefit of its members, ultimately the posts that appear in the feed are the responsibility of the authors of those posts, and are in no way endorsed by SFWA, nor do such posts reflect the opinions or policy of SFWA.”   It’s not as if I spoke as an officer of the organization, hijacked the SFWA Twitter account, posted anything on the SFWA web site or published an article in the SFWA Bulletin.

Finally, she doesn’t so much lie as display outright neuroticism by claiming “This last reads to me very much like a threat, especially coming from a
white man to a black woman in a country where public lynchings are a
matter of living memory.”

This last bit certainly helps explain why people have been deriding El-Moron’s command of the English language. First, it’s obviously not a threat.  I’m the only one who has actually, and repeatedly, been threatened here. Second, Jemisin made her speech in Australia.  Third, I live in Europe, not in the Americas.

Let rhetoric be silent when the readily observable facts gainsay its blather.