Tag: SFWA

Another whack of the Tetsubo

I’m beginning to get the impression that Larry is underwhelmed by the call to repentance, recantation, and self-abasement: 

Secondly, and this is going to be much more damaging for him longterm, he allowed himself to become very closely associated to Vox Day in the process. Ultimately people do judge others by their associations, and both Larry Correia and John C Wright have made very public declarations of support for Day, that I fear both will deeply regret in the long run.

One of the tactics I’ve seen them take is conflating my views with those of Vox Day. It doesn’t matter that I’ve disagreed with the man, and I’ve debated with him several times, but they sure love linking me to Vox. See, unlike me, they can actually find a couple of comments from him that they can manage to spin up some outrage over, and everybody knows righteous indignation gives libprogs super powers.

You have an issue with something Vox said, take it up with him. I did, and I found the guy to be a capable debater, and many of the insinuations about him floating around the internet were grossly exaggerated. (says the man who the Guardian has insinuated hates women and wants to keep fiction the exclusive domain of a group he doesn’t technically belong to, so I simply can’t imagine the internet exaggerating somebody’s beliefs.)

The woman Vox insulted with the infamous half-savage comment also has a long history of inflammatory racial statements, and had been throwing insults at Vox for years, but somehow she always gets a pass in these discussions about “divisiveness” (remember what I said earlier about the Ctrl H search and replace to put Jew instead of White Man in their tweets? She’s totally the best). I don’t think she likes me much either, because she gave a speech a little while ago and condemned Mr. Free Speech At All Costs… I think that’s supposed to be me, but personally I took that as a compliment, because you know, that part where I actually believe in free speech and stuff.

So I recommend a short story by somebody who made a statement they found racist? DIVISIVE! And Damien will condemn me in his newspaper. Meanwhile, an approved author writes tons of negative things about an ethnic group that it is cool to hate? Totally not divisive, and Damien will plug her in his newspaper. Now me personally, I think the concept of race is increasingly irrelevant bullshit, and I judge all humans as individuals, but I’m the International Lord of Hate.

Public declaration of support? By that Damien means I failed to join his lynch mob? Sadly I couldn’t find my jack boots in time.

One of the International Lord of Hate’s commenters pointed out what Damien was trying, and failing, to accomplish: “They want to slam Vox because he is the one nut they can’t crack, but
boy, if they can turn a few of his friends and supporters, that’s at
least along the lines of their goals.”

On behalf of Mr. Correia, Mr. Wright, and Mrs. Hoyt, I am offended at the idea they should be deemed any easier to crack than me. (As opposed to that notoriously soft and bendable reed, Col. Kratman, whose pastimes make Ramsay Snow’s look like embroidery.) Now, it is true that mi amigo latino has a different perspective on race than I do. I realize this may astonish white people, particularly of the SWPL variety, but we members of La Raza Cósmica do not necessarily think alike; some of us don’t even believe in the inevitability of Universópolis. Transmetachronopolis, yes. Universópolis, not so much.

As Larry says, we’ve even debated the matter in private, and while I did not convince him, I believe he did come to understand that my position is based entirely on sound genetic science and history rather than personal preferences. Since then, the publication of A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade has demonstrated that my “controversial” views are entirely in line with current science and that the “Nurture not Nature” perspective is outdated and unscientific.

(Nota Ironica: the very concept of La Raza Cósmica is based on the idea that Darwinism was “created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others.” So, you see, this is why only fifth-racers like me “have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the ‘universal era of humanity’.” Bow down, you colonial sons and daughters of the Old World, abase yourselves, you children of the Orient, kneel before me, you spawnlings of Darkest Africa. Bow to me, in the name of humanity!)

I love Larry. I have great respect for him. He’s the best action writer of our generation. But I don’t answer for him and he doesn’t answer for me. That’s one thing the Left will never accept: there is no guilt by association. A man can only answer for his own deeds, his own words, his own actions.

Which is one reason why Larry declined the opportunity to participate in the suggested auto-da-fe:

I’m quite serious about my suggestion by the way. I think if Correia wrote publicly to support the new diversity in the genre, and apologised for any perception he was campaigning against it, that might help him a lot.

Apologize for the perception? Apologize for being seen as an enemy of progress? That sounds suspiciously like the apologies Stalin used to have people sign right before he shipped them off to the gulag, so in response, Beria, er, I mean Damien, here are a few of my thoughts about what it really means when a libprog demands an apology.

Rule number one. Never apologize for something that shouldn’t be apologized for. Check out all the various firings, purges, boycotts, and cancellations. Apologizing for causing their outrage is you taking responsibility for their ignorance and inability to control their own emotions. Apologizing to the perpetually outraged means they own you. You have declared yourself guilty and vulnerable to their threats. It is like negotiating with terrorists. Give into their demands and you’re just encouraging them to blow something else up.

If I was the type of mushy headed fool that would issue an apology, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because as we’ve already seen my actual words and actions mean nothing compared to the agreed upon narrative, and that narrative is that I’m guilty of pretty much every vile thing they can think of. Luckily for me, I’m successful enough that these people aren’t particularly threatening, so I scrape them off my shoe and continue writing books.

Normal people only apologize for things that should be apologized for, like for example: “I’m sorry the Social Justice Warrior contingent of sci-fi is made up of a bunch of perpetually outraged adult children.”

I suspected that would be the outcome. As for me, I’m just wondering when all the pinkshirts and Social Justice Warriors who said less-than-flattering things about me are going to apologize to me now that N.K. Jemisin has openly admitted that she is not merely “half-savage”, but rather, “all savage and damned proud of it”.

And in the meantime, John C. Wright has produced the United Underworld Literary Movement Manifesto, complete with logo. Apparently I am the Supreme Dark Lord, Secret Warden of the Cosmic Fifth Race, and Eternal Champion of Universópolis.

The concern rabbit

There is no need for me to address Damien Walters’s latest attack on Larry Correia and me, since the big guy is going to be doing one of his monster fisks on it. I will link to it later. One Jared Garrett summed up the Guardian article succinctly: “This is one of the single stupidest pieces I’ve ever read. I
know who you’re referring to in this clownish rant and you have
absolutely zero clue. Either you’re too stupid to read and comprehend or
you’re being deliberately obtuse.”

What I found more interesting than Damien’s customary moronics was the rabbiting that took place in the comments, wherein Damien purported to be deeply concerned about the career of the very man he is publicly attacking and calling “not very intelligent”. Consider his comments of that follow the article.

  1. I think you’ll find they lumped themselves in with Vox Day. Why they
    wanted to do something quite so suicidal to their careers, we can only
    speculate.
  2.  I think Correia did two things. The first was appeal for
    votes on the basis of a perceived liberal bias in the genre. That was
    the basis of his campaign, a protest vote against liberal influence.
    That was divisive and did a lot to spark the backlash he’s still
    feeling. Secondly, and this is going to be much more damaging for him
    longterm, he allowed himself to become very closely associated to Vox
    Day in the process. Ultimately people do judge others by their
    associations, and both Larry Correia and John C Wright have made very
    public declarations of support for Day, that I fear both will deeply
    regret in the long run. I’m quite serious about my suggestion by
    the way. I think if Correia wrote publicly to support the new diversity
    in the genre, and apologised for any perception he was campaigning
    against it, that might help him a lot. Remember, we won’t know who
    missed out on shortlist places until after the awards. At that point
    Correia et al could find the response to them gets much, much worse even
    than when the story broke. 
  3. I’d suggest those 25 other writers work harder not to be associated with
    Vox Day. it seems to be doing the public perception of them a great
    deal of harm.
  4. The reactionary conservative movement in SF has many members, Corrreia,
    Wright and a number of others mentioned. Vox Day goes far beyond that.
    You’re welcome to defend his opinions if you wish, and good luck to you
    in the task. I think even the reactionaries would do well to distance
    from him if they have any sense.
  5. I have no clear idea what you mean by shunning or writing people out of
    the genre. I assume you’re bringing in baggage from other discussions.
    We have a genre growing ever more diverse, and a small clique of
    reactionaries behaving very poorly in response to that. And doing
    immense damage to their own careers in the process. Sad for everyone
    involved.

Meanwhile, the Blue SF/F market continues to grow, as do the submissions to Castalia, as does the readership of this blog. May 2014 marked the 14th straight month in which the average blog traffic was more than 100,000 Google pageviews more than Whatever’s best-ever month of May 2012. 

It’s fascinating to see how desperate the pinkshirts are to try to separate me from Larry, John, and everyone else. This is classic rabbit behavior; when they can’t exclude themselves, they try to convince others to perform the exclusion for them. Not that it would do any good anyhow. They don’t understand that Larry, John, and me are under absolutely no illusions that we agree on everything. Or even most things. We are three very different men who belong to different population sub-groups, different Christian denominations, we vote for different political parties, and we have very different interests and communication styles. Larry is the tetsubo, John is the rapier, and I am the Ka-Bar, best suited for close-in combat gutting. We simply happen to have earned each other’s respect for various reasons and to share a disdain for SF/F that elevates left-wing ideology over every other aspect of storytelling.

Nor are we alone. Damien doesn’t mention Tom and Sarah and Ringo and Amanda and Kate and the other Tom and Lou and Brad or any of the many other writers who have observed precisely the same problems with the left-wing infestation of SF/F that the Big Three have, (just a joke, John, I can see you wincing now) except to say that “the reactionary conservative movement in SF has many members”.  But that’s not the real issue, the real issue is that there are far more “reactionary conservative” readers than there are readers of the progressive Pink SF detritus that the mainstream SF/F publishers have been aggressively pushing on SF/F fans for the last two decades. And apparently two decades of a consistently shrinking market isn’t enough for them, because #weneeddiversebooks!

Damien is making the same mistake that Whatever readers did two years ago, the same mistake that CNN made in 1996, and the same mistake that Newsweek made in 1998. He is assuming, all the evidence to the contrary, that the numbers are on his side. Throughout his piece and his comments, he foolishly attempts to minimize the other side: for example, he refers to “little-known writers” even though Larry is a best-selling author, I have the best-trafficked blog in SF/F, and John C. Wright was voted the sixth-greatest SF writer alive.

Indeed, if there is not this institutional left-wing influence that we “reactionaries” all observe, and all oppose, how can anyone be “doing immense damage to their own careers” by opposing it? If it doesn’t exist, then how would being lumped in with me, in any way, be “suicidal to their careers”. Setting aside the humor inherent in an unpublished nonentity like Damien giving literary career advice to the Nebula-nominated Mr. Wright or the Hugo-nominated Mr. Correia, it should be obvious that Damien has assumed the very point that he was attempting to refute.

So, in the end, this is nothing more than a petty rabbit with a soapbox attempting to DISQUALIFY, DISQUALIFY. Again. The most offensive aspect of Damien’s latest attack is the insult to both Larry and John in the implication that they are any more susceptible to the Left’s blandishments than I am. I, for one, find it impossible to imagine either man being even remotely willing to submit to the Left’s ritual of public recantation and self-abasemen.

Why, one wonders, is it such an imperative for the Left to separate me from everyone else it is attacking?

Mailvox: the sterile wasteland

A foreign author observes the pinkshirts running amok in other literary genres than SF/F:

I found your blog yesterday and I just wanted to thank you for what you have done there. I’m a published author in an Anglosphere country, who has really been struggling with the prevailing SJW culture in my local literary community. What is going on here is actually horrifying, to the point where I have indulged in self-exile and given up ever publishing in this market again.

The entire literary community here has been transformed into a horde of politically correct zombies hellbent on sniffing out and crushing the merest hint of intellectual insurgency.

The types of writers arising from this mess are increasingly foisting upon the local and international public derivative works of insipid speculative fiction which amount to remixes of ideas from other better authors.

However, they all seem to be geniuses at networking amongst our small, left leaning liberal elites, and a small, well-networked coterie of these people occupies positions in the mainstream reviewing press, publishing journals and publishers. The result is that unanimous praise is heaped upon everything that is published by anyone attached to this network, and prepared to turn their novels into conduits for speaking power to truth.

One of these authors recently won a major international literary prize for a second novel which was so bad that I actually blushed when I read the first chapter. I have been completely unable to make sense of this, or the way that some big names in fiction have put their weight behind this person, while crowd-sourced reviewing sites have largely given the work the stick it deserves.

Reading through some of your blogs I now have a sense of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that must accompany literary awards, and it has helped to develop a sense of what really goes on. I have always suspected that some rather dark Machiavellian maneuvering happens in the backrooms of Big Lit.

At any rate, this whole process is gradually turning our locally literary landscape into a sterile wasteland. Literary forums where writers used to interact have turned into barren wastelands because of the vigour with which any dissent is persecuted.

The people in the community seem oblivious to this fact, and now seem to interact mainly on Twitter where they retweet each others’ blind observations and compete to come up with interpretations of the world that are as thoroughly inverse to observable reality as possible.

I stopped engaging with these people over two years ago and now just observe them, as they make for an interesting study of the decay of Western civilization and values. I find myself coming up with theories in an attempt to make sense of and accept what I see.

One thing I have considered is that many not terribly bright people hold the art of novel writing in incredibly high esteem and consider it the ultimate status position in society.

This gives these people a very strong motivation to write books, and if these books are bereft of quality, those who possess suitable social skills have a strong motivation to use these skills to bring their work to prominence by hook or by crook. The result is that we’re seeing the survival of the cynical, while actual writing ability is coming uncoupled from literary success and renown.

It was a huge relief to find your blog, and to see that not every writer fits this mold. I’ve subscribed to your blog and look forward to participating in discussions on it. Thanks, you’re doing God’s work and beaming a light into the darkness.

It increasingly appears that we are the monks of the Grimdark Age. It is vital that we continue to read, continue to write, and continue to support those who are keeping the traditional literary forms alive, despite the mainstream’s descent into the literary equivalent of Ow! My Balls! and Ass.

Let’s face it, Redshirts, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and “All That Fairy Tale Crap” are considerably closer to Ow! My Balls! than to Dune, Foundation, or The Lord of the Rings.

I’m clearly not the only one who has picked up a book that has won awards or been given a quantity of rave reviews, then wondered what on Earth the readers were dropping to reach such obviously absurd conclusions. It only takes a few times experiencing this to realize that most reviewers these days are actually worse than useless. Which is why precisely we are in the process of turning the CH blog into the leading site for the review of independently published books.

QED

It appears I may have erred in describing NK Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage”. I was clearly too generous in giving her the benefit of the doubt, as she is, by her own admission, “all savage and damned proud of it”.

This is why I say I was premature in calling for a reconciliation. Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended. In South Africa the Truth & Reconciliation Commission came after apartheid’s end; in Rwanda it started after the genocide stopped; in Australia reconciliation began after its indigenous people stopped being classified as “fauna” by its government. Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted? How can we begin to talk about healing when all the perpetrators have to do is toss out dogwhistles and disclaimers of evil intent to pretend they’ve done no harm?

(Incidentally: Mr. Various Diseases, Mr. Civility, and Misters and Misses
Free Speech At All Costs, if you represent the civilization to which
I’m supposed to aspire then I am all savage, and damned proud of it. You may collectively kiss my black ass)….

There are some signs of hope, I guess: SFWA did throw that one bigot
out, though plenty more remain. Chip Delany’s been honored as a SFWA
Grandmaster some fifty years after one of his novels was rejected for
serialization in ANALOG because its editors didn’t think anyone could
relate to a black protagonist. WisCon invited me here to be one of its
Guests of Honor, five years after I ragequit the Concom over the
Elizabeth Moon affair. We are talking about what’s happening. We are
fighting back. But I am desperately afraid that Delany’s prediction
will continue to prove true, and that the violence will escalate as more
of us step up and demand that our contributions be recognized, our
personhood respected, our presence acknowledged. If that’s the case,
then we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. And we need to prepare.

So. If they think we are a threat? Let’s give them a threat. They
want to call us savages? Let’s show them exactly what that means.

Yes, because history is absolutely rife with examples of how well savages fare when faced with civilized opposition. I note, with no small amusement, that Jemisin has now publicly conceded the truth of everything I wrote in that controversial Twitter-linked post last summer. She has not only conceded her barbarism and her inability to grasp the fundamental nature of SF/F, but the nonsensical nature of her call for “reconciliation” in SF/F as well.

Last summer, I wrote: “Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for
“reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a
call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel
Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her
ever-so-touching speech understand that.
There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.”

Even the most skeptical critic must admit that I warned everyone the pinkshirt inquisition would not end with me. Don’t let that “plenty more remain” escape your notice. Remember, this is the woman who would read out Robert Heinlein himself out from the SF genre on the basis of his being “racist as fuck“, as well as “the average American” and “most of science fiction fandom” too.

I, for one, welcome this escalation. I think it is a wonderful thing that the other side has finally admitted the ideological conflict they have long denied. I find it encouraging that they now openly confess they seek to “Make them uncomfortable. Shout them down. Kick them out.”

Disnearations of civilization indeed.

Pink projection and passive-aggression

More nonsensical posturing out of the pinkshirted brigade, as an aspiring SF writer tries his hand at amateur psychiatry. Delusion ensues.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
 Reading VDs blog now is like watching a schizophrenic muttering persecution delusions in a cell smeared with their own faeces.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Holy crap. Vox Day seems to be entering the catastrophic break phase of his psychotic meltdown after the Nebula awards. Sad to observe.

Joyce Chng (JDamask) ‏@jolantru
@damiengwalter Ewww.

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet
@damiengwalter Let me guess. He’s lost what’s left of his mind because all the fiction winners were women?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@SFReviewsnet Yep. And keeps whinging about how “amusing” it is and how he isn’t at all obsessed with the issue.

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet
@damiengwalter Very odd defense mechanism. “Your ongoing success and professional esteem *amuses* me. My lack of same = superiority.” Okaay.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@SFReviewsnet VD is a borderline personality. They hook on to people / communities for attention because of deep rooted fear issues.

Now, keep in mind that these claims of obsession are coming from people who write about me on a regular basis, and who openly fantasize about wanting to harm me. Just to give one example:

Den Patrick @Den_Patrick
Weird night of discussions, mainly how I want to hurt politicians and Vox Day. Booze may have been involved. Offering no apologies. 

I didn’t create these people. I didn’t invent them. I have done nothing more than respond to their repeated attacks by describing them accurately and that was sufficient to set them off. It is readily observable that most of them are uninteresting writers with nothing to say that anyone outside their weird little cocoon wants to read, and one need not see their pictures to confirm that they are lonely social failures rejected by the sane and the attractive. They hate me beyond all others, I think, because they know I see them for what they are. Note that the claims of “borderline personality”, “deep rooted fear issues”, and “psychotic meltdown” are being made by an individual who described himself in the following manner:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a
lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many
losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a
desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere….  I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery
I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse
where I had, at long last, collapsed.

Just as the darkness cannot comprehend the light, the mentally diseased and dysfunctional cannot understand the healthy and fully functional. They interpret every action, every statement, through their own cracked and crippled perspective.  John C. Wright described them well in his final essay in TRANSHUMAN OR SUBHUMAN, “Restless Heart of Darkness”:

Despair is the key. It explains nearly everything that is so puzzling about the madness of modern life, the pack of self-contradictory dogmas that make up the default assumptions of the Dark Ages in which we live.

They have nothing else. No wonder they are bitter. No wonder they are irrational. No wonder they lie like dogs. No wonder they boast. No wonder they are full of envy and malice. No wonder they kill babies in the womb and fete socialist dictators and mass murderers. No wonder they love death. No wonder they admire, protect and love Islamic terrorists. No wonder they admire, protect, and love sexual perversion.

It is because they have nothing else. They live in a world of darkness, without hope, with nothing but their seven great friends to sustain them: pride, which they call self-esteem; envy, which they call social justice; wrath, which they call activism and protest; sloth, which they call enlightenment; gluttony, which they call health food and legalization of recreational drugs; greed, which they call fairness in taxation; lust, which they call sexual liberation.

The modern age is suffering from spiritual and philosophical starvation in the midst of what should be the greatest feast of mind and spirit imaginable. Someone has told them offal was food and food was poison, and so they gnaw on foul things which cannot satisfy them, which make their hungers grow. They are dying of thirst, and someone offers them seawater to drink.

Let us now and forever eschew anger and indignation at these creatures. They are blind kittens who cling and claw and scratch at the hand that come to feed and comfort. No man should be angered at a blind scratch.

Neither should we do them the honor of assuming theirs is a philosophy, political or otherwise, or a coherent worldview, or anything that can be discussed or debated. It is a dream, a delirium, a vision, a nightmare.

There is no point in correcting their ludicrous lies or attempting to show them the obvious illogic in their statements. They are lost to madness and until they abandon their prideful despair of their own accord, there is literally nothing that anyone, least of all me, can do for them. They cannot imagine my amusement at their abysmal creations and their impotent rage because they cannot imagine either sanity or a sense of humor that is not based on a fleeting sense of superiority.

The Pink Nebulas

Kate Paulk contemplates the 2014 Nebula Awards:

The big news of the last week or so is that this years Nebula Award winners (with the exception of the Grandmaster Award) are all women. Naturally this should be taken as sincere recognition of an excellent field, the most impressive of whom just happened to be female, right?

Right…

Let’s hear from some of those who discussed the winners:

  “Yes!. All the fiction winners are women. The white male patriarchy takes one right in the balls. “

Keep this in mind if you’re considering voting for a woman in the future. A vote for her isn’t a vote for her, it’s a vote against white male patriarchy. And apparently, every time a man wins, the pinkshirts take one right in the glittery hoo-hah.

“2014 Nebulas & all the fiction winners are women – The idea that
women don’t belong in scifi has another nail in its coffin”

Actually, if you read the winners, you’ll find conclusive evidence that women not only don’t belong in science fiction, but these particular women belong in mental institutions.

“Another dinosaur complaining about the Nebulas. Wish they’d just leave sff and be hush for good.”

Well, based on the sales numbers, the readers are certainly leaving SF/F. At least, they are leaving what is being fraudulently passed off as SF/F by these charlatans. The pinkshirts are chasing off the larger part of SF/F’s historical readership, then wondering why advances are plummeting and the midlist is dying. It’s such a mystery!

“as great as it is that so many women won #nebulas, now i’m wondering what form the inevitable backlash will take.”

It will be fun, won’t it! I suspect that within 15 years, assuming they are still being given out, a Nebula won’t be as well regarded as an empty toilet paper roll. Consider how far its prestige has fallen since the joke that was the Quantum Rose award. These days, a middle volume from a mediocre romance series in space would look downright Clarkean by comparison.

“Pretty healthy podium line-up in the Nebulas this year; I imagine the Hugo ballot-stuffers are suitably furious.”

One can only assume that “healthy” here is a euphemism for “well-fed”. It would be interesting to know how the fiction winners stacked up against the average NCAA defensive line. I’m not sure they could mount much of a pass rush, but with a run-stopper like Swirsky in the middle, you’re not going to run on them. And as for ballot-stuffers, I wouldn’t know. I never stuffed any ballots.

SF/F Thought Police strike again

Or, why Uncle Timmy was disinvited from Archon:

I’m going to tell you a little story about a good man who has been slandered and libeled by one individual who is hiding behind the anonymity of the Internets. That good man? Tim “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo.

You see, a pathetic troll whose name I’m not going to bother typing (because it’s a nickname that the individual hides behind because they’re afraid of owning up to their actions) has, after taking random snippets of conversations and tacky jokes that Uncle Timmy publishes on something called “The Revenge”, managed to get Uncle Timmy uninvited from Archon this year. Archon, apparently, is “listening to the fans” (the one who has slandered and committed libel, but we won’t get into that at the moment) and decided that it was in their best interest to not have Uncle Timmy as their Fan Guest of Honor this year.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the forty years that Uncle Timmy has dedicated to fandom in the South and Midwest. Let’s forget that he started and ran Libertycon for 25 years, which is one of the more popular “small cons” around. Let’s ignore the fact that the man is extremely smart and is an engineer who has a sterling reputation (except when he’s playing spades. He’s a jerk when he plays spades). Heck, let’s even ignore the fact that Uncle Timmy is an old, fat white dude who started a scholarship for a fan and friend (a black man) after he died tragically while trying to help someone.

Oh, wait. No. Not only no, but hell no. All these facts are pertinent to the lie being spread that Uncle Timmy is one big old Southern racist redneck who hates science.

I told you none of this was about me, none of it ever had much to do with me. But now you know why I have never backed down to the petty pinkshirted grotesqueries. SFWA, Archon, Rutgers, Smith, Brandeis, Haverford, it’s all the same. It’s all about control of the narrative, control of the organization, and control of the lines of communication.

That’s why toleration is not an option. That’s why preening oneself on refusing to take a stand is moral cowardice. Those are merely slow forms of surrender and submission. Sad Puppies was the first time the pinkshirts have been punched in the mouth in decades and they reacted like a vampire to Holy Water. But it was a mere splash, when what is needed is an inexhaustible firehose.

On a related subject, Sarah Hoyt addresses the triumphant vaginalism of the SFWA, which celebrates the fact that its membership did not vote an award to a single white male this year.

UPDATE: Apparently I am wrong and the Nebulas were all about me.

It’s so heartening and amazing that so many women authors won! I know
there has been a lot of drama about sexism and racism in science fiction
circles lately and I feel like all of these women winning such a high
prize is just awesome. The Vox Days of the world are going to be nearly
apoplectic with anger but they can go fuck themselves. Women in sci-fi
for the win!
– trynewideas, ULauren Davis Monday 12:11pm

Apoplectic? Quite the contrary, I am VASTLY amused. I hope they are successful in setting up the multicultural Matriarchy of their absurd fantasies. I love the fact they actually gave an award to Swirsky’s ridiculous dino-porn revenge fantasy and I wish they’d gone one step deeper into self-marginalization and only given awards to gay black women writers. They are actively killing off the market for pink science fiction and they don’t even realize they are doing it. These women are in sci-fi the same way a cancer cell is in the human body. The only victory they will find is self-extinction. They can hand themselves hundreds of awards, thousands, but they will never receive the respect they so desperately crave.

Because the map is not the territory.

The end of the Nebula

It’s more than a little ironic that so many people are expressing fear for the fate of the Hugo Awards due to the nominations of works by Larry Correia and me when it is readily apparent that it is the status of the other science fiction award that is in considerably more danger. While the pinkshirts are celebrating the wonderful news that four women won the four SFWA awards for the best “science fiction” this year, more astute observers will recall the principle that men have a long-standing tendency to abandon what are viewed as women’s professions and any field dominated by women tends to lose status in the eyes of both sexes.

(This is why the fact that men are statistically overrepresented as firefighters and computer programmers is supposed to be a major societal problem, but no one is concerned by the fact that women are statistically overrepresented as nurses and primary schoolteachers.)

Whether this is the consequence of raw male sexism or the female tendency to reward others on the basis of their status in the herd rather than individual excellence is irrelevant. What the awards sweep indicates is that the reputation of the Nebula award, which has been dubious since The Quantum Rose won best novel, is now in freefall.

It will be interesting to see if there are any male winners in the next few years; I would not be surprised if, within five years, there are not even any male nominees. The organization is not only in the process of being abandoned to women, but to the sort of women who are much more interested in the sex and politics of the author than in the actual fiction.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be SFWA if they couldn’t host an awards dinner without shooting themselves in the foot. Robin Wayne Bailey posts on Facebook:

“The amazing fuckitude of the 2013 Nebulas blind-sided and shocked me as my presentation speech, including Frank Robinson’s acceptance remarks, were totally fucking skipped. I’ve promised to be silent for a few days while the ombudsman figures how how it happened, but I won’t be totally silent, and I won’t let SFWA off the hook for this affront to Frank Robinson and also to myself. I’m furious. Never in the history of SFWA has something like this happened.”

That is certainly a novel way of honoring a “special guest”. The observable reality is that SFWA isn’t a science fiction organization anymore, it is now a women’s political action committee. Male members, even those who are past leaders of the organization, shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves silenced and shunned in the future.

Fortunately, those running the show are SF/F nonentities, many of whom have never even published a single novel, so it’s not like such treatment is going to harm anyone’s career.

The prosecution rests

John C. Wright reflects on the SF/F community’s response to his article in Intercollegiate Review, which appears to mark the first time that the SF/F community at large has ever indicated it is aware of the existence of Intercollegiate Review:

I am surprised, but should not be, that an obscure opinion in an obscure journal by an obscure author such as myself would provoke so many loud and hostile reactions. (Maybe it is a slow news day and there is nothing else to fret about.)

Why so vehement a reaction when so other published opinions of mine, much more controversial, go uncontroverted? I suspect that the witchhunters hate being identified for what they are. Truth is their kriptonite.

I won’t bother linking to them. Overhearing strangers talk about me either in praise or blame bores me, since I am not a fascinating subject to myself, and none of these people know my character or my character flaws.

But I will make one comment, which I hope is telling: Please note that these various articles critiquing my article do not say, “the witch hunt never happened; we, the socially-aware segment of the science fiction community, are completely forgiving of all personal flaws and differences of opinion, political and personal, between ourselves and Malzberg, Moon, Correia, Card, etc, and we judge their works only on the merit of the writing!”

Instead they say, “But those people he defends really are witches and pariahs! Right-thinking people must have nothing to do with them!”

Which would seem to prove, rather than refute, my point.

And that would be checkmate.

It is rather remarkable how obtuse the hissy-fitters of the Left repeatedly show themselves to be. My personal favorite was SFWA President Steven Gould publicly asserting that his organization doesn’t do what got the whole ball rolling in the first place, then noting with an asterisk that it actually does exactly what he had been denying.

They don’t seem to grasp that the moment you proclaim “there is no place for X in our community”, X can be, and will be, defined as anything those with sufficient power deem it to be. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for racists, then it is also acceptable to say there is no place for blacks. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for libertarians, it is acceptable to say that there is no place for socialists. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for the science-literate, it is acceptable to say there is no place for the half-savage.

Once thought policing is imposed, the situation has devolved into a straightforward power game. But, as the slack-jawed reaction to the Hugo nominations has shown, they’re not actually ready for the open conflict they created. They don’t even realize that we haven’t even begun to flex our muscles. They thought they’d won the game while the other team was still in the locker room. Now the first three or four players players have stepped onto the field and they are absolutely shocked to discover that we showed up.

The amusing thing is that they think we’re crying about their harmless little attacks because that’s what they would feel like doing in our shoes. They still don’t realize that we are not like them. They still have no idea what is coming.

The ire of the irrelevant

What is it with these Canadian SFWA members?  A SF nonentity is foolish enough to call John C. Wright a liar despite the readily accessible public record:

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
John C Wright is either ignorant or a liar. Theodore Beale was kicked out of SFWA for using its Twitter feed to disseminate a racist screed.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Personally, given the evidence I have seen thus far, my own suspicion is that John C. Wright knows he is lying and does not give a fuck.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
I know this because I am one of those who sent an email to my SFWA board rep demanding Beale’s removal. Good riddance to a goddamned swine.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Sometimes I feel like just scouring this planet of life would be the most expedient course.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Folk’re sure confident saying things online that they wouldn’t if they said them to my face, giving me a chance to break their fucking nose.

The self-proclaimed pencil-neck geek is a real tuff guy. It’s fascinating to observe the way these SWPLs insist that it is beyond the pale to call a deceitful and obnoxious African-American “an educated but ignorant half-savage” but deem it acceptable to label Hispanics “goddamned swine”. No wonder so few writers of color, such as Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt, have any desire to join the organization.

At this point, any SF/F writer would have to be a complete fool to think that joining SFWA will enhance his career in any way. SFWA members know that SFWA provides a writer with zero credibility with the publishers, (editors in the SFWA Forum openly joke about how only total noobs are so stupid as to mention their memberships when they are submitting manuscripts), so there is literally no professional upside that comes with the downside of paying for having one’s speech policed.

Now consider that this SFWA nobody was attacking a science fiction master on the very day that Mr. Wright’s novella was #86 on Amazon: 4,117 people downloaded AWAKE IN THE NIGHT yesterday and the day before.  Another new release from Mr. Wright has been #1 in Science Fiction History & Criticism for three straight days. It is readily apparent that Mr. Wright doesn’t need SFWA. I certainly don’t need SFWA. Neither does anyone else anymore.

It is very easy to demonstrate that Mr. Barton is a liar himself. The SFWA did not give any reason for expelling an unnamed member last year and still has issued no official statement concerning any of the reasons for its actions: “We will continue to omit the expelled individual’s name and the details of his behavior on advice of counsel.”

And as I pointed out in my response to the SFWA report concerning the various false claims about SFWA’s “twitter feed”: “the channel does not belong to SFWA, the Content did not belong to SFWA, the content was deemed permissible by the channel owner, and the personal attack contained in the blog post to which the tweet linked was fully in line with previous personal attacks made by dozens of other members of the organization in official SFWA spaces. Therefore it is incorrect to claim that an official SFWA channel was misused via the marking for inclusion of the blog post of June 13, 2013 in the @sfwaauthors Twitter feed.”

Barton is only one of many SFWA members who simply do not grasp that “@sfwaauthors” is not, and has never been, “SFWA’s Twitter feed”. That is “@sfwa”, which according to Twitter’s Terms of Usage, does not belong to SFWA either. They also do not grasp that the tweet in question contained nothing that was racist or offensive, it was a simple link to a blog post. And finally, anyone who has read either the 34-page SFWA report or my detailed response to it knows that the SFWA Board’s action was based on its active thought policing of a) me on my personal blog, b) the various commenters on my blog, and c) people with no connection to me commenting on sites with no connection to me. The SFWA President even admitted as much the other day: “Board investigation of harassment complaints may take public statements into consideration”. 


By which they not only mean public statements by their members, but also by anyone who happens to comment on a member’s blog or anywhere else on the Internet.

Mr. Wright’s view of SFWA is entirely correct. The SFWA Board has overtly and undeniably claimed for itself the right to police the public statements of SFWA members. Although the SFWA Board has done its best to bury its own report, inadvertently encouraging members like Andrew Barton to present fiction as fact, the truth is out there. Some of the sub-irrelevant SFWA members, such as the clueless wonder who keeps posting links to her blog post here on unrelated topics, would be advised to read it.