Tag: SFWA

SFWA Forum: the “moderated” posts

Since the freethinkers at the SFWA Forum are presently debating whether my comments can be permitted in the very place where I am attacked with the most badthink words the rabbits can produce, I hereby give myself permission, as per the SFWA Forum guidelines, to quote my posts here before they are disappeared again:

1. Posted Today, 03:41 AM
 

Her speech is ridiculous, her call for reconciliation is impossible, and, it should be noted, MS Jemisin is lying about me:

“For the past few days I’ve also been observing a “kerfuffle”, as
some call it, in reaction to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’
of America’s latest professional journal, the Bulletin. Some of you may
also have been following the discussion; hopefully not all of you. To
summarize: two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made
some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as
sexist and racist by most of the organization’s membership. Now, to put
this in context: the membership of SFWA also recently voted in a new
president. There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described
misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole. In
this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent of
the vote. SFWA is small; only about 500 people voted in total, so we’re
talking less than 50 people.”

I am not “a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few
other flavors of asshole”.  It is John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden,
and Theresa Nielsen Hayden who have described me that way.  I merely
posited that even if their false claims were true, I would still be the
right choice for SFWA president given my industry connections and
executive experience. Nor have I ever made any active efforts to take
away the woman’s “most basic rights”; I am in fact a libertarian. NK
Jemisin’s speech is not only ignorant, it is blatantly and provably
dishonest with regards to me, with regards to the history of science
fiction, and with regards to Florida and Texas state law.

I hereby demand a public apology from Ms Jemisin.

Moreover, based on the particular nature of her false claim, Ms Jemisin has clearly violated the Forum rules, which state “The
SFWA discussion forums are for SFWA members only, and all posts made
here are confidential. Material may not be re-posted outside these
forums without the explicit permission of their authors.”  Her false statement was clearly based on my announcement which was posted here in the forums by Lawrence Schoen.

I therefore also request that she be given a warning point by a Forum moderator.

2. Posted Today, 07:52 AM

[PERMISSION TO QUOTE REQUESTED]

She did nothing of the kind.  I have never described myself anywhere
as misogynist, racist, or anti-Semite and a search of my blog will prove
that.  The only time I’ve even bothered to address such stupid
accusations together is here, in the Forum, which is why it is obvious
that she violated SFWA confidentiality.  I have zero interest in
debating with you, Mr. Sanford. I enjoy challenges and you’re not half
as intelligent as people I’ve crushed in three exchanges.

[PERMISSION TO QUOTE REQUESTED]

I should certainly hope so.  I was warned for violating SFWA
confidentiality once because I was unaware even partial quotes were not
permitted.  I expect Ms Jemisin to be similarly disciplined.  If not,
well, then we’ll know just how impartial the moderators are.  Anyhow,
20x more people will read this on my blog than will read it here.

[PERMISSION TO QUOTE REQUESTED]

Reality isn’t racist, Mr. Sanford.  Neither is history.  They simply
are.  And you can’t escape the fact that Ms Jemisin lied about me and
about the state laws of Texas and Florida.  As some of my Australian
readers have already pointed out, Ms Jemisin has no idea what she’s
talking about concerning Australian race relations either.

3. Posted Today, 08:15 AM

[PERMISSION TO QUOTE REQUESTED]

So, if I’d simply written: “That post on her blog is one of the most
racist attacks I’ve seen in a long time.”, that would not require
moderation?  Who are you trying to kid?

Meanwhile, the President-elect, Steven Gould, notes: “Lots
of people calling for the expulsion of this guy. With reason.”

Well, my lawyer and I would certainly enjoy seeing them try to expel a paid-up Lifetime member for the thoughtcrime of expressing his opinion.  You see, I’ve already got the entire SF Forum on record, so it would be fascinating to see them attempt to defend various statements by certain authors while claiming that mine were worthy of expulsion.

A black female fantasist calls for Reconciliation

NK Jemisin is publicly lying about me and a few other things in Australia as she blithely advocates the continued self-destruction of science fiction:

Right now American politicians are doing their best to roll back
voting rights won during our own Civil Rights movement. They are
putting in place educational “reforms” which disproportionately have a
negative impact on black and brown and poor white kids, and will
essentially help to solidify a permanent underclass. Right now there
are laws in places like Florida and Texas which are intended to make it
essentially legal for white people to just shoot people like me, without
consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence. So:
admitting that the land we live on was stolen from hundreds of other
nations and peoples? Acknowledging that the prosperity the United
States enjoys was bought with blood? That’s a pipe dream.

I want you to understand that what you’ve done makes me want to weep with envy, and bitterness, and hope.

So: segue time. Let’s scale down. Let’s talk about the community — the microcosmic nation — of science fiction and fantasy.

For the past few days I’ve also been observing a “kerfuffle”, as some
call it, in reaction to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of
America’s latest professional journal, the Bulletin. Some of you may
also have been following the discussion; hopefully not all of you. To
summarize: two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made
some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as
sexist and racist by most of the organization’s membership. Now, to put
this in context: the membership of SFWA also recently voted in a new
president. There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described
misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole.
In this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent
of the vote. SFWA is small; only about 500 people voted in total, so
we’re talking less than 50 people. But scale up again. Imagine if ten
percent of this country’s population was busy making active efforts to
take away not mere privileges, not even dignity, but your most basic
rights. Imagine if ten percent of the people you interacted with, on a
daily basis, did not regard you as human.

Just ten percent. But such a ten percent.

And beyond that ten percent are the silent majority — the great
unmeasured mass of enablers. These are the folks who don’t object to
the treatment of women as human beings, and who may even have the odd
black or gay friend that they genuinely like. However, when the ten
percent starts up in their frothing rage, these are the people who say
nothing in response. When women and other marginalized groups respond
with anger to the hatred of the ten percent, these are the people who do
not support them, and in fact suggest that maybe they’re overreacting.
When they read a novel set in a human society which contains only one
or two female characters, these are the people who don’t decry this as
implausible. Or worse, they simply don’t notice. These are the people
who successfully campaigned for Star Trek to return to television after
25 years, but have no intention of campaigning for Roddenberry’s vision
to be complete, with gay characters joining the rainbow brigade on the
bridge. These are the people who gleefully nitpick the scientific
plausibility of stopping a volcano with “cold fusion”, yet who fail to
notice that an author has written a future earth in which somehow
seventeen percent of the human race dominates ninety percent of the
characterization.

Let me be perfectly clear.  I do not describe myself as a “misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole”.  John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Theresa Nielsen Hayden, among others, have described me that way.  Of course, John Scalzi also describes himself as a rapist, Patrick Nielsen Hayden took his wife’s name when he got married, and Theresa Nielsen Hayden is dumb enough to have claimed a prominent Game blogger with three Billboard-charting club hits “is not acquainted with actual women.”

Granted, Spacebunny and the fat frog that is Nielsen Hayden don’t look as if they belong to the same phylum, let alone the same species, so perhaps the key word is not “women, but “actual” in the sense of “grotesquely malformed”.

I therefore suggest that their assertions should be taken with at least a small grain of salt rather than credited to me. And it should be obvious that, being a libertarian, I am not actively attempting to take away anyone’s “most basic rights”.  Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too.  The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without
consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.

Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the traditional Western code of civilized conduct. She could, if she wished, claim that privileged white males are responsible for the decline of Detroit, for the declining sales of science fiction, even for the economic and cultural decline of the United States, but that would not make it true.  It would not even make it credible.  Anyone who is paying sufficient attention will understand who is genuinely responsible for these problems.

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.  If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance.  These things take time.

Being 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, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her ever-so-touching speech understand that.

There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.

UPDATE: It may amuse some of you to know that in making her false claim, NK Jemisin appears to have violated the SFWA Forum rules, which state: “[A]ll posts made here are confidential. Material may not be re-posted
outside these forums without the explicit permission of their authors.”   I am confident the moderators of the SFWA will be swift to deal with this violation of the organization’s rules.

UPDATE 2: The Spitefully Fascist Writers of America are on the job!  This post was resulted in the following email:  “Your blog feed has been removed from the @SFWAauthors aggregator due to violating of the policies of this service, specifically:  “Marking blog posts for inclusion that include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling will also be grounds for removal.”” 

UPDATE 3: Now the SFWA moderators have, at least temporarily, wiped my comments off the SFWA Forum thread while leaving the attacks on me untouched.  What a pity that 20x more people will read everything here instead.  Keep this in mind when you’re trying to argue that there are no ideological gatekeepers in the SF/F publishing world.  They desperately want to silence all disssent, and they’re tremendously frustrated that they don’t have the wherewithal.


UPDATE 4: As always, I am quite willing to publicly debate Ms Jemisin, Mr. Sanford, or any other member of the SFWA concerning the issues raised here, be it on the SFWA Forum, this blog, or any other written venue.  And if all these passionate champions of human equality are afraid to defend their views in public, as were Messrs Myers and McRapey in the past, well, everyone knows perfectly well what that signifies, their protestations notwithstanding.


UPDATE 5: McRapey has the perfect solution to the Problem that Must Not Be Named.  He’s going to give money to ANOTHER charity. That will show me!  When did “donation” replace “education” as the left-liberal solution to all evils?

Stampeding the herd

Sarah Hoyt contemplates the bovine thinking that led to the SFWA’s recent “storm in a B-cup”.  After all, it’s hard for the older members of the herd to keep up:

I got very – as opposed to a bit – worried in the eighties when women
started claiming that men talking them into sex was “rape.”  The
reasoning seemed to be that men had awesome talking skills and a mere
woman could not defend herself against all those double-slick words.

I thought “OMG, they’re going Victorian.”

Since then we’ve gone to lookism (the ugly girl’s attempt to take
attention from the pretty one) and to a man even looking at a woman too
long, or asking for a date being considered “harassment.”

In fact, any man NOTICING another person is female is now harassment
(witness the offense at “ladies” in Barry and Mike’s article.)

I feel for Barry and Mike.  I’m sure they were full supporters of the
initial feminism which only wanted to give women access but assumed
that evolution was not going to be reversed in a generation, and if
women wanted to work alongside men, they’d have to endure men being…
male.  And if they used a little of female wiles to get what they
wanted… well, that’s how humans are and they go two by two.  This was a
somewhat rational idea, and if it had stopped there…
It didn’t.

Their articles were salutes of the women who made it in (at that time) a very hostile male environment.

Barry and Mike had no idea that the herd had changed step and that
the mooing signals from the top had changed.  Cattle are very stupid
animals.  They identify their herd by a series of not very rational
signals.  Fall out of step, and you risk being mistaken for an intruder
and gored.  And people who didn’t realize there was herd behavior going
on, and who got to their positions by rational thought, are more than
likely to get that treatment.  I know, it’s happened to me.

And meanwhile the herd of tough grrrl Victorian maidens, “don’t call
me slut” but “I’ll sleep with guys I’m not even interested in, and I’ll
call myself slut,”  “asking me on a date is sexism” and “I can’t
understand where all the good men have gone”, “we’re just as good as
men”, “it’s rape if a man talks a woman into sex because men have
awesome men neurons we can’t compete with” goes on its merry way
changing directions as the leaders change rationals and demanding more
government intervention to handicap men more, because otherwise, how can
they compete with wonderful male superpowers?  They who are fragile
flowers who get peristaltic disturbances because someone mentions most
top scientists aren’t female?

The irony is the lesson being taught to younger men who have watched the Resnick-Malzberg debacle is that my way is the right way.  Kowtowing to the feminist cows only leads to being trampled, but standing up to them, challenging them, and contemptuously exposing them for the pathetic intellectual frauds they are will send them stampeding away, mooing in distress, every single time.

Barry and Mike were full supporters of the initial feminism.  Most men of their age were. Having been steeped in it my entire life, I’m a full-fledged enemy of it.  And I’m very, very far from being alone in that regard.

Equality in the SFWA

A German university points the way:

The University of Leipzig has voted to adopt the feminine version of the word for “professor” as its default. In German Professorin refers to a female professor while Professor is the male equivalent. Under the new measures, written documents will use the term Professorinnen when referring to professors in general. A footnote is to explain that male professors are also included in the description.

This solves so many problems!  I’m sure the likes of McRapey and McRacy will be delighted to henceforth be known as science fiction authoresses.  They’ll probably throw on pretty dresses to celebrate this bold step forward in gender equity. 

You know McRapey is just dying to break out his little red pumps again.

Seriously Fascist Women’s Association

One of the cross-dressing lights of the New Equalitarians created a helpful list of the most censorious liberal fascists in the SFWA.  With one or two exceptions, it’s a useful list of nobodies and mediocrities whose books you now know you can safely continue to ignore.

It’s a bit amusing to read through it and realize there are precisely two authors on it whose work can reasonably be compared to that of the two men who are being so widely castigated… and I’m not a fan of either Resnick or Malzberg.  I merely support their right to write opinion pieces and freely express their opinions in them, regardless of how offensive these delicate, fainting flowers may find those opinions to be.  Of course, in the present SFWA, such support for free speech renders me a radical extremist, nearly as dangerous as the deeply offensive cover of Issue 200.

Bonus points for whomever can figure out how many of these
self-appointed censors have published novels with more “offensive”
covers than the Red Sonja illustration on the Bulletin cover that has
inspired such an epic collective hissy fit.

It’s been interesting to see that Laura Resnick, who is usually very quick to leap in and loudly condemn anyone suspected of insufficient enthusiasm for equalitarianism, has been silent concerning the public witchburning of her father. It’s also intriguing to see how these liberal fascists claim labeling two old men “sexist
bigots” and openly calling for an end to their column is acceptable, but
identifying them as “censorious” is, and here I quote the SFWA
moderator, “abusive behavior”.

    SFWA burns a witch

    Amanda takes exception to the ongoing SFWA witch hunt, which is being led by Rapey McRaperson and his sidekick, Rachel Swirsky:

    What did Resnick and Malzberg do that was so bad, you ask? Well, at the beginning of the column in issue 200, he admits to have written — gasp — porn. And he sold it to a “lady” editor. He identifies female authors and editors as “lady” writer and “lady” editor. Oh, and he’s pissed — not that I necessarily blame him. He and Malzberg had been attacked in the SFWA forums for stating their opinions  in what is basically an op-ed column (gee, I thought that’s what op-eds were for). People were demanding that SFWA censor them by not letting them write the column any longer and, gasp, he called them out on it.

    Could he have been more circumspect? Probably. Are some of his ideas old-fashioned? Of course. But that isn’t, in my opinion, the real crime with what’s been going on. The crime is how the detractors behaved. They took their issues with Resnick and Malzberg public without giving the public the opportunity to read the columns in question and make up their own mind. They attacked two men who have more experience in the field and, in the vast majority of cases, more sales than these attackers will ever hope to have. Instead of simply asking to post a counter piece to what Resnick and Malzberg said, they went on the attack, with all the name calling and vitriol they accused the two gentlemen — gasp, have I just committed the crime of sexism by calling them gentlemen? — of being sexist and misogynistic.

    In other words, this very vocal but apparently small group resorted to bullying and threats to leave or never join SFWA in order to impose their own views on SFWA. Pardon me for not jumping on their bandwagon but I don’t support bullies and you can sure as hell bet that if the tables were turned on them, they’d be whining about how we just don’t understand and we aren’t enlightened or whatever the latest bullshit politically correct term happens to be.

    This is an issue, if you want to give it that much credence, that should have been handled in-house. But no, these bullies took their complaint public but didn’t want to give the public the whole story. After all, if they did, the public might just see through all their catch phrases and righteous indignation. They demanded SFWA act so this atrocity never be allowed to occur again.

    And SFWA caved and did so publicly and in a way that adds to the condemnation that has been heaped on Resnick and Malzberg, as well as the editor of the Bulletin.

    The much-criticized editor of the SFWA Bulletin, Jean Rabe, resigned under pressure today.  It appears Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg will be stripped of their column as well. It shouldn’t be long before all criticism of women, romance novels in space, and the Obama administration are banned in the SFWA Forum.

    It’s absolutely freaking hilarious.  I just wish I could share all the self-congratulatory back-patting over all the brave, brave courage that the censorious freakshows believe they are exhibiting by boldly taking on chainmail bikinis and references to ladies.

    The dangerous vision of the SFWA

    I posted a pair of comments that were in line with my post yesterday on the SFWA Forum.  (Forum posts are private and one is not allowed to quote them elsewhere, otherwise I would quote the posts to which I was responding.) This resulted in numerous complaints to the moderator, a warning for “abusive behavior”, the deletion of the following posts, and a temporary removal of my posting abilities there by a creature with the unlikely Warrior Woman name of Cat Rambo.
    Not that it will likely make a
    difference, but I don’t see how “Moahr Titz” is going to
    improve the Bulletin. As for more diversity, that’s a fantastic idea
    if you want to render the Bulletin of absolutely no interest to
    anyone except women who derive vicarious pleasure from listening to
    other people moan about the travails of life. If this was the
    Organization for Respecting Women and not the SFWA, hey, these
    various suggestions are fine. But they have absolutely nothing to do
    with science fiction. Consider: it will be a pretty hollow victory to
    claim that everyone in professional science fiction is finally
    respecting women, minorities, dwarves, and fairies in the desired
    manner if in the process you manage to drive away three-quarters of
    the science fiction readership.
    The Bulletin absolutely should have
    scantily clad women being rescued by manly men from bug-eyed aliens
    on the cover from time to time. It should have robots and spaceships
    too. Whether you find that offensive or not, that’s part of what
    science fiction was, and is. Science fiction is supposed to be the
    literature of dangerous ideas, not safe and inoffensive and
    respectful and politically correct ones.
    And if you can’t handle that
    concept, then you should get the hell out of the field and the
    organization. You don’t belong in either of them.
    I therefore encourage every member
    of the SFWA who is offended by the Dialogues or the Bulletin covers
    to follow e. Catherine Tobler’s excellent example and resign from the
    organization. Because regardless of your literary talents and
    interests, you are clearly not fit to be a science fiction writer.
    Science fiction isn’t about respect, equality, or inoffensiveness, it
    is about science and the future.

    I also addressed the idea that the Dialogues column between Mike Resnick and Barry Salzberg should be forcibly retired with alacrity.

    How about a regular column by women
    writers complaining about sexism in [science
    fiction/fantasy/horror/publishing/games] and how there are not enough
    female [fill-in-the-blank]. That would be totally new and different
    and impossible to find anywhere else!
    Maybe every four issues we could
    change it up with a column by a black writer complaining about racism
    in [science fiction/fantasy/horror/publishing/games] and how there
    are not enough black [fill-in-the-blank].
    Who wants to read about the history
    of yucky old science fiction by some old white guys of whom nobody
    has ever heard anyway?

    So, praising the decision of a member to quit, expressing the opinion that others of similarly delicate minds would do well to follow her example, and noting that women are inordinately inclined to be easily offended, speech-controlling fascists resulted immediately in fascistic, speech-repressing activity by an offended woman.  In the eyes of the present SFWA, criticism equals abuse.

    And you thought the Sports Guy was joking.  Women really do ruin everything. Even for themselves. Perhaps especially for themselves.

    No wonder a number of SFWA members refuse to post on the Forum and stubbornly stick with the old ones on SFF.net.  The SFWA Forum doesn’t just stifle discourse, it actively eliminates it altogether.

    Harlan Ellison wept.

    Women Ruin Everything: SFWA edition

    A female writer quits the SFWA because she believes it isn’t sufficiently feminized:

    It began with issue #200 of the Bulletin—all right, #199 if we want to get technical. It began with the Resnick and Malzberg
    Dialogues, a long-time feature of the publication. It began when two
    men sat down to have a dialogue about editors and writers of the female
    gender. How fantastic, I thought, because I, being a writer and an
    editor and female, had a keen interest in such things. I love reading
    anthologies such as Women of Wonder (and its sequel) and seeing
    how women impacted and contributed to this forward-looking and -thinking
    genre I love. I hoped they might include the women who inspired me and
    introduce me to many I hadn’t yet discovered.

    That’s not what I found. I found a dialogue that seemed more focused
    on how these “lady editors” and “lady writers” looked in bathing suits,
    and that they were “beauty pageant beautiful” or a “knock out.” I am
    certain no condescension was intended with the use of “lady,” but as the
    dialogues went on, I felt the word carried a certain tone—perhaps that
    was a fiction of my own making. As I listened to these two men talk
    about lady editors and writers they had known, I grew uneasy. Something
    wasn’t right…..

    And now, apparently, we who voiced complaint are having another finger leveled toward us, saying how dare we?
    How dare we voice a contrary opinion—surely we want to silence all
    thoughts that are unlike our own! Surely we want to strike these men and
    their dated notions from all records!

    Because we ask to be respected and have our point of view respected
    does not mean we wish to obliterate the point of view of another. Because we ask to be treated with the same thought you would give a
    person of your own gender, a person of a different gender, a person of a
    different religion, a person of your own religion, a person of your own
    race, a person of a different race, does not mean we seek to tear down
    anything you believe, follow, or espouse.

    This woman isn’t content with the ruination of both the organization and most of the science fiction publishing houses, now she wants to put limits on the opinions expressed by the old lions of the field, eliminate the very sort of artwork that helped make the old SF publications popular in the first place, and be held immune from criticism for her fascism.

    She is, plain and simply, lying.  She clearly wants to silence all thoughts that she finds insufficiently respectful.  She does wish to obliterate a masculine point of view that she finds offensive. It is women like her, and their gamma male allies, who have devastated science fiction, who have driven most of its male readers away from books and toward games, and who are responsible for the genre’s declining sales and inability to replace the classics of previous decades.  This is little more than an attempt to silence the remnants of the SFWA’s old guard.

    As we learned yesterday, I am unpublishable by the present standards in the publishing industry.  But I am far from the only one, very far from it.  I am no Heinlein or Herbert, perhaps more akin to a Resnick or Malzberg, but it should be abundantly clear that none of these four men could get break into publication today, that their perspectives are intrinsically offensive, and none of them would be able to successfully navigate the maze of scalzied manboobs and feminist fascists who have infiltrated the genre and now control the editorial gates at the professional magazines and publishing houses.

    Neither should it be any surprise to observe that the genre is dying, just like every other male-dominated endeavor that permits, or is forced, to allow the “equal opportunity” that somehow always ends with women telling men what they are allowed to think, say, and do.  It is the same pattern we have seen play out again and again and again. But I think Ms Tobler is to be congratulated for leaving the SFWA and I think her action shows that she is an admirable role model for many SFWA members. 


    Dear Ms Tobler,


    Congratulations on quitting the SFWA.  I’m sure it was a real shock to learn that the old lions of the field are not inclined to immediately adjust their thinking to your liking upon demand and I’m sorry you had to experience such palpable horror.


    Now, if you will please take the rest of the feminist fascists who believe romance novels in space, necrobestiality, and rehashed Regency romances are science fiction with you, thus permitting the real SF writers to get on with the business of writing actual science fiction for readers who enjoy it, you will do a great service to both SFWA and the field of science fiction.


    Best regards,
    Vox

    SFWA opts for the status quo

    Five hundred sixteen (516) ballots were received by the deadline of April 26, 2013. This is up one hundred twenty-one ballots from last year.  Of these, twenty-three (23) ballots were discarded for lack of cover sheets as required by the instructions sent out with the ballots. This number is down eighty-seven invalid ballots from last year.The resulting four hundred ninety-three (493) ballots were tabulated as follows:

    PRESIDENT:
        444: Steven Gould
        46: Theodore Beale
        1: Robert E. Waters
        1: John Scalzi

    Congratulations to Steven Gould, who will be the next president of the SFWA. I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit surprised. That’s about thirty-one more votes than I anticipated receiving.  Ironically, it was a closer vote than those for VP (Rachel Swirsky) and Treasurer (Bud Sparhawk).  Anyhow, I certainly wish Steven Gould good fortune in piloting the organization, although given his support for the status quo and his stated opinion that SF/F is not in any trouble as an industry, my concern is that his victory will tend to increase the probability that the organization will founder upon the very shoals my platform was designed to avoid.

    But that is Mr. Gould’s concern now, not mine.  I appreciate the support from the 46 members who voted for me; the campaign was certainly an eye-opening experience. And if nothing else, the membership is now aware of some of the changes to the industry that are around the corner, which was my primary purpose in running for the office.

    From SF/F to R(SF/F)

    A female SF/F writer explains the mediocrity of the modern female SF/F writers:

    New York Publishing by definition has got the rat of Marxism in their
    heads.  They always treated writers as widgets anyway.  Round the mid
    seventies, early eighties they realized that they had more widgets with
    outies than innies, and they decided to correct it the usual way.  “Buy
    more women” the cry went out.  And in came not only a barrage of women
    who had an easier time breaking in than men, but of women who were told
    what kept them out had been discrimination.  And who, therefore, hated
    the field they were getting into, because those meanies had kept them
    out.  Out came an outpouring of “poor me female” writing.  Which in the
    early nineties caused me to snarl at a Barnes & Noble, “I wish
    someone would pass a law forbidding women from writing.” After I’d
    walked up and down a fantasy shelf and found NOT ONE novel that wasn’t
    about some abused high-magic chick whose father was a monster.

    Here we digress from writing in general to genre writing.  It will
    shock you to realize that different genres appeal to different people,
    right?  In general romance – by and far the blockbuster of genres –
    appeals to women.  I know this shocks you, since women are not at all by
    evolution designed for being fascinated with relationships.  This
    doesn’t mean men don’t read it.  I know several men who read Romance
    (and no, it has nothing to do with their orientation) but the
    proportions are so grossly skewed that if you see someone in public with
    a romance novel and can’t see what gender they are, you can take a safe
    bet it’s a woman.  At the other end of this, military fiction is read
    mostly by men.
    Fiction is no different than anything else. If one artificially lowers the barriers to entry, one is going automatically to reduce the quality of entrants one accepts. When it was decided, presumably by female editors and executives, that an insufficient number of female authors were being published in the SF/F genre, many women were given publishing contracts primarily on the sole basis of their being better writers than other female wannabes.

    Now, I disagree with Sarah in that I don’t believe the female writers who entered the genre hated the field or even necessarily wanted to change it much.  I think, to the contrary, that they loved fantasy and science fiction, they merely wanted to “improve” it and make it just a little bit more to their liking.  Hence the shifting focus from ideas, plots, and worldbuilding towards characters and relationships… and romance!

    This shifting focus didn’t have to be a bad thing. It wasn’t an intrinsic negative. There was certainly some room for considerable improvement with regards to characters, relationships, and style; one cannot read Asimov, Heinlein, Vance, or any of the lesser SF/F authors from the 1950s through the 1970s without being conscious of a certain clunkiness to the prose and a shallowness to the characters.

    The problem was that in far too many cases, the ideas, plot, and worldbuilding aspects were simply thrown out, to such an extent that now, the average “fantasy” novel is little more than a thinly disguised romance novel. In many cases, the “SF/F” publishers aren’t even bothering to disguise it any longer. What is broadly described as “paranormal” fiction actually belongs to the romance genre, not the SF/F genre, as any reasonable examination of its tropes will swiftly reveal.  And the romantic transformation isn’t limited to the necro-bestial sub-genre of fantasy either. Consider the cover of Mary Robinette Kowal’s new novel, Without A Summer. Kowal is the current VP of SFWA. She’s nice, she’s talented, and she’s an award-winning writer. She was even nominated for the Best Novel Nebula in 2010.

    What she isn’t is an SF/F writer.  She’s a romance writer. The marketing department at Tor Books clearly knows that. Both the Handsome Prince and the Pretty Princess with her bluebirds on the cover are straight out of Disney.  Giving a Nebula award to a book like this would be akin to giving Joe Abercrombie the Golden Tea Cosy or whatever award it is the RWA gives out because one of his mentally unstable killers happens to tenderly rape a female captive during a momentary interlude between bloody battles.

    As for me, the last female writer I read was Dr. Helen Smith and her forthcoming book Men on Strike.  The last female novelist I read was Naomi Novik, whose fantasy novels, as should surprise absolutely no one, manage to reduce the broad human tragedy of the Napoleonic Wars to a pretty good tale about a relationship between a man and his accidentally acquired dragon.

    It is due to this transformation from SF/F to R(SF/F) that despite there being more female “SF/F” authors than ever before, none of them compare favorably with the likes of Madeleine L’Engle, Susan Cooper, Ann McCaffrey, Tanith Lee and Lois McMaster Bujold, women who were always more than capable of competing with the men on pure merit alone.