Tag: SFWA

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.

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.

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.

It appears the British Parliament may contain almost as many pedophiles and pedophile defenders as SFWA:

More than 10 current and former politicians are on a list of alleged child abusers held by police investigating claims of a Westminster paedophile ring. MPs or peers from all three main political parties are on the list, which includes former ministers and household names. Several, including Cyril Smith and Sir Peter Morrison, are no longer alive, but others are still active in Parliament.

The existence of the list was disclosed by Peter McKelvie, the whistleblower whose claims prompted Operation Fernbridge, the Scotland Yard investigation into allegations of a paedophile network with links to Downing Street. Mr McKelvie, a retired child protection team manager who has spent more than 20 years compiling evidence of alleged abuse by authority figures, said he believed there was enough evidence to arrest at least one senior politician….

Mr McKelvie, who helped bring the notorious paedophile Peter Righton to
justice in 1992 when he worked in Hereford and Worcester child protection
team, said: “I believe there are sufficient grounds to carry out a formal
investigation into allegations of up to 20 MPs and Lords over the last three
to four decades, some still alive and some dead. The list is there.”

In a letter to his local MP Sir Tony Baldry last month, Mr McKelvie suggested
that a further 20 MPs and Lords were implicated in the “cover-up” of abuse
of children.

The Guardian has already done one story on Marion Zimmer Bradley. One hopes the newspaper will continue investigating her defenders and enablers, and then look into Ed Kramer, Samuel Delany, and the connections between Walter Breen, L. Ron Hubbard and a science-related gifted kids program.

The strange link between physics and ESP came to the forefront in the
character of Jack Sarfatti, whom we already introduced. Sarfatti was, in
1952, part of an after-school group of gifted children, being tutored
by Walter Breen of the Sandia Corporation, an organisation famous for
atomic weapons research and development. Breen was helped by others from
Sandia to lecture to these children. In 1952, Sarfatti received a
phone-call from outer space – quite literally, he felt. It seemed to
predestine him to become a leading physicist, interested in time and
space, other dimensions, etc.

Sarfatti reiterated that the enigmatic phone calls he received occurred in the summer of 1953. “I met Walter Breen soon after that via Robert Bashlow who recruited me and Johnny Glogower. Also Robert Solovay (briefly). Breen was working for Professor William Sheldon at Columbia Psychiatry Department funded by Eugene McDermott, a World War II Intelligence leader, co-founder of Texas Instruments and University of Texas at Dallas – and part of the Charles Lindburgh, Arthur Young ‘Round Table’ group. Saul-Paul Sirag says that L. Ron Hubbard was part of that scene along with Puharich. 

What this suggests is that the science fiction freakshow of sexual deviants may not necessarily be just three or four bad actors, each operating more or less on their own. It is well known that pedophiles tend to run in loosely affiliated packs, and the fact that there have been at least three confirmed pedophiles, Breen, Bradley, and Kramer, and one serious red flag, Delany, active in the relatively small science fiction community, indicates that there could be as many as ten times that number involved, as is apparently the case in Westminster.

And keep this description in mind when you read plaudits about the wonderfully warm “Chip” Delany, who has provided considerably more cause for suspicion than the recently convicted Rolf Harris ever did.

To people throughout the world, myself included, he was the beloved uncle: warm, colourful, comforting. Lovely touchy-feely Rolf had this ability to make you feel as though you were the most important person in the world…. Experts in pathological sex offenders say the really clever ones spend only one per cent of their time grooming their actual victims — but 99 per cent of their time grooming the people around them. Often working as teachers or priests or entertainers, they are expert at persuading people they are trustworthy — tirelessly giving to charities, visiting the sick, cheering up the masses — to the extent that no one would believe a bad word against them.

Everyone knows that I am not a fan of SFWA. I think it is an outdated organization that has outlived its purpose and thereby enmeshed itself in left-wing ideology in a misguided attempt to remain relevant to writers. But my feelings and motivations have absolutely nothing to do with what other people have done over the last 50 years. Pattern recognition has always been a strength of mine (see: Financial crisis of 2008), and SFWA’s increasingly bizarre non-reaction to revelations of FIVE DECADES of child abuse and the public defense of child abusers by its members is tripping my radar. It may be simple incompetence, or it may suggests that there is more to the situation than the isolated acts of a few bad apples.

As an explosion of historical child abuse cases are being revealed in Britain, from popular entertainers to Members of Parliament, it can be readily observed that the British elite’s reaction to the exposure of the pedophiles in their midst was not dissimilar to the current non-reaction of the SFWA concerning the revelations concerning Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ed Kramer, and Samuel Delany.

His paedophile campaign ran into the buffers of derision from the press and hostility from fellow parliamentarians, some of whom denounced his use of parliamentary privilege to name Hayman and accused him of grandstanding.

It is hard to imagine today, as celebrities from that era are brought before the courts for historic sex offences, that this matter was treated so lightly by Parliament. Dickens believed this was because influential people were involved in the abuse and were determined to shut him up.

In reality, it stemmed more from a startling indifference to what was then called “kiddy fiddling”. It was as though because it had always gone on, it was not something to get too worked up about.

For his part, Dickens simply could not understand how an organisation such as PIE was allowed to exist…. Frustrated, Dickens brought a Bill before Parliament “to make it an offence to be a member of any organisation, association, society, religious sect, club or the like that holds meetings at which support is given to encourage, condone, corrupt or entice adults to have sexual relationships with children.”

Is it really that hard to imagine today? The British Attorney General’s dismissal of Sir Peter Hayman’s subscription to the Paedophile Information Exchange network is more than a little remniscent of the defenses various SFWA members have offered of SFWA Grand Master Samuel Delany’s being a regular reader of the NAMBLA bulletin.

“Sir Peter Hayman had subscribed to PIE, that is not an offence and there is no evidence that he was ever involved in the management.”

“I’ve seen no evidence (doesn’t mean it’s not out there; I’m not
trying to be willfully ignorant here) that Delany’s position was
anything other than intellectual.He was responding to the contents of their newsletter, which may
have been interesting and/or thought-provoking intellectual discussion
for all I know.”

Despite reports that the SFF community is reeling, neither SFWA nor its president, Steven Gould, have publicly said anything despite being directly asked about the scandals. But attempting to sweep the whole problem of child abuse in SFWA under the carpet as nothing more than the accusations of a bitter ex-member is not going to work any better in the long term than the British attempt to dismiss child abuse by its entertainers, diplomats, and politicians as “the fantasies of a deluded man”.

I suspect Jo Walton will eventually come to regret her repeated praise of Delany on Tor.com, just as Ann McCaffrey and Robert Sawyer likely came to regret their defenses of Ed Kramer in the official SFWA publications and Jim C. Hines and Tor.com itself have come to regret their past celebrations of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

“We didn’t know,” they cry, some honestly, some not. But it seems readily apparent that the only reason many of them did not know was because they were determined not to look for fire amidst all the smoke. For example, notice that the Toad of Tor is STILL trying to defend Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Just F-ing Keftastic @Keffy Jun 13
THERE ARE FUCKING COURT FUCKING DOCUMENTS. And you still got people waffling about WELL WE DON’T KNOOOW and making excuses based on “vibes.”

tnielsenhayden @tnielsenhayden Jun 14
Pointing out that there remain areas of considerable uncertainty is not necessarily a defense of pedophilia.

Not necessarily, no. But remember, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is one of the very members who demanded an 80-page investigative report of my supposed racism on the basis of a single tweet. But when it comes to Marion Zimmer Bradley, there “remain areas of considerable uncertainty” and when it comes to SFWA Grand Master Samuel Delany, it would appear his constant dwelling on things such as “racist porn”, “racial ephithets”, “father/son homosexual incest starting very young” and “bestiality” “on almost every page” don’t merit an investigation or anything except repeated public celebrations of the man.

Consistently looking the other way for decades, ignoring all the obvious signs, and then belatedly trying to hide behind “areas of considerable uncertainty” is, taken in sum, a de facto defense of the pedophiles in science fiction.