Tag: SFWA

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.

McRapey and McRacist react to criticism

James May criticizes two left-wing starlets of science fiction and fantasy:

Pretending the 21st century is actually the 19th just doesn’t cut it,
no matter how much you argue everyone born before you had the same
interest in politicizing and racializing the most innocuous things, or
even white people today, who show not the least interest by way of law,
institution or mainstream culture in the very things they are accused
of. If you wish to group together people as whites, a thing I detest,
then it is whites who have created the very laws that protect minorities
in America today. In the absence of law, institutions and mainstreams
cultural expressions of racial disdain, one must then of course come up
with theories which assert the unseen, the underground and the
unwitting, showing the “truth” of a thing by its shadow, showing a
dearth of cultural morality while at the same time denying such a thing
is possible by non-white cultures. And let’s be very clear here: there
is no scholarship which can support whites even think of themselves as a
culture racially in the 21st century while the exact opposite in regard
to Jemisin and advocates like her provides mountains of black
symposiums, black organizations and black culture artifacts. There’s
even a black scuba divers association if you can believe in that bit of
idiocy. And don’t hold your breath waiting for either Scalzi or Jemisin
to wring their hands over black basketball players in the NBA
overrepresented by 5 times their demography in America. “Meritocracy”
is a slippery word in the hands of racial bigots. Am I to assume that
lack of diversity in the NBA is a tacit plot by black players to keep
out the white ones, or an example of black privilege?

You can’t have this argument two ways – either skin brings nothing to
the table or it does. If pedagogic racialists believe diversity in and
of itself brings something to the table then it is taking up the
opposite argument of what it claims, because those people are still an
“other,” just a better one, with innate qualities other races apparently
don’t have. But that argument can be turned around in a flash and in
the end, it’s just as stupid to ask a man to stand on a pedestal because
of his skin as it is to ask him to stand in a ditch. In this light, the
obsession the SFWA has with shallow diversity on the one hand while
arguing race and gender mean nothing on the other seems sad and rather
dark. Content of character, remember that? Gives a stupid and whole new
meaning to the term “uplift wars.”

The idea that Scalzi has what it takes to get inside the head of 100
million men based on their skin is an absurd idea and a racist one at
that. It’s no surprise to me that it basically amounts, in principle, to
the exact opposite of what he says he champions, because, at its heart,
political racialism is Orwellian doublethink. Scalzi should be sure to write a follow up where he tells us what 3
million Jewish and 20 million black men think. He mustn’t forget to
explain how he effortlessly rises above the fray while indulging in the
most despicable racial stereotypes, a neat trick. So generic whites are a
safe political target. Try the same thought process on Jews. I’m dying
to read that one. What about gays? How are they all doing? Does he
approve?

And this is how the two starlets react to it, on Twitter, naturally.

McRacist: ‏@scalzi What the — ? HAHAHAHA I’m not a Tor author, you putz.
 
McRapey: @nkjemisin It’s a special piece of writing, isn’t it?

McRacist:
@scalzi Why do champions of anti-racism (anti-anti-racism?) sound so
alike as they endlessly blather on? So much energy, so little *sense.*

McRapey:
@nkjemisin Poor logical skill and underdeveloped rhetorical control are
strongly correlated, i.e., I can’t argue but I CAN go on and on.

Quite
the pair of intellectuals, aren’t they.  And such a devastatingly
convincing response. McRacist is not a Tor author, ergo she must not be a racist black woman and McRapey isn’t a racist, incoherent gamma male who hates his socio-sexual superiors.  HAHAHAHA
EVIL WHITE MALE POWER AND CENTRALITY!  Also, DRAGONS!

Of
course, McRapey is correct.  He can’t argue. That’s why he always talks
about his critics instead of directly addressing their criticisms of him.
That’s also why he flees from debate, both in third-party venues and on his own blog, which is a pity since he is one of the
finest examples of the correlation of poor logical skill and
underdeveloped rhetorical control you’ll find anywhere on the Internet.

Me show all dem me no gamma! Me show dem me no rabbit! Now me haz gammarabbit.com. Agree and amplify DAT, bitchez! No hurtz now… why still hurtz, WHY?

As
for McRacist, someone needs to explain to her that the fact that
something doesn’t make sense to her doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t
make sense at all.

* * *

It may simply mean that she’s not intelligent enough to understand it.

The ideology war in science fiction

Sarah Hoyt tries to convince science fiction’s left wing mainstream to come to grips with the new publishing reality before the ability of the right wing to bypass the gatekeepers does to them what Fox News has done to the ABCNNBCBS media cabal.

At its inception science fiction gave free rein to all thoughts of weird thoughts.  To this day science fiction allows a great leeway to personal behavior.  If there is a place on Earth you can show up wearing a live duck and have people ask you about the technical details of the costume, it’s science fiction.  To that extent, fans and other authors are “my people” and it’s a place I can decompress.  Like gays in the bad closet days finding a place they could be themselves, science fiction conventions allow me to be my own weird self without people shying away from me.  As a friend of mine puts it “we are the plaid sheep of our families.”  And the best place to hide is the flock.

The problem is that any community – ANY community – but particularly an excluded community (see what I did there?) will tend to try to form cohesion along the lines of common thought and common belief.  You might think that Odds would not try to enforce a rigid conformity, but you would be wrong.

It happened gradually.  Part of it is that most of us are used to be looked at askance and treated like abnormal.  A stunning number of us were bullied as children.  This means we tend to have an over developed empathy with any group identified as “victims.”  That, plus the fact that the publishing gatekeepers are the result of the long march and are – no, this is not under dispute – varying shades of red going from slightly to the right of Lenin to slightly to the left of Stalin. (Why is this not under dispute?  Because of the number of authors who identify themselves as communist.  Because there is in Science Fiction a young communist authors group.  People OPENLY identify as communist, and there’s no repercussion in their careers.  People don’t openly identify as conservative UNLESS they came in at a different time and their careers are secure.  If you think that’s because only leftists are creative or that this means the community is becoming more enlightened, you are part of the problem.  Go to the corner and meditate how identifying with a regime responsible for the death of a hundred million is “enlightened.  Or how any community EVER has achieved uniformity of opinion, unless it is EXTERNAL and enforced by authorities.  Good Lord, even today we have flat Earthers.  BUT you think that everyone who writes science fiction just is magically “left”?  I hope you are a fantasy author.)

I swear the eighties was a long slog of abused women in science fiction and fantasy books.  They were always abused by their fathers, too, who were tyrannical evil sobs.  The idea that mothers can be horrible parents too, never seemed to occur to these female writers. There was always a sisterhood of women.  As someone who has known any number of ‘orrible mothers, and who went to an all girls’ school the whole “sisterhood of those who possess vaginas” made me want to shred kittens.  (Shuddup.  I didn’t do it.  I’m just saying how mad it made me.  You know how I feel about cats.)  Even when the books were somewhat acceptable otherwise, it annoyed me to the point a lot of them went unread.

Then came the every woman a hero every man a wimp movement.  (Yes, Athena is more than normal.  Yes, she is strong. She is also hotheaded and foolish and, btw, Kit is far more than a match for her.)  And then…

Well, every fad of the left falls into science fiction and fantasy books, even the patently, absurdly ridiculous.  Like, oh, for instance, the idea that all male sexuality is dangerous, the idea that a society of women would be peaceful forever, the idea–  Too much to go on.  Suffice it to say the most awarded short story in our history – receiving every award in the field – posits that life in an American Suburb is more exclusionary and worse than life during China’s cultural revolution.

HOWEVER commentary by someone otherwise respected in the field, in a CHURCH magazine to the extent that homosexuals might have conflicts with being good LDS members occasions cries of “kill the witch.”

Oh, my people!  Not only are you trying to enforce conformity, but you’re trying to enforce a conformity so out of touch with the rest of society that what you think is right and worthy to publish strikes most people as “OMG, kill.”  Which probably explains the spiraling down print runs.  Those of us already fans and writers yawn, the rest of the world backs away screaming….

News for my colleagues on the left: For years we’ve put up with
whatever you dished out.  We had to.  We didn’t scream, we didn’t
complain.  We are even tolerant enough to like your books and admire
your artistry, EVEN when we think what you’re proposing is wrong and
perhaps evil (a world of all women.  Communitarian worldwide
societies.)  We understand the difference between ideas and those who
have them.

It’s harder for you.  Politics is your religion.

Up till now given a limited output, already pre-vetted, it was easy for
you to freeze out anyone who outraged you.  But indie has opened the
sluice gates.  You might (for all I know.  Again, when a community is
excluded, it goes underground) be a majority in sf writers now for all I
know.  I GUARANTEE you’re a tiny minority in the population.  Now that
the gates have opened and anyone can write SF and sell well and be
admired, it probably won’t be long before you’re a minority in sf/f
writing.

However, I URGE you to come to terms as soon as possible.

I have to say that I don’t think Sarah’s warning is going to make any difference at all.  As a result of my campaign for SFWA president, I have spent the last two months in the bowels of the SFWA forums. What I have seen is that the writers who make up the SF/F community are, to an almost unbelievable extent, delusional.  They genuinely believe they are faster when they have been winning races because a vast quantity of other runners have been barred from even lining up in the blocks to run against them.  They genuinely believe that they are special beings with a superior morality, and at the same time, assert that their ideological views are shared by all the decent members of civil society. And they are very nasty pieces of work, bitter from their long experience of social exclusion and their lowly positions on the socio-sexual totem pole.  They are full of hatred themselves, which is why they see hate in even the most genuine and harmless differences of opinion. 

Most of all, they have no ability to conceive of the mere possibility of separating the personal from the political. They attempt to destroy those who disagree with them or cause them to suffer embarrassment; recall that McRapey’s charity campaign wasn’t an attempt to stop me from trolling his blog or to advance any racist, sexist, or homophobic causes, it was to try to stop me from simply mentioning him because I dared to directly quote him and taunt him for his eminently tauntable words. I did nothing more than do to him what he prides himself on doing to others; you all know what resulted from that.

Nearly two decades ago, a member of the SFWA told me that the battles within science fiction were so bitter because the stakes were so small. But I think he was wrong. It’s more than that. The battles are so bitter because SF/F is largely comprised of gamma males and unattractive women who are very bitter people.  They are openly bitter about their lots in life. They are deeply angry with the world as they have experienced it. The books they write, for the most part, are their wish fulfillment fantasies, places where they finally have the chance to say what they didn’t have the wit to say when it mattered and be the people they couldn’t manage to become in real life. This is why, despite being technically more proficient in some ways, their work is so observably inferior to the science fiction and fantasy of earlier ages that concerned itself with ideas of more grandeur and societal import than the retro-adolescent daydreams of socio-sexually unsuccessful former junior high school students.

I commend Sarah for her graciousness in attempting to warn those who have repeatedly done their best to professionally shun her and undermine her career. But I can tell her that it will not work; I attempted to do something similar in my current campaign for SFWA President. But my warnings about the coming collapse of the traditional professional publishing business of SF/F – which you will note preceded the failure of Night Shade Books – was met with little more than the usual sneers and rabbits shrieking “not-rabbit, not-rabbit”!

So leave them to their fate.  Let the rabbits panic as books prices continue to decline, their royalties continue to fall and their publishers stop paying advances before finally going the way of Borders and Night Shade Books. Let them learn if they are able to compete on a playing field that is not heavily tilted in their favor by like-minded ideologues. Let the obese, unhealthy moral degenerates struggle to pay for the increased costs of their health care under the Obamacare regime for which they clamored.

It’s not our fault. It’s not our concern. And it’s not our problem. The gatekeepers are failing, the gates are swinging open, and the right-wing horde is rapidly approaching the citadel. It won’t be long before the sneering writers of SF/F cease their endless snarking and start crying out for mercy.

At that point, it will fall to us, we established writers of the right who have somehow managed to surmount every obstacle and survive every stone and missile hurled our way throughout what passes for our literary careers, to remind them that it was their decision to declare “no quarter”. We didn’t make the rules, we are merely playing by the ones they established.  I won’t take any pleasure in their suffering, but neither will I shed any tears.

I’ve put a list of standout authors on the right sidebar.  Authors like Sarah and Orson Scott Card, genre writers who have been willing, in some manner of speaking, to stand up against the fascists of science fiction and tell them, no, you don’t own science fiction, you don’t own fantasy, you are interlopers and intellectual parasites, and you have polluted the very literature you claimed to love.  I encourage those fans of the genre who are of the right themselves to support those writers who don’t insult you, who don’t despise you, who don’t hate you for your religious faith or your political beliefs.

Give their books a shot. You won’t like all of them.  I don’t myself.  I will still read China Mieville although he is a Communist lunatic and adore Umberto Eco’s work despite the incoherence of his left-leaning humanism.  But to the extent that I can utilize whatever influence has been granted to me by those who choose to read this blog and support my writing, I will use it to assist those who stand up for Western civilization and human liberty, rather than those who, intentionally or unintentionally, are seeking to destroy it.

Make no mistake.  The John Scalzis of the science fiction world desperately want to see Western civilization destroyed. They despise it and the conceptual aspects of their work largely consists of their dreams of its demise. But what they fail to realize is that the end of all the things they hate, the end of racism, sexism, morality, religion, and inequality, requires nothing less than the end of humanity itself, and that the end of Western civilization will not be the sexy secular scientopia of their dreams, but a two thousand-year relapse into depravity and pagan darkness.

The cancer in SF/F, part I

Adam Roberts asks who owns the political soul of science fiction

I make no apologies for writing science fiction.
I love the genre with a deep and geeky love. Becoming professor of
19th-century literature at the University of London has done nothing to
diminish my capacity for that mode of enthusiasm that fans call “squee”.

Being
a literature professor means, in effect, the government pays me to read
books; and, taking my job seriously, I read a lot, in and out of genre.
I think the novel is most alive today as a literature of the fantastic:
at their worst, SF, fantasy and magic realist novels can be very bad;
while at their best, they’re by far the most exciting kinds of writing
being published.

But here’s the thing: my genre divides
politically in a manner unlike others. Writers of historical or crime
fiction might be rightwing or leftwing, but few would attempt to define
those genres as intrinsically left- or right-leaning. SF is different:
the genre defines itself according to two diametrically opposed
ideological stances.

Roberts didn’t have to tell us which side he is on: his use of the word “squee” was all that was necessary to let us know that he was of the enscalzied left wing of science fiction.  But his question is more interesting than it might first appear, because although the answer is obvious to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to the world of professional, published science fiction over the last 20 years, there is more to it than simply looking at who is getting published, who is winning awards, and who has been running SFWA for the last decade.

There is no question who presently owns what would be best termed “the trappings” of science fiction.  It is the scalzied manboobs, the cisgendered queers, the obese cat collectors, the Red Diaper socialists, the female imperativists, and the professional race whiners who presently dominate science fiction, not because they have more talent to offer than those on the right, but due to a) science fiction’s longtime affiliation with the secular humanist, sciencistic left and b) the long march through the publishing institutions that has gradually and methodically gone about excluding every editor and author even remotely suspected of harboring views that have been, or may be, deemed ideologically undesirable.

The long march isn’t the product of my imagination. I first became aware of it when Pocket Books, to their credit, thought it would be a good idea to assign an editor who had at least a modicum of religious awareness to my Eternal Warriors novels, but couldn’t find a single religious individual in house.  They finally had to hire an external editor, a Jewish woman, because the organization’s collective theological knowledge amounted to zero.

So much for the heirs of the Western intellectual tradition; the reviewer at Black Gate who reviewed Summa Elvetica genuinely believed that the argument presented therein was a real one written by Thomas Aquinas.  However, having read the Summa Theologica, I can assure everyone that while the Angelic Doctor contemplated many issues, the question of whether elves have souls naturally united to them or not was not one of them.

One need only look at the increasingly mediocre works that have been nominated for, and in some cases even won, science fiction’s highest prizes to realize that the genre is dominated by the ideological left and is in severe decline from both the literary and revenue perspectives.  When six of the top 10-selling SF books in 2012 are either ripped off from an Xbox game or were first published more than a decade ago, it shouldn’t be difficult to observe that there is a very serious problem with the science fiction that is presently being published.

Now, some will wish to dismiss my observations as the embittered rantings of a fourth-rate fantasy author, even though the sales of one of my books, at around 41,000, would have put me at number three on the 2012 list of bestsellers.  But even if one dismisses me, the problem is that I am far from the only former Asimov and Analog subscriber who no longer bothers to even pirate, let alone buy, The Year’s Best Science Fiction collections because so little of it is worth reading anymore. As an SFWA member, I have a vote for the Nebula, but at least in the case of the Best Novel category, there is simply nothing for which one can credibly vote.

It is simply impossible to call any of the novels presently up for this year’s Nebula or Hugo the best novel in SF/F with a straight face. And if one of them truly does merit the description, then the genre is in even worse shape than I have observed.  It should not be controversial to suggest that it is highly unlikely that anyone from this year’s class will one day be named a Grandmaster of Science Fiction.

CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Heinlein could not get published in today’s SF/F publishing environment, which has ironically turned Harlan Ellison’s concept of SF being a place for “dangerous visions” on its head. The fact that the Guardian chose to head the linked article with a picture of Iain M. Banks was particularly apt, as science fiction is today in much the same position as the unfortunate Scottish author, who recently announced that he was terminal with a cancer that had developed unbeknownst to him. (One has to respect his mordant wit; in response to the bad news he asked his longtime girlfriend if she would do him the honor of becoming his widow.) Science fiction is not only terminal, its professional community is still largely ignorant of that readily observable fact.

Science fiction is dying because it has been invaded by a parasitical and hostile ideology that has metastasized and spread throughout the genre. This ideology is opposed to science because science is weakening the assumptions on which it is founded. It is opposed to heroism because heroism is intrinsically anti-egalitarian. It is opposed to masculinity because its adherents are women and feminized gamma males. It is opposed to Western civilization because Western civilization is Christian.  It is opposed to free discourse because free discourse reveals its many incoherencies, contradictions, and complete flights of fantasy.

Roberts’s summary of the difference between left and right is accurate, but incomplete: “Heinlein’s imagined interstellar future is an environment designed to
valorise the skill sets (self-reliance, engineering competence,
willpower, bravery and manliness) that Heinlein prized. Left-leaning
Iain M Banks’s Culture novels posit a high-tech geek utopia in which the
particular skill sets, ethics and wit‑discourse of SF nerds turn out to
be the gold standard of pan-galactic multi-species civilisation.”

But it is more than that. Roberts omits to mention that feminism, equalitarianism, cultural relativism, massive central government, unrestrained sexual adventurism, and ideological strawmen are de rigueur for the science fiction of the left.  And that is when it is more than simple romance novels in space or rewritten Regency romances with a modest sprinkling of magic.

The fact that Roberts considers the genre’s greatest writers to be “Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson” shows that he is speaking only of the genre’s left and also suffices to show the inferiority of the works produced by that side of the genre. With the exception of Le Guin and Sheldon, no science fiction fan would trade a single Herbert or Heinlein novel for the complete collected works of all the others… well, perhaps some of the later Heinleins.

The fate that awaits the world of professional published science fiction is that which ultimately befell the art of Socialist Realism. Because it is imposed by a small, centralized group that happened to seize the relevant power, it will collapse and fade away once the group’s power ceases to be relevant.  As it so often does, economic and technological changes have eroded the power of the gatekeeper’s, which is why we can watch the collapse of Nightshade Books and anticipate the coming closure of other publishers and imprints which are infested with the ideological cancer.

SF/F’s left-wing gatekeepers made the same error that the ABCNNBCBS cabal made when instead of simply reporting the nation’s news, it attempted to turn itself into the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. But there will be no singular Fox News prison-raping its competitors in the case of SF/F, instead, there will be Glenn Reynold’s army of a thousand Davids, with successful independent authors like Larry Correia and Marko Kloos demonstrating to every other writer deemed politically incorrect and/or unpublishable by the gatekeepers that the gates have been torn down. They no longer exist.

More on why the ongoing collapse of the gatekeepers is not reason for despair, but promises to be very good news for fans of traditional SF/F in part II.

How not to be SFWA president III

John Scalzi tweets concerning his admirable commitment to intellectual discourse: “I’ve blocked or muted an incredible number of appallingly stupid people today. Seriously, it must be a record.”

Of course, you have to keep in mind that McRapey defines “appallingly stupid people” as anyone who disagrees with him and dares to ask him a question that he is incapable of answering without exposing his intellectual limitations.  The Gamma Rabbit knows very well that he can’t hold his own in any environment where he can’t control the microphone.

Keep on keeping on, Johnny.

How not to be SFWA president II

John Scalzi doubles down, not only in terms of jacking up his levels of emotion, irrationality, and vulgarity, but by expanding his attack on Random House to include ALL publishers who utilize a no-advance model:

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

But, these publishers and their defenders may say (and have said), the publisher takes all the risk in producing a book! Yeah? Hey, to publishers and their defenders who say that: Fuck you. Fuck you for asserting that the author has shouldered no risk, when she’s invested the time, opportunity cost and material outlay required to create a manuscript. Fuck you for asserting the the author sees no risk to her own career from the choices that the publisher imposes on the publishing process that the author has no control of: everything from cover art (which, if horrible and/or out of step with the market, can sink a book) to the size and distribution of the initial print run, to the marketing plan the publisher has for retail.

Fuck you for lightly passing over the risk that the author has if the book fails — that any additional books in the contract might be cancelled or put out with the bare minimum of contractual obligation, that the author might not be able to sell another book to the publisher or other publishers because of a track record of poor sales — and for lightly passing over the fact the a publisher mitigates its own risk of the failure of a single book by having an entire portfolio of releases. If one single book fails but the publisher’s line holds up generally, then the risk the publisher encounters to its livelihood is minimal. The risk to the author, on the other hand, is substantially greater. Yes, to all of that, “fuck you,” is probably the politest thing to say in response.

Now, I could certainly point out that this is an incredibly stupid, unprofessional, and irresponsible thing to do, especially in light of how the Guardian has already mistaken one of his previous posts on the subject for the SFWA’s position.  So, given the dedicated journalistic commitment to calm and reasonable discourse, it would not be a surprise if we soon see headlines of this sort: SFWA To All Publishers: “FUCK YOU”.

However, I think that’s all readily apparent.  Being an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist, I happen to find it much more amusing to demonstrate that Scalzi simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and moreover, to show that his observed inability to understand the potential benefits of the no-advance, revenue-share system has already cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2012 alone.

Scalzi has publicly stated that Tor sold
35,667 eBook versions of Redshirts at $11.99, 17,008 audiobooks at $19.95 and 26,604 hardcovers at $24.95.  If we assume that he gets the
standard 20% royalty on ebooks that Tor author Robert Sawyer says Tor is paying its authors, the customary 10(5K)-12.5(5K)-15% on hardcovers, and 8% on audio books, his royalty revenues under the traditional publishing model he is defending so vigorously are likely in the vicinity of the following:

Ebook: $59,870.62
Hardcover: $90,479.22
Audiobook: $27,144.77
Total royalties: $177,494.61

That’s excellent performance by any measure, almost surely in excess of whatever advance he received for Redshirts.  One must congratulate Scalzi on his ability to write fiction that people want to buy, regardless of what one thinks of the man or the fiction.  However, one also has to seriously question his financial acumen, because if he had the very sort of publishing deal that he is claiming is so dreadful and indefensible, he would have done considerably better.

Let’s be realistic and assume that in addition to the revenue-sharing model, his contract contains an amount of chargeable overhead as many of these 50/50 contracts do.  The largest of which I am aware permitted the publisher to charge the author up to a maximum of $10,000 from the author’s royalties.  Based on the same channel discount structure as above, but this time splitting the resulting revenue equally between Tor and the author results in the following figures:

Ebook: $149,676.57
Hardcover: $165,942.45
Audiobook: $84,827.40
Total royalties: $400,446.42
(less overhead charge $10,000)
Net author revenue: $390,446.42.  

In other words, Scalzi has already thrown away $212,951.81 in additional royalty revenue due to his insistence on an advance and his inability to understand that the no-advance, 50/50 revenue-sharing model is not intrinsically unfair, disadvantageous to the writer, or predatory.  In fact, if he wasn’t such an angry and short-sighted fool, he would go to Tor and very politely ask them to publish his future books under the very no-advance model he is so vigorously decrying.  As it stands, every dollar he henceforth collects from Tor on Redshirts represents $2.55 (and counting) that he would have received had he the courage and foresight to accept the risk of foregoing a pre-payment on his royalties.

No doubt some authors believe that it is a good idea to heed the advice of a successful author when it comes to book contracts.  And that is quite often true.  But is it really a good idea to avoid no-advance, 50/50 publishing deals on the advice of an author dumb enough to hand over 54.5 percent of his potential royalties to the publisher for nothing more than the privilege of collecting part of the income beforehand?

UPDATE:  John Scalzi demonstrates that he not only can’t do math, he can’t read either:

The
fellow in question has no idea how my contract is structured, so he
hasn’t the slightest idea what I’m making. I will say his estimates
amuse me. His estimates about production and marketing costs likewise
suggest a profound ignorance of the real world (that $10,000 would have
covered this for a week, at most). Additionally, if the fellow is trying
to use the example of an outlier (i.e., a bestselling author with a
large and healthy following) in an overly-simplistic “all other things
being equal” sort of comparison, grounded in bad numbers, to show why
these sorts of contracts might be beneficial to other writers,
particularly new writers, then he’s, at best, once again letting his
need to get his mancrush on get in the way of clear and rational
thinking, or useful advice to other authors.

Ignorant and
mendacious is not a great combination, basically. And that’s all I will
say about that. It’s nice he’s still making money for those various
organizations, however.

As noted here, I have no problems with
authors choosing not to take advances — or making any other sort of
contractual maneuvers they choose — when the author has decided that it
is in his or her own best interests to do so, based on several factors.
This is manifestly different from the publisher having “no advances” as
its default setting. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the difference between
those two probably should not be dispensing career advice to anyone
else.

First, Scalzi is attempting to have it both
ways here.  I cited the standard royalty rates for ebooks, hardcovers,
and audio books from Tor Books in doing my calculations.  It is entirely
possible that as one of their leading authors, he gets better royalty
rates from them, although I very much doubt he is getting the 50 percent
royalties that Hydra is offering or that I get from my publishers.  The
numbers are not bad, they are standard and other writers, particularly
new writers, are not likely to get better royalty rates than those I
cited.

They are certainly more relevant than the numbers
that John is keeping to himself, which is certainly his right, but to which he
cannot reasonably appeal.  And, insofar as his royalties depart from those that new writers will receive he is making the very outlier mistake that he
erroneously accuses me of making.

Furthermore, I said absolutely
nothing about “production and marketing costs”, but rather, referred to
a fixed amount that is expected to help cover the publisher’s overhead
costs involved in publishing the book.  In my various book contracts,
that fixed amount ranges from zero to $10,000 and comes out of my 50
percent share.  Far from showing any “profound ignorance of the real
world”, it simply showed Scalzi’s lack of reading ability and
unfamiliarity with the revenue-sharing model.

Notice that he is backing down now that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous and materially self-defeating.  Suddenly the problem isn’t “no advances”,  but “no advances as its default setting”.

UPDATE II: The little rabbits actually manage to make Scalzi’s inept response look downright intelligent when they try to weigh in:


“Claiming that 10000 USD cover all the expenses involved in marketing and
producing Redshirts (Posters. Book tours. Wil Wheaton. Cover designs.
Typesetting. Editing. Proofreading.) is so fallacious that it renders
every other point invalid.”

Well, I suppose it might if anyone had ever made such a stupid and fallacious claim.  But no one did anything of the sort, least of all me.

How not to be SFWA president

Three-time and outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi appears to want to bring his period of amateurish misrule to an end on a fittingly diplomatic note:

THIS IS A HORRIBLE AWFUL TERRIBLE APPALLING DISGUSTING CONTRACT WHICH IS BAD AND NO WRITER SHOULD SIGN IT EVER. Yes, I’m aware I’ve already said this. It bears repeating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from Alibi, Hydra or anyone. Run away from it, as fast as you can, arms flailing like a Muppet’s. It’s the only rational response.

I will note that at the moment I have in my email queue a letter from Random House, written in a “more in sorrow than anger” style, which expresses disappointment that I (for one) didn’t talk to them before writing my piece on their terrible regrettable insulting Hydra deal terms, and waxing rhapsodic about their bold new business model. It’s profit sharing, you see, not like apparently any of those other book contracts out there, which comes as a surprise to me, considering how much of Tor’s and Subterranean’s profits I’ve shared in over the years.

I am speaking for myself and only for myself when I say that I looked at the letter that the folks at Random House sent me and wondered just how incredibly stupid they must think I am to believe that just because they sent a letter that read as all reasonable and nice sounding, that would somehow change the fact that the business model of their new eBook imprints is predicated on preying on writers — and preying on the writers most at risk for being preyed upon, the new and the desperate.

This must be more of that smart diplomacy of which we heard so much in the recent presidential elections.  It’s hardly a joking matter, but it is a little amusing in light of expressed concerns regarding my ability to get along with the major publishers.  But while I may have been personally attacked by a pair of Tor editors and been guilty of asking questions concerning the number of Nebula nominations won by Tor Books, it can honestly say it never occurred to me to publicly assail a major publishing house’s basic business practices or make assumptions concerning its views of its authors.

I am not saying the business model of Random House’s ebook imprints is ideal or even fair.  But these are issues best raised privately, not shrieked from the mountaintops.  Despite Scalzi’s hysterical whining – no, Johnny, they’re not “fucking kidding you” – there is absolutely nothing wrong with the no-advance model; I prefer it myself because it reduces the amount of risk to the publisher and costs the writer nothing while simultaneously providing him with a considerably higher share of the upside.  The shared risk model is a good one; why should the publisher have to gamble and assure the writer of revenue that may never be realized?

And the publisher’s risk is real.  I’ve been paid “advances” on three books from two different publishers that I didn’t even have to write due to various reorganizations and turf wars inside the publishing houses.

Instead of jumping up and down and screaming “it’s not fair”, the SFWA president should be speaking quietly with Random House, and explaining what aspects of the contracts are reasonable and which are not.  That’s not only the best way to address situations like these, it is the only way, because SFWA is not about to win a pissing match with a major publisher facing a declining market and a genuine need to revise its traditional business model.

As an SFWA member, I’m embarrassed by the juvenile behavior of the president and appalled that the introduction of new contracts for the new medium appear to have taken the organization by surprise.  I’ve stated that the status quo leadership of the recent past has been amateurish in the extreme; this incident is only the most recent evidence of that.  And, needless to say, if I am elected president, these matters will be handled in a considerably more professional manner.

UPDATE: Publisher’s Weekly is on it, complete with a copy of the letter to Scalzi and the SFWA:

After the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) came out swinging on Wednesday, with its president saying that it would not allow authors publishing with Random House’s e-only science fiction imprint Hydra to use that achievement as a credential for membership, the publisher has responded.

PW’s Genreville blog ran a post about the SFWA’s decision, but Random House said the organization never gave it the opportunity to address the issue at hand, namely royalty rates and overall contract terms. (The SFWA said the main reason for its decision is that Hydra “fails to pay authors an advance against royalties, as SFWA requires, and has contract terms that are onerous and unconscionable.”

In a letter to the SFWA, Random House’s digital publishing director Allison Dobson said that while it respects the organization’s stance “we strongly disagree with it, and wish you had contacted us before you published your posts.” The letter went on to say that Hydra “offers a different–but potentially lucrative–publishing model for authors: a profit share,” and that “as with every business partnership, there are specific costs associated with bringing a book successfully to market, and we state them very straightforwardly and transparently in our author agreements.”

Mailvox: the line between F and SF

An SFWA author writes concerning the upcoming SFWA election:

 I voted for you and my ballot’s going out tomorrow in the mail. I thought your opening statements were hilarious! Outlandish, too….  But anyway I liked most of your ideas for SFWA.

The idea of establishing two Nebula awards — one for SF and one for F is really over the top. They overlap. Just as a good story also overlaps with dark elements. (Which we politely do  not refer to as “horror” but it is.) This is the main reason I’m writing you –I’d like to know just how you would possibly chop SF & F in half –when novels and stories contain elements of both. “Hard” sf isn’t the only definition of Science Fiction. “Hard SF” implies that there is some explicit element of science explained within the story or novel (which Landis and Haldeman do well) but it’s not the only element and anything we imagine becomes fantasy.

This was my response:  In answer to your question, those nominating a novel for a Nebula Award would be expected to indicate that they considered the nominated work to be either F or SF as part of the nomination process.  A novel that received both SF and F nominations would have both types of nominations counted but would be put up for the award in the category that received the most nominations, assuming that it received enough combined nominations to qualify.  If the author happened to disagree with the categorization and the difference between the two categories was between one and three nominations, then the category would be switched at the author’s request.

Obviously, if everyone nominates something that is clearly Fantasy and the author prefers it to compete in the Science Fiction category because he believes he is the second coming of Isaac Asimov or because he thinks it will be easier to beat out Star Trek 562: Spock Takes a Nap than the most recent rewrite of a Brontë novel published by Tor Books, there would be no reason to accommodate that.

But if a book could be reasonably considered to be either science fiction or fantasy, to such an extent that it is unclear to the readers, there is no reason not to permit the author to determine which category the book most properly belongs.