Tag: SFWA

ESR on SF and literary penis envy

Er, sorry, I guess that was literary STATUS envy. Although considering the predominantly female and low-testosterone gamma male makeup of the other side, either description would serve equally well. In any event, ESR addresses the Blue SF/Pink SF divide:

I’ve been aware for some time of a culture war simmering in the SF world. And trying to ignore it, as I believed it was largely irrelevant to any of my concerns and I have friends on both sides of the divide. Recently, for a number of reasons I may go into in a later post, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at it. And now I’m going to have to weigh in, because it seems to me that the side I might otherwise be most sympathetic to has made a rather basic error in its analysis. That error bears on something I do very much care about, which is the health of the SF genre as a whole.

Both sides in this war believe they’re fighting about politics. I consider this evaluation a serious mistake by at least one of the sides.

On the one hand, you have a faction that is broadly left-wing in its politics and believes it has a mission to purge SF of authors who are reactionary, racist, sexist et weary cetera…. On the other hand, you have a faction that is broadly conservative or libertarian in its politics. Its members deny, mostly truthfully, being the bad things the Rabbits accuse them of.

It’s interesting to see ESR weigh in on this, not only because he is an unusually intelligent individual, but as he says, he has sympathies on both sides of the divide. And, I would suspect, competing natural inclinations as well. But it was a little surprising to see him conclude that he tended to be more sympathetic to the side of evilly Evil. As the title of his post suggests, his observation is that the root cause of the divide is not political, but rather literary:

Alas, I cannot join the Evil League of Evil, for I believe they have
made the same mistake as the Rabbits; they have mistaken accident for
essence. The problem with the Rabbits is not that left-wing politics is dessicating and poisoning their fiction. While I have made the case elsewhere that SF is libertarian at its core,
it nevertheless remains possible to write left-wing message SF that is
readable, enjoyable, and of high quality – Iain Banks’s Culture novels
leap to mind as recent examples, and we can refer back to vintage
classics such as Pohl & Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants
for confirmation. Nor, I think, is the failure of Rabbit fiction to
engage most SF fans and potential fans mainly down to its politics; I
think the Evil League is prone to overestimate the popular appeal of
their particular positions here.

No, I judge that what is dessicating and poisoning the Rabbit version
of SF is something distinct from left-wing political slant but
co-morbid with it: colonization by English majors and the rise of
literary status envy as a significant shaping force in the field.

This is a development that’s easy to mistake for a political one
because of the accidental fact that most university humanities
departments have, over the last sixty years or so, become extreme-left
political monocultures. But, in the language of epidemiology, I believe
the politics is a marker for the actual disease rather than the pathogen
itself. And it’s no use to fight the marker organism rather than the
actual pathogen….

The Evil League of Evil is fighting the wrong war in the wrong way.
To truly crush the Rabbits, they should be talking less about politics
and more about what has been best and most noble in the traditions of
the SF genre itself. I think a lot of fans know there is something
fatally gone missing in the Rabbit version of science fiction; what they
lack is the language to describe and demand it. That being said, in the long run, I don’t think the Evil League of Evil can lose.

Of course the Evil League of Evil cannot lose. Not with me as its Supreme Dark Lord! I have studied the lessons of my many failed predecessors well and have subsequently implemented the following protocols:

  1. Installed a magical ground-to-air defense system called IRON CLAW that will grab, pull down, and dismember any airborne creature large enough to carry a hobbit.
  2. Scheduled rotating squads of crack guards, each including at least one experienced battlemage, to be positioned outside the side door to Mount Doom. Also hired new Head of Security after ordering the previous one thrown into the lava flowing inside the aforementioned mountain.
  3. Established an operation called HERODSIX that tracks global birth data and passes it on to a team of nutritionists who will arrange to feed abortifacients to any pregnant woman who has previously given birth to six sons.
  4. Constructed a well-guarded underground facility in which my undead, unkillable warriors are created. Instead of carting a heavy, rune-inscribed iron cauldron around to every prospective battlefield, the Evil League of Evil is paying top silver for freshly killed corpses in good condition, with a bonus for each one over 6’4″.
  5. Dismantled and reassembled the four thrones at Cair Laugharne. I’m looking forward to seeing the little bastards park their bony little arses on them as foretold now that they’ve been made into gold-plated wooden stakes.
  6. Armored the air intakes to my mighty mountain fortress, Gheddorodim, with plasma shields capable of deflecting the most powerful energy-torpedo.
  7. Implemented DOUBLE-TAP, a protocol which includes bans on monologuing, evil cackling, unauthorized torture, and extended prisoner-taunting by all lieutenants and minions of rank E6 or higher. It also lays out specific policies concerning proper confirmations of death (or True Death in the case of the undead), and corpse disposal. All employees of the Evil League of Evil who fail to abide by the protocol will themselves be subject to DOUBLE-TAP.
  8. Also, at the request of Generalissimo Xcrucifix, we now have cookies. Chocolate Chip and Oatmeal Butterscotch. I’m not convinced this actually enhances our security, but I don’t see how it harms it either.

Now, in my opinion, ESR is partially correct in his interpretation of the divide as being intrinsically literary. But while the literary aspect is absolutely another facet of the SF/F divide, and one which I have written about in some detail in the past, it’s only the second of five facets that separate the Evil League of Evil from the rabbits.

  1. Political. This is obvious. We tend to be center-to-right, they tend to be left-to-extreme left.
  2. Literary. They tend to be focused on style, followed by ideological concerns regarding diversity and social justice. While our best stylists, Gene Wolfe and John C. Wright, are better than theirs, it’s true that they tend to be more skilled when it comes to pure prose. As the International Lord of Hate has frequently pointed out, we are focused on story, story, story, followed by characters, followed by worldbuilding and/or ideas.
  3. Religious. We tend to be either religious or religion-friendly seculars. They tend to range from goddess-worshipping Unitarians to rabid anti-theists. Even the atheists in our midst are more comfortable with religion in their SF/F  than their most religious members.
  4. Socio-sexual. We tend to be men of Delta rank or higher. They tend to be women, feminized Gamma males, or Omega males. Our female members possess more of the masculine virtues of courage and honor than most of their men.
  5. Experiential. We tend to come from worlds outside of academia and education. We write and we work real jobs that are totally unrelated to writing. They mostly write, and write about writing, and teach, quite often about writing. I expect their academic majors were mostly English, with the occasional STEM degree, while ours are from a much broader spectrum. For example, by training, John is a lawyer, Larry is an accountant, and I am an economist. And ironically, for all their politically correct enthusiasm for diversity, we are probably more ethnically and linguistically diverse.

The differences between the two sides are often visibly identifiable, and not just because we’re the ones carrying guns. One of the two book signings I ever did was a big one featuring 20 different authors at a big Barnes & Noble, including Gordon R. Dickson, Joel Rosenberg, Lois Bujold, David Feintuch, David Arneson, and various other SF/F luminaries. One kid asking me to sign his book said: “You don’t look like an SF writer.” And, I had to admit, after looking to either side of me, it wasn’t at all clear that we belonged to the same phylum, let alone species.

In response to a few of the various statements and questions raised:

  1. I would never deny that it remains possible to write left-wing message SF that is readable, enjoyable, and of high quality. That is true. But I would argue that the Culture novels are an excellent example of how the left-wing messages tend to harm, rather than enhance, the fiction. It’s not an accident that nothing interesting ever happens in the Culture (or in the Federation), or that in order to simply tell a story, it is necessary to leave the left-wing utopia and go in search of adventure elsewhere. Just as the Left has only one joke (you know that guy there, he’s stupid, isn’t he?) it has only one story, that of the struggle of the transition of an entity, individual or collective, from Badthink to Goodthink. They don’t tell stories, they tell Very Important Lessons.
  2.  How do you separate real writers from wannabes with deep pockets? Who cares? Let everyone write. Publish them all and let Amazon sort them out. SFWA was already irrelevant because its reason for existence was subverted. It was captured by the mainstream publishers long ago, as illustrated by its lining up against Amazon on Hatchette’s behalf.
  3. The term “rabbit” actually comes from E.O. Wilson’s ecological r/K selection theory. I explained it in a post called Digging Out the Rabbit People. It is derogatory; it is also very apt. More importantly, it’s always fun to be able to throw in the occasional Lapine phrase from Watership Down.
  4. Contra Mr. Andrew Marston of Marshfield, MA’s claims, I do sell books. I’m no bestseller, to be sure but my books usually sell around 5,000 copies apiece. Not enough to live on, especially when it takes me two years to write one, but not bad for a hobby. My bestselling book sold between 35,000 and 40,000 copies. My bestselling game sold over six million copies. And I have never had a trust fund.
  5. The idea that the existence of the “Gamma Rabbit” t-shirt is evidence that the rabbits have a sense of humor about themselves indicates an insufficient understanding of the gamma mentality and the gamma male’s need to spin the narrative in his favor. It’s little more credible than Scalzi’s claims that he found my mocking his inept satire and exposure of his self-inflating traffic claims to be “adorable”.

UPDATE: The Official Spokesvillain of the Evil League of Evil, The King in Yellow, explains the identifiable attributes of the rabbits/morlocks/trog-progs:

There are thirteen identifiable markers of the membership of the tribe of Troglodytes:

1. Theologically, they are atheist and agnostic, or at least laiacist.
2. In Metaphysics, they are nihilist. They hold the universe to have no innate meaning.
3. In Epistemology, they are subjectivists and (ironically) empiricists.
4. In Ontology, they are materialists. They believe minds are epiphenomena of matter.
5. In Logic, they are polylogists. They believe each race and both genders possesses unique and exclusive rules of logic.
6. In Aesthetics, they glorify the ugly and destroy beauty.
7. In Ethics, they are Gnostics. Whatever we call good, they call evil, and whatever we call evil, they call good.
8. In Politics, they are statists, and tacitly totalitarian. They want arbitrary power rather than law and order.
9. In Economics, they are socialist. They want the law of supply and demand to vanish softly away.
10. In Semantics, they are nominalists. They hold words to have no innate meaning.
11. In their psychological stance, they are sadists.
12. In their psychopathology, they are suicidal. They don’t want to live, they want you to die.
13. Emotionally, they are infantile. The emotion that governs them is envy.

Now, these are rough generalizations only, and no one member of the movement believes all these points, and, being a strongly anti-intellectual and pro-irrational bent, few of them even know what these big words mean. Some of these points contradict each other. That matters nothing to them. Logic is not their strong suit.

    The pinkshirts are trembling

    And it’s not merely Amazon that is scaring them. What’s amusing about this is that the truth is finally beginning to dawn on Damien… that he and all his weird little friends are in the minority. Their little freakshow extravaganza of diversity and left-wing ideology only existed thanks to the gatekeepers and now they’re getting blown out of the water by people like Larry Correia, Tom Kratman, John Wright, Sarah Hoyt, the Mad Geniuses and hundreds of other ambitious writers who don’t have to kowtow to their ridiculous demands or respect their absurd dogma any longer.

    One noticeable difference between John Scalzi and Damien Walter is that McRapey is a master of self-marketing who always understood that there were as many, if not more, people on the right side of the ideological fence as the left. And Scalzi was, in the past, assiduously careful to maintain good relations with the other side, until he lost his temper and let the mask slip too egregiously. Damien, on the other hand, simply doesn’t grasp that Fox News is not an outlier, it is an indicator. He simply cannot fathom that there are far more people who, if forced to choose, will genuinely prefer what I stand for, sanity and civilization, over his diverse band of deviants, weirdos, race hustlers, and outright sex criminals.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    Vox has a core of a few hundred regular readers. They may be sad losers, but they’re enough to effect a small Hugo voter pool.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter @mareinna Vox Day is a racist rightwing nutjob. He gathers in his umbra, many of the same. This isn’t really surprising.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    Exactly why letting this clique have a platform within the niche SF community is a very bad idea. @E_M_Edwards @mareinna

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter @mareinna I don’t see how they threaten SF -as a community; outside of their circle, they’re routinely laughed at & despised.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter @mareinna And SF has a not insignificant share of (historically and currently) rightwing, racist, nutjob writers & readers.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter @mareinna They have a platform because, unfortunately, they represent a portion of the human spectrum.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter @mareinna A portion that is pretty awful, even by human standards, but I don’t understand why VD creates such a stir.

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    @damiengwalter @E_M_Edwards @mareinna I’d be happy if they stuck to their own little niche, but they want to take over the genre.

    Martin McGrath ‏@martinmcgrath
    @damiengwalter So why would you tweet links to their hateful words?

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna That’s not going to happen though.

    Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter 2h
    Only because at this point he’s been allowed a platform. Kick him off that platform and there’s no problem.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna And I fear it’s wishful thinking to consider racism & fascist tendencies a ‘niche’ in SF.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @martinmcgrath Because he’s already got himself a Hugo nomination. Ignoring the issue became moot at that point.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Certainly from a historical point of view, it is a recognizable thread in genre. As it is in the world

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards If that as the case I would leave the community. It’s a *tiny* minority, but vocal.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna I think you have to support a more diverse SF community because you’ll not ever stamp it out.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna But I’m less sure you’ll ever snip it out of the overall pattern. It will remain, and reappear.

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    @E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna I was lucky that my early exposure was via bookstore which kept fascist books off their shelves.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna And I’m not saying that out of some ‘free speech’ argument.

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    @damiengwalter @E_M_Edwards @mareinna Whenever these jerks spew their crap again, I feel like leaving.

    who needs words @mareinna
    @E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter maybe because he kerps writing tirades against writers who in turn give him publicity by defending themselves?

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    @E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna The SFF community is getting more diverse, that’s why these folks are furious.

    Arthur Wyatt ‏@arthurwyatt
    @damiengwalter I’m pretty sure it’s not people who have actually read his stuff you need to worry about.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter You’re an idealist. I don’t see VDs values as those of a tiny minority. He’s just more visible.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter In no small measure, I suspect, because it is a part – and I dread this phrase- of his personal brand.

    Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards If you prove to be correct, I’ll leave the community. In an instant.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Agreed. There is always a push back by groups who have had more of a majority share, when it shrinks.

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    @E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna VD is the radical fringe. IMO the Correias, Kratmans, Ringos, Hoyts are the bigger problem.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna But that doesn’t mean they’re going to disappear. Which is why diversity best use of energy, I feel.

    Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert 2h
    @E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna Cause they pretend to be the reasonable mainstream and silent majority.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter Your choice, OC. But why? Better to add your weight to the counterbalance then throw out your toys.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Again, I agree, mostly. Though I suspect some of their ‘moderate’ stance is just as calculated.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards Why? If SF is mostly bigots and racists it can go fuck itself. But, it isn’t, you’re wrong on this.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Which doesn’t mean they disagree with people like VD. But they’re rather he be the lightning rod.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter I don’t believe it is however, a ‘tiny’ minority. Or even a radical fringe.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards If it was even a substantial minority. It isn’t. @CoraBuhlert @mareinna

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter Is VD radical within it? Likely yes. Both personally and due to his positioning, but a black swan? No.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards Again, if you prove to be right, I’ll leave it. No point repeating this again.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter OK. I can hear you don’t want it to be. It would be more useful perhaps, to have real figures.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter Which I don’t have either, so I’m not saying you have to have them to have an opinion.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter But I’m not swayed by your conviction, without them.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards Do you think VD deserve a Hugo award? You’re derailing on to an irrelevancy here.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter I hope not. Even if we don’t agree on much. I’d rather you were out there in it than VD

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
        @damiengwalter Which sounds like weaker praise than it is meant. 😉

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter I’m hard pressed to think of anyone I’d rather have active in SF than VD. Likely they’re out there.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards I’ll happily go back to ignoring the idiot when the SF community stops letting him hijack it as a platform for his bile.

    E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter And if he does or doesn’t, how exactly – considering the limits & flaws of the Hugo – prove a point?

    @damiengwalter I’m not sure that will happen. We make our own platforms these days and the margins are very porous.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    @E_M_Edwards Given the small number of votes required, and coordination with other cons, it seems possible.

    Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
    If he or Correia win, the Hugos will have become a complete joke.

    Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
    Actually, these people are a big part of the reason I’m not going to Loncon.

    TL;DR: We’re winning. Already.

    First of all, it is, as usual, amusing to see them still failing to understand that this blog is considerably better trafficked than the blog that was celebrated and respected for years as the biggest blog in science fiction. Prior to the SFWA’s decision to purge me, the blogs were running just over one million pageviews per month. They’re now running at 1.4 million per month, a 40 percent increase in only one year. No one is “letting me have a platform” and SFWA has already tried to kick me off it. How did that go for them?

    Second, I don’t have a core of a few hundred regular readers. I have a core of a few thousand regular readers and a hard core of a few hundred Dread Ilk. I don’t lead them and they don’t follow me. If I quit tomorrow, a dozen would take my place, some of them smarter and more articulate than me.

    Third, to quote the Real Slim Shady: “I have been sent here to destroy you.
    And there’s a million of us just like me, who cuss like me; who just don’t give a fuck like me. Who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me.”

    Every day. Literally EVERY SINGLE DAY, I get emails from people who thank me for speaking out, who tell me how glad they are that someone is finally standing up to the freaks and deviants and pedophiles, who let me know that they are reading SF again for the first time in years, who send Castalia submissions saying how glad they are to know they will get a fair shake and an impartial reading that isn’t based on political correctness and diversity checkboxes.

    E.M. Edwards is more right than he knows. Damien reminds me of the troll, Andrew Marston, who once said that it made him feel suicidal to know that I had over 200 Twitter followers. Well, Damien should throw in the towel and quit right now, today, because the sane, civilized, and traditional side of SF/F is not only bigger than he knows, it is bigger than he fears. And it is going to grow bigger still.

    The pinkshirts are hoping the worst has passed and yet we have barely even begun to get started. They have no idea, none, about what is coming down the pipeline. Just wait until there are ten bestselling Correias and 20 outspoken VDs and even more young right wing radicals who make Tom Kratman look soft and have less sympathy for the pinkshirts than we do.

    Baen is kicking ass. Castalia is exceeding every expectation. The selfies and indies are eviscerating the gatekeepers as Amazon crushes the Big Five. Read those frightened tweets and smile, because we are only now beginning to light the fires that will engulf them.

    UPDATE: Now Damien is demonstrating, again, that he can’t comprehend what he reads. This lack of reading comprehension may be related to his dearth of literary success:

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    You see, this is what happens when you let racists on your award ballot. Hugos utterly discredited at this point.

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    “So who are the Hugo noms this year?” “Oh you know, some Hard SF, some Fantasy…and a man who advocates acid attacks on women.” +

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    + Do you see where that departs the usual “Hugos are broken” narrative?

    The fact that I can understand and even articulate a logical case for acid attacks on women when challenged to do so does not mean that I endorse or advocate it. Damien is reduced to trying to score cheap rhetorical points; he hasn’t learned yet that if you want any credibility in the public commentary game, you simply cannot fold, spindle, or mutilate the object of your criticism’s words.

    In any event, it’s not as if the Hugos could further discredit themselves after awarding Best Novel to Redshirts, a mediocre one-joke derivative of a previous parody of Star Trek. And has he read “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”? Ye cats.

    Call people “fucking cowards” and whatever other names you want, Damien. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. Your nightmare is just beginning.

    Will Shetterly interviews an SFWA Grandmaster

    In light of the recent revelations concerning science fiction figures Marion Zimmer Bradley, Walter Breen, and Ed Kramer, Will Shetterly thought it advisable to interview Sam Delany, who in addition to being SFWA’s most recently named Grandmaster, is also known to have publicly endorsed the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Be aware before you read it that it deals in fairly graphic detail with sexual deviancy and child abuse:

    After Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter spoke out about child abuse by Bradley and her husband, Walter Breen, a member of NAMBLA, writers as different as Vox Day and Liz Williams brought up Samuel R. Delany’s comment about NAMBLA twenty years ago:

    “I read the NAMBLA [Bulletin] fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I’ve ever found. I think before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself to it and see what it is really about. What the issues they are really talking about, and deal with what’s really there rather than this demonized notion of guys running about trying to screw little boys. I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.” — Samuel R. Delany, Queer Desires Forum, New York City, June 25, 1994. 

    Then I began to
    feel bad for not asking Chip Delany about this. In the 1960s, he was one
    of a small number of writers who made me believe fantasy and science
    fiction could be both great fun and great art. When he was the guest of
    honor at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, he was charming and
    learned and pretty much everything anyone could want in a guest of
    honor. I can’t say I know him, but I can say I like him. I believe we should be able to talk about things which are taboo—what
    reveals our nature is not what we say, but what we do. This is
    especially true of storytellers, who regularly write about things they
    would never do. 

    So I wrote Chip, which
    began a discussion that moved between Facebook messages and email. He
    has agreed to share it. What follows is a version that I lightly edited
    for clarity.

     As some readers may recall, I have observed that in addition to Delany’s homosexuality, his endorsement of NAMBLA, his fiction is literally overflowing with deviancy, sex crimes, and the abuse of children. I view all three of those factors as red flags of varying degrees of seriousness indicating a potential predilection for pedophilia. I would encourage you to consider some of Delany’s following statements that I have highlighted in that light:

    • I never met or knew Walter Breen (and only two or three times met Marion Zimmer Bradley, in the last two or three years of her life)…. I got the impression from others who knew him that the gossip about Breen, especially in the first years I knew Paul (well before Stonewall), whether Breen was gay or straight, was a tempest in teapot. Currently it sounds like it’s not. But, again, I never knew Breen or saw him in my life.
    • I have no idea what NAMBLA has been doing for the last twenty years.
    • I had my first sexual experience with an adult when I was six, with a local Harlem building superintendent. And nothing hurtful happened at all. It would have been cruel and unusual punishment to incarcerate him for it…. The building superintendent, however, abused me not at all. To say that he did, is just incorrect.
    • I said and still maintain that 20 years ago [NAMBLA] was an intelligent and highly thoughtful institution.
    • Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a child, and nine years of that life as a pretty sexually active gay child, my complaint against the current attitudes is that they work mightily to silence the voices of children first and secondarily ignore what adults have to say who have been through these situations. One size fits all is never the way to handle any situation with a human dimension.
    • The current attitude toward pedophilia is a tragic attempt to drive nature out with a pitchfork, and at this point it is a self-reinforcing tragedy, encouraging the worst and punishing the best by making no distinctions at all
    • The consent of a seven-, eight-, or nine-year old is not the same thing as the consent of a seventeen- or eighteen-year old. And the “consent” of a three, four, and five year old means much less—especially if it’s negative. But it must count for something, otherwise you are just saying the child is not human and has no feelings or agency whatsoever—which, in itself, is abusive and counter-intuitive. And, I would maintain, immoral when another possibility presents itself.
    • I have heard fifty or sixty such tales from gay men of this nature. It had none of the affect of abuse. If anything, it had more the feel of an impromptu educational session.

    On the basis of Mr. Delany’s remarkably frank answers, I would maintain that he was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused as a child to the point that he is intrinsically unable to tell black from white or right from wrong with regards to sexual matters. However, it is to be regretted that Mr. Shetterly did not ask Mr. Delany anything about the elephant in the room, namely, what he, himself, did. We know Mr. Delany was sexually abused by an older man at the age of six. We know he is familiar with fifty or sixty similarly abused homosexual men. What we still do not know, and what Mr. Shetterly rather delicately avoided asking, is if Mr. Delany ever put his principles into action, and, as an adult, engaged in sexual relations with children under the age of legal consent.

    Since most sexual abusers were abused themselves as children, (a fourth red flag, if you’re still counting), at this point I doubt it would very much surprise anyone if he had. And lest you doubt that SFWA’s support for Mr. Delany, let me remind you what SFWA President Steven Gould and former SFWA President John Scalzi had to say about Samuel R. Delany last December.

    1. “One of the perks of being SFWA president is the option of
      selecting the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s next
      Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. One of the tragedies is we only get
      to select one a year. That said, from the grains of sand in my pocket, I
      am delighted to pull this star. Samuel R. Delany is one of science fiction’s most influential
      authors, critics, and teachers and it is my great honor to announce his
      selection. When discussing him as this year’s choice with the board,
      past-presidents, and members, the most frequent response I received was,
      “He’s not already?” Well he is now.” (S. Gould)
    2. “The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has named Samuel R.
      Delany its newest Grand Master…. I will say this: This is an award
      both well chosen and well deserved.” (J. Scalzi) 

    It would certainly be interesting to know if Mr. Gould and Mr. Scalzi still unreservedly support Mr. Delany.

        Marion Zimmer Bradley’s son speaks out

        After his sister, Moira Greyland, bravely came forward and publicly exposed her mother, the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as a child abuser, her son has also stepped forward to confirm both her charges and the deposition of Elizabeth Waters. This is a brief selection; read the whole thing there.

        CS: Do you think other people were aware of your mother’s abuse of you and your sister at the time? If so, in what ways did they respond?
        MG: You assume that I would have felt free to say anything. There was always drama and there was always the invisible blade of what would happen if all of this dreadful secret got out. The atmosphere of fear of discovery was simply everywhere and there was no place to hide.

        Worse, I was ashamed. When you are small you believe stuff, and I felt with my whole heart that I was responsible when she would go bad. There was absolutely no way I was gonna drag the mountain onto my head. And that made every day a drama, a thick clogged tube of waiting for the dreadful, the un-nameable horror.

        And nobody spoke. Everything was always fine and that was my clown suit. I thought everyone knew and that I was such a bad person no one would speak to me. My echo chamber filled me with such fear of exposure I would do anything to make the shadow go away. And I did. The shame paints my world yellow and pink and brown. I don’t want to say these things any more….

        CS: Who benefits from the sales of your mother’s books and the MZB trust?
        MG: I was disinherited by language that sounded so unlike my mother that I knew she never wrote it, as was my sister and my half-brother who is now deceased.

        The money went to the opera and to her lover.

        “Nobody spoke.” That is the shame of the science fiction community then and now. Now that they can’t deny the fact of MZB’s abuse, they can still pretend that Ed Kramer isn’t a member of SFWA, they can still pretend that there aren’t a veritable United Nations of red flags waving around Sam Delany’s head, they can still try to brazen it out. But the truth is going to come out eventually, and their legacies will reflect the fact that they did their very best to sweep the ugly truth under the carpet as long as they thought they could get away with it.

        SFWA still has not responded to my questions about its position on the eligibility of known and suspected child molesters for membership in the organization. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has the organization that produced an 80-page investigative report on the subject of a single tweet done anything to discover who in the science fiction community knew what and when they knew it.

        As for Mark and Moira, as difficult as it may be, they have the right to hold their heads up high. Unlike all the cowards, they were not afraid to speak. They were not afraid to expose the evildoers. One need not be a writer of fantasies to know, and to acknowledge, that such actions are indicative of the behavior of a hero, not a villain, and not a helpless victim.

        If I could tell Mark one thing, it would be this: You did the right thing. You broke the spell of silence. You have made it harder for others to do what was done to you. You don’t have my pity or even my sympathy. You have my respect.

        Mailvox: DISCO SUCKS and the Evil League of Evil

        I was less interested in the analogy drawn here than the important conclusion drawn by the emailer:

        I mentioned that we were now in the “riot grrl” phase of SFF. Today, after reading the following link, I came to more conclusions:  1) The Evil League of Evil is the “Disco Sucks” of SFF, and 2) NEVER let your opponent have the opportunity to speak on your own behalf and not answer in kind:

        “So how did racism and homophobia get attached to Disco Demolition?

        In 1996, VH1 was attempting to expand from the music video template of MTV by creating documentaries and original programming. One of their first was “The Seventies,” a look at the decade in popular culture. A producer asked me to contribute a commentary about Disco Demolition. I saw the event as a romp, not of major cultural significance. I had no interest in claiming responsibility for killing disco. My target was Disco DAI, which was smothered in spring of 1980. The interview coincided with my quitting WMVP (a story for another day). I missed it.

        Blowing off that interview was a mistake. The producers reframed the event through the lens of 1996 sensibilities. For the first time, the event was labeled racist and homophobic. It was a cheap shot, made without exploration, and it served as a pivot point for their documentary. It has lived on, thanks to Google….We were a bunch of disenfranchised 20-something rockers having some laughs at the expense of older brothers who had the capital and the clothing to hang with the trendy social elite. We were letting off a little steam. Any statement to the contrary is just plain wrong.”

        I remember the VH1 documentary he’s writing about, and I remember the saddened, wistful, “knowing” looks of the disco artists bemoaning the “Disco Demolition” and the “Disco sucks” movement in general, and yes, I specifically remember the charges of racism and homosexual backlash they labeled it with, completely unchallenged.  I even remember a cutscene of Tom Petty smashing the shit out of a drum machine around 1979 or so.  Funny how no one ever accuses HIM of being racist or homophobic.

        My parents both grew up in Philadelphia in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.  That means American Band Stand when it was still broadcast in Philly, there were such things as “regional sounds” regional hits and scenes, records you might NEVER hear again if you ventured 2 or 3 hours away.  In the ’70s, they were into disco (they married in ’75, I came along in ’77).  Everybody was into disco, for the simple reason, it was fun and it was a party scene, especially for guidos growing up in Northeastern cities.

        My parent’s reaction to the “Disco Sucks” thing?  Well, they thought it was a little mean spirited, at worst, and maybe, maybe, there was an element of anti-black or anti-gay bias in it, but they were the first to admit that by 1979 it was pretty much over.  They didn’t attach too much cultural significance to disco itself, It was a fad, and like all fads, it was time to move on to the next one.  Incidentally 1979 is about the time they both jumped off the pop culture wagon – they didn’t care for punk or New Wave, and I think, other than oldies collections, the last NEW record my Dad bought was Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall.”  As time went on, they went further back into soul, R&B, doo wop, and classic rock. 

        They were more Philly Soul and Motown fans than anything else, so they also readily admitting to realizing just how limiting a musical form disco was.  Sure there are some tremendous records, but if you wanted something that was actually PLAYED by musicians, you were looking for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Chic, NOT the very first names that come to mind when someone says “Disco.”  I mean, Kiss went disco, Blondie went disco, Star Wars went disco.  It was simply,  played,  out.  It did NOT speak to rock fans.  There was only so much you could do with “four on the floor” and “burn baby burn.”

        Funny though, the VH1 “rockumentary” made ZERO mention about the 9 million pound asteroid in the room:  did disco, in fact, SUCK?  No one of course would actually go near the idea that maybe, just maybe the music wasn’t really all that good – now it’s looked at as kitsch, nostalgia fodder.

        The interviewees they had, that I remember, included Donna Summer and Nile Rodgers of Chic – that’s bringing in the ringers – that is a convenient way of saying “you can’t say it sucked!!!”  They sure as hell didn’t interview the Bee Gees, or Abba, or Tavares.  No one actually did much criticizing of the obvious, the central point, the music, other than to say a little “yeah maybe it was a bit manufactured and faddish, I mean, c’mon, Kiss” but YOU’RE ALL REYCISSS!!!!!  It’s like how you simply CANNOT criticize Pink SFf for its actuall literary merits or lack thereof – the SKILL of the writer – all that’s important is the feels and  the politics, it doesn’t matter if it’s actually good or not.  It’s art as participation trophy for the oppressed, and this documentary, I think, KICKSTARTED that idea into the stratosphere.

        But, here’s the point, the original instigator, Steve Dahl, passed on a chance to have his say in court.  Would it have made a difference? I don’t know.  And I also don’t know why he waited until now to make his point, but the fact is this, this rock-hard meme that’s it going to be damn near impossible to ever refute is stuck in the popular consciousness, just about the time when PC bullshit and the war on language really took off, the 1990s.

        So, why say that ELoE is the “disco sucks” movement of SFF?  Because you’re the only ones calling out Pink SFF on its overuse of drum machines, recycled beats, empty lyrics, and celebration of shallow excess – Pink SFF happens to be the current ever-declining sales posting radio friendly unit shifters of the moment, but you’re basically saying that what came along with “New Wave” sci-fi in the ’60s and ’70s, which was pretty damn disco sci-fi if you ask me (Jerry Cornelius anyone?), also begat cynical punk rock (cyberpunk), industrial (gray goo), and other fads that have had their time, and are fading. You could call some of Pink SFF “hip hop” but unlike real-life hip hop, it also doesn’t sell, and I think that’s more apparent in comics and graphic novels and movies than books. 

        He’s correct. The pinkshirts are DESPERATE to avoid the discussion that the Evil League of Evil has collectively initiated about science fiction and fantasy, and they are constantly trying to summarize and explain and interpret and spin what we are saying rather than simply quoting us. In many cases, they don’t even refer directly to us by name, but instead provide in-group indicators so that their fellow pinkshirts will know to whom they are referring and bark on request while moderates and neutrals more capable of being swayed will be left in the dark.

        They are attempting to control the narrative rather than engage in discourse, for the obvious reason that they know as well as we do that we are absolutely correct. They claim we are bad writers while readily admitting to never having read our books. We claim they are inept storytellers pushing left-wing propaganda on the basis of being intimately familiar with the very best they have to offer. Hence we can identify them, quote them at length, and directly engage because we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. They, on the contrary, are correctly fearful of being exposed, at having their whole Potemkin Village of publishers and editors and writers and reviews and “bestseller” lists and awards blown away in the harsh, judgmental winds of reality.

        So, they will attempt to continue controlling the narrative by speaking on our behalf and erecting the sort of strawmen they are capable of defeating. But, thanks to the Internet and our own determination to speak for ourselves, they will not succeed.

        For varying degrees of “fascist”

        In which Our Friend Damien proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that he doesn’t know what “fascist” means. But certainly we would be remiss if we did not help him complete his list. And, for the purposes of improving the obvious gaps in his education, recommend that he read I Fascisti by Giordano Bruno Guerri and Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. At the very least, he would do well to read my translation of “Il manifesto dei fasci di combattimento”, penned by Mussolini himself, to better understand who is, and who is not, fascistic, paying particular attention to the very first plank of the program.

        Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
        I might do a column on sci-fis most crazy, fascist authors. Nominations?

        Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
        @damiengwalter You really need some? I thought your “fan club” provided sufficient ammunition.

        Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
        @CoraBuhlert May be one or two I’ve missed…

        Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
        @damiengwalter Kratman, Wright, VD, Correia, the entire Mad Genius Club, prepper fic authors, anybody in that Buzzfeed article.

        Paul Weimer ‏@PrinceJvstin
        @CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter that’s a fairly solidly comprehensive list

        Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
        @damiengwalter Ringo, though he’s not a jerk as far as I know.

         Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
        @CoraBuhlert I think the Oh No John Ringo meme suggests he is.

        Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
        @damiengwalter Not as jerky as the others who will flood you with trolls.

        The amusing thing is that Damien has been repeatedly writing about Larry Correia and me in The Guardian, he just normally pretends to be writing about some mysterious Voldemortean figures Who Shall Not Be Named, whose secret identities only the PC cognoscenti may be permitted to know. But a point-and-shriek routine isn’t very effective when one only shrieks and refuses to actually point at anyone. So, for all that the charge of fascism is risibly inaccurate, it would arguably be a step forward.

        Perhaps one day Damien will even reach the point where he feels comfortable doing the journalistically responsible thing and actually ask a question or two of his targets instead of repeatedly engaging in the conventional left-wing spin cycle into which no genuine information is permitted to penetrate.

        In any event, who is Damien missing? He appears to have most of the Evil League of Evil already covered. Except M-Zed, of course, who will be mortally wounded at being overlooked.

        SFWA contra Amazon

        There has been a fair amount of talk concerning SFWA aligning itself against Amazon on behalf of the Big Five publishers. Here is the confirming evidence, straight from the horse’s mouth. And to think these geniuses actually re-elected Steven Gould. I was wondering what he could possibly do for an encore after last year’s performance; now we know.  As for the Preston letter that Gould mentions SFWA signing onto, here is the text:

        A letter to our readers:

        Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette, which owns Little Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints. These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room.
        But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette’s authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

        For the past month, Amazon has been:
        –Boycotting Hachette authors, refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette’s authors’ books, claiming they are “unavailable.”
        –Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette’s authors’ books.
        –Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette’s authors’ books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

        As writers—some but not all published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want. It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be “Earth’s most customercentric company.”

        Many of us supported Amazon from when it was a struggling start-up. Our books started Amazon on the road to selling everything and becoming one of the world’s largest corporations. We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner. Nor is it the right way to treat your friends. Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage. (We’re not alone in our plea: the opinion pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which rarely agree on anything, have roundly condemned Amazon’s corporate behavior.)

        We call on Amazon to resolve its dispute with Hachette without hurting authors and without blocking or otherwise delaying the sale of books to its customers.

        We respectfully ask you, our loyal readers, to email Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, at jeff@amazon.com, and tell him what you think. He says he genuinely welcomes hearing from his customers and claims to read all emails from this account. We hope that, writers and readers together, we will be able to change his mind.

        Sincerely,
        [Alphabetical list of authors]

        Brilliant. Just brilliant. Between this and the pedophile-defending, one wonders what they would do if they decided to intentionally HARM their members. Techdirt explains the problems with the letter.

        Pink SF/F in one picture

        For all the triumphalism, award-giving, and mutual queef-sniffing of its politically-correct champions, the observable fact is that Pink SF/F has been an unmitigated disaster when viewed from an objective perspective. While the conventional argument is that it was the Internet that has devastated the short fiction magazines, this chart showing the rapidly declining market for Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the now-defunct Realms of Fantasy show that it could not have been the Internet that had such a deleterious effect as, depending upon the magazine, the declines began between 1984 and 1992.

        Naturally, those who think it is definitely wonderful that things are opening up in the genre have absolutely no idea what could possibly have caused this puzzling decline.

        So, it seems that somewhere in the 1980s and the very beginning of the 90s, something, happened to both newspapers and SF magazines. Some of it is likely due to a gradual decline in reading for pleasure, but this decline is a lot less significant than the decline in newspaper or SF magazine sales. I can’t find 20+ year data for magazines, but what I could find doesn’t look as significant. I don’t have any answers, merely a question.

        Whatever could that be? Speaking as a former subscriber to Asimov’s and F&SF, who finally stopped subscribing to both magazines after realizing that neither contained anything of interest any longer, I think I can shed some light on the situation. First, it was not a decline in reading for pleasure, as increasing overall book sales will suffice to demonstrate. Second, there were certainly some industry distribution issues involved, the more important factor was the way in which the gatekeepers opened up the genre to every form of subversion and perversion and left-liberal orthodoxy. This was was more than offensive to many readers’ sensibilities, even worse, it was tedious, monotonous, and uninteresting.

        Consider what one SFWA member mentioned on Twitter the other day: “At Barnes & Noble. The SFF section is filled w friends. Yet the book
        blurbs suggest we’re all writing the same 5 books over and over again.”

        They are. They were. And due to this, as the statistics show, in only 20 years, the new SF/F gatekeepers managed to drive off as much as 80 percent of their audience! Notice that the chart above only runs through 2007; the decline of the traditional publishers has observably picked up speed since then with the rise of Amazon and independent publishing. (I have heard that e-subscriptions have helped the SF/F mags stop their decline; at this point there are probably no non-Pink readers left to lose.) Remember, in 2012, Publisher’s Weekly reported science fiction sales were down 21 percent from the year before.

        Look at Tor’s bestsellers. It’s all Orson Scott Card, Robert Jordan, and Brandon Sanderson, followed by HALO tie-in novels. Many of these are books published 30 years ago. Some of these authors are dead. Tor’s current favorite, the ever-ubiquitous John Scalzi, doesn’t even show up until #25, and the long list of Tor-published no-name award-winners and SFWA activists are far down the list. Or look at this week’s Sci-Fi bestsellers on Publisher’s Weekly. Dune, by Frank Herbert, published in 1965, is number 9.

        You may recall the pinkshirts celebrating the fact that women swept the Nebula Awards this year. And yet, there is not a single female author in the Publisher’s Weekly top ten Sci-Fi bestsellers.

        Does a similar decline in newspapers invalidate this interpretation? I don’t think so. Conservatives used to read the newspaper and occasionally grit their teeth, but they religiously subscribed to one or more papers. But as the left-liberal influence over the editorial page steadily grew, until, by the early 1990s, the conservative voice was reduced to a single token moderate, conservatives quit subscribing to newspapers for much the same reason many genre readers quit reading science fiction and fantasy: they didn’t see any reason to pay money to have their views attacked on a regular basis.

        I expect CNN’s ratings have seen a similar decline, the difference in the cable news market is that Fox News provided a direct alternative. In areas where there were no alternatives, such as genre publishing and single-newspaper cities, people simply turned away.

        It’s not an accident that Brad Torgersen has been repeatedly voted the favorite author of Analog’s dwindled readership. He may be the only author published there who is still writing in a reasonable facsimile of classic science fiction.

        Pro-pedophile, anti-Amazon

        It’s certainly an unusual public position for a writers organization to take. I found this letter by an SFWA member to be vastly amusing, particularly in light of how the astonishingly inept Steven Gould was recently re-elected SFWA President:

        Douglas Preston is circulating a letter regarding the Amazon-Hachette dispute. In this letter, Preston finds Amazon alone guilty of multiple sins against Hachette authors. He encourages readers to email Jeff Bezos about the matter. The dispute has exposed a big faultline in publishing, between those authors traditionally published by the Big Five (who have spared no words defending Hachette) and independent and self-published authors (who have been equally vociferous in defense of Amazon).

        Myself, I’ve kept quiet about this kerfluffle because I didn’t have a dog in this fight. I’m an independent author (without connection to any of the Big Five publishers.) I do make the lion’s share of my sales through Amazon, so there’s that.

        Today, though, my professional society — The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) — threw my dog into the fight. The President and Board of SFWA officially endorsed Preston’s letter. They did so without discussion among the membership or, as near as I can tell, any attempt to determine the wishes of the members….

        So what does SFWA do? It publicly and officially takes the side of traditional publishing, thereby signaling to independent and self-published writers that SFWA doesn’t understand or care to understand their concerns. it’s about as clear a message of “You don’t belong and aren’t welcome” as I’ve ever seen.
        I know many hardworking members of SFWA who stood ready to resign if the vote goes against allowing self-published writers to join — several of them have already said that this endorsement is the last straw.

        One thing you have to understand about SFWA is that most of their members a) despise self-publishers and b) are absolutely terrified of Amazon. They speak very differently in public these days, but I was privy to their two private forums for years and many of them are on the record practically spitting contempt for people who are not, in their view, “real writers”.

        One of the many things they didn’t like about me when I ran for office was that I intended to expand eligibility to self-publishers as well as game writers, which naturally horrified those who were quite happy with permitting the gatekeepers at the major publishers and genre magazines to decide who was, and who was not, eligible for membership.

        The other thing that is more than a little funny is that numerous people expressed the fear that I would act unilaterally if I was elected president. And now Steven Gould has gone and publicly taken sides against Amazon without bothering to see if the membership would be on board with that.

        But still nothing on former SFWA members Marion Zimmer Bradley or Ed Kramer. Or Grand Master Sam Delany.

        Cedar Sanderson opines at Mad Genius Club:

        So here we have an organization that still claims it supports authors and helps them get the best deal, but now they are in bed with one of the biggest publishing businesses. Their cover story is getting thinner than a streetwalker’s top…. For sure, they aren’t fighting for authors to get the best deal. They
        just came out in support of the guys who pays 12.5% on a book sale, over
        the guy who pays 70% on a book sale. Even the least mathematically able
        among us can see where the “bend over and spread, dear’ side is.

        I’m not surprised they are on Hatchette’s side. That was always obvious. I’m just shocked they were dumb enough to actually take Hatchette’s side in public. I, for one, would find it hilarious if Amazon responded by refusing to sell any books by an SFWA member. How many nanoseconds do you think it would take these highly principled writers to do a 180 and back down.

        As for me, as a writer with multiple book contracts with a Big Five publisher and an editor at an independent press, I am firmly on Amazon’s side here. As every writer and reader should be. Perhaps one day Amazon will begin behaving as badly as the Big Five have behaved. Perhaps one day Amazon will try to increase its revenue share from 30 percent. But there is no rational case for taking Hatchette’s side that does not primarily involve being the recipient of payments by a Big Five publisher.