The Worldcon audio

Dave Truesdale has posted the audio of his panel at Worldcon that led to his expulsion.

I had originally planned to post this unedited audio recording of the panel in conjunction with an article I wanted to have posted at Tangent Online the same day as the panel, and the text transcription of the audio. I now feel it is in the best interests of all parties to post the audio now, with the article and text transcription to follow as soon as I can get to it.

I had made notes for the article I wanted to have posted here, so brought them to the panel in their rough state, crossouts, arrows moving pieces around, written in thoughts in pen, the usual rough draft of any document. I did not intend to use anywhere near all of them but knew from experience that having too much material is better than having too little. As it turned out, the only item I used directly from these notes was the quote from David Hartwell.

It’s easy to see understand why they kicked him out. They really had no choice after he began singing “Horst Wessel Lied”, then threatened to whip NK Jemisin until she agreed to pick his cotton. Outrageous!

The panicked reaction to Truesdale’s recording illustrates why you must always record SJWs. When you’ve got a recording, they can’t convincingly lie about what they said or what you said. Keep in mind, as you listen to this, that Truesdale is accused of having caused “excessive discomfort” with his words, which was the grounds for his expulsion.

And SJWs ALWAYS lie.


Truesdale expelled from Worldcon

This is truly incredible. MidAmericaCon II expelled Dave Truesdale, the editor of Tangent Online, because he expressed views concerning the state of science fiction with which the SF-SJWs disagreed:“

Dave Truesdale’s membership was revoked because he violated MidAmeriCon II’s Code of Conduct. Specifically, he caused ‘significant interference with event operation and caused excessive discomfort to others.’”

Even hardcore SF-SJWs such as Jim Hines and Charles Stross find this difficult to believe. Hines wrote this before the MidAmericaCon II tweet:

I’m not at Worldcon. I didn’t see first-hand what happened on this panel. (I have read multiple reports from folks in the audience and others on the panel.) It does sound like Truesdale acted like an ass, derailed the panel, and pissed off a lot of people who wanted to, you know, talk about the state of short fiction.
As you might have guessed, I have thoughts about all this…

  • Who the hell thought it was a good idea to put Dave Truesdale in charge of this panel? He’s been doing these rants for years, if not decades. How can the convention turn around and pretend to be shocked by his pearl-clutching derail when that’s pretty much who he is and what he’s known for?
  • I’ve seen panel derails and blow-ups before. People have gotten into shouting matches, walked off of panels, and so on. I’ve never heard of someone being kicked out of the con for it. (Not invited back as a panelist, sure. Kicked out? Maybe it’s happened, but it’s not a practice I’m aware of.)
  • Right now, we have only Truesdale’s post about him being kicked out. It’s possible there’s more to this than just his ridiculous behavior on that panel.
  • As Truesdale has gone public with this, I hope Worldcon will issue a statement clarifying why he was expelled from the convention, and whether he violated convention policies either on the panel or elsewhere.
  • ETA: From the Worldcon Code of Conduct: “MidAmeriCon II reserves the right to revoke membership from and eject anyone at any time from a MidAmeriCon II event without a refund. Any action or behavior that … adversely affects MidAmeriCon II’s relationship with its guests, its venue, or the public is strictly forbidden and may result in revocation of membership privileges.“
  • I think we’ve all seen people derail panels for their own personal agendas. Truesdale’s moderation might have been an epic shitshow, but is it grounds for expulsion?

Like I said, we don’t have all the facts on this. Just people’s comments on the panel, and Truesdale’s own account of why he was kicked out. But it sounds like a mess. 

Charles Stross even points out that “derailing a panel” is hardly unknown:

I suspect there’s more to this than meets there eye.

Derailing a panel isn’t that unusual; and while I could see Programming quietly telling a disruptive panelist that they’re not required on any subsequent panels, that’s as far as I’d *expect* it to go. (And that would be a real pain in the neck for Programming because then they’d potentially have to find a bunch of substitutes at very short notice.)

Kicking him out of the convention completely is much more serious and I suspect there must have been some sort of face-to-face harassment incident. But as various folks have noted on twitter, MidAmeriCon say they can’t comment further, so unless the target of such an incident feels like speaking out we’re not going to find out any more.

(Truesdale has been an “anti-PC” gadfly and general nuisance presence on the net for a long time — I remember crossing swords with him on the Asimov’s reader fora back in the late 90s/early 00s before they turned into an utter cesspit no sane human would go near — and my impression is that he’s been getting more outspoken over the years.)

Except, of course, there wasn’t. This was pure SJW thought-policing. The badthink must be expelled! Racist! Sexist! Homophobic! The Name of the Narrative compels you! This demonstrates why one should never get involved with any organization that has a Code of Conduct. They are nothing but weaponized SJWism.

We’ll discuss this and more at the Rabid Puppies Hugo Party 2016 tonight. Dave, if you’re reading this, please feel free to stop by.

The SJWs are getting nervous about having their Narrative about Dave Truesdale’s expulsion from Worldcon punctured:

We might not get a chance to hear the audio of the panel. Panelist Jonathan Strahan posted this on Facebook to Dave Truesdale: “Dave, while I felt we had cordial communications on the panel yesterday, and while I tried at every point to treat you with respect and civility, I would point out that I was unaware that you were recording the panel, and that I do not consent to it being distributed publicly. I hope you will respect my request and not do so. Best, Jonathan.”

Oh, I rather suspect everyone will. This is why you ALWAYS record SJWs. Because, well, you know what they always do.


Dave Truesdale culturally enriches Worldcon

The SJWs in science fiction are upset again, this time because Dave Truesdale, the editor of Tangent Online, pointed out the long term consequences of their actions in a panel at MidAmericaCon II. From File 770:

At 3:00 PM at today’s panel on The State of Short Fiction, Dave Truesdale (of Tangent Online) shocked panelists and crowd alike by abusing his position as moderator to give what sounded like an alt-Right rant against political correctness. He declared that political correctness had destroyed short SFF by making it bland and destroying the careers of people. He waved around a fistful of pearl necklaces and told people to “clutch your pearls” and shut up whenever they felt the urge to point out some injustice.

He had started reading from a multi-page prepared speech (which he attributed to the late David Hartwell) when Sheila Williams shouted at him to stop. (It helped a lot that he seemed to be clueless as to how to operate a microphone whereas she was clearly a master, so she easily shouted him down.) He seemed very surprised that almost the entire crowd (minus one person who might have been a relative) was angry with him. From his behavior, I think he expected to have at least a large cohort agreeing with him.

Eric got a photo of Truesdale reading while Neil Clarke turned his back and other panelists grimaced.

The panelists denied that SFF had declined in quality or that political correctness particularly influenced them as editors. They did note that overt bigotry was no longer acceptable, but Truesdale indicated that he was okay with that change.

At a subsequent panel, we heard that MidAmeriCon II apologized to the panelists, saying no one had any idea this would happen. According to one source, he’d been about to launch into a section titled “definition of a bigot” before he was derailed. Most people seemed to agree that they’d never seen a panel moderator abuse his position to hijack the panel as a platform for his or her own personal agenda.

Seemed. Exactly. Remember, SJWs always – ALWAYS – lie. Translation: they’d before never seen a moderator fail to support the SJW agenda.

I very much doubt Truesdale was surprised in the slightest by the crowd’s reaction. These morons have absolutely no idea what to do other than virtue-signal and blindly defend the current Narrative. This picture of Neil Clarke prissily turning his back in order to maximally signal his virtue in order to avoid besoiling himself with badthink association is hilarious.

Considering that Truesdale was directly addressing the subject matter, the state of short fiction, it’s obvious that the reason they are angry is not that he “hijacked the panel”, but because he told them the unpleasant truth as they know it to be.

Here is how one SJW subsequently characterized it.

Sunil Patel ‏@ghostwritingcow
This panel is fucking UNREAL. It’s DT being a whiny pissy manbaby and everyone else yelling at him.

Well done, Dave. Mission accomplished.

And speaking of Worldcon, Tor’s campaign for E Pluribus Hugo continues apace, as the EPH Analysis for the years 2014 and 2015 has been released(pdf). Of course, they didn’t dare publish their analysis for any other years, for as they have tacitly admitted, doing so would prove that there are whisper slates that have been having an effect on the Hugo Awards for years.

Here is the first amusing thing about it. In the “slate” year of 2015, 10 long list spots and 14 ballot spots changed under EPH. In the “non-slate” year of 2014 – never mind that Sad Puppies was in action then – 17 long list spots and 5 ballot spots changed. And they wonder why I support EPH!

The second amusing thing is the fact that the authors got it wrong. Contra their insistence that only the long list would have been affected, had EPH been in effect in 2015, Alyssa Wong would have made been a Campbell finalist in the place of Rolf Nelson.


Then they fight you

(((Joel Stein))) attacks the Alt-Right in Time:

Trolling is, overtly, a political fight. Liberals do indeed troll–sex-advice columnist Dan Savage used his followers to make Googling former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name a blunt lesson in the hygienic challenges of anal sex; the hunter who killed Cecil the lion got it really bad.

But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.

The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.

It’s always educational to see how the media inevitably attempts to push its Narrative by redefining terms. They’re actually attempting to ban self-expression in the name of self-expression, in much the same way the EU tries to bar democracy in the name of democracy.


The alt-right argues that if you can’t handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that’s arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet. 

No, that’s not arguing against self-expression, that IS self-expression. Moreover, it is using the media’s own argument against it: “if you don’t like it, turn off the TV”. It’s amazing to see them resorting to the Moral Majority’s position they used to oppose. They’re going to pine for the good old days when they were dealing with the terrible, no-good Religious Right they hated so much, as the Alt-Right is considerably less tolerant and merciful.

And, of course, the conservative media loves this stuff; they hate the Alt-Right worse than they ever hated communism, leftists, or Democrats.

Dana Perino ‏@DanaPerino
How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet – article in TIME – we are doing this subject on @TheFiveFNC. Mostly AGREE!

First the New York Times, then Time magazine, and now Fox News are attacking the Alt Right. Looks like we got ourselves a new media offensive on our hands. This is a good sign. They used to ignore us. Then they mocked us. Now, they’re fighting us. You know what comes next. We win.


This is why we de-troll

There is absolutely no point in tolerating endless repetitions of the same argument over and over again from rhetoric-limited SJWs who cannot learn from information and whose thick skulls remain impenetrable to facts, logic, science, and history. Case in point:

Sorry, but I happen to agree with the sentiment that many of the so-called “anti-amnesty” voices here and elsewhere are in fact, racist. I understand Ace’s use of the word “spics”- I do the same thing, in an ironic sense when I make the point that for many of you, “illegal aliens” is a code word for “dirty fucking Mexicans”.

I’m not slamming Mexicans, I’m slamming your attitude towards them and translating some weaselwords into their true meaning, without the code.
Posted by: docweasel at March 29, 2008 03:05 PM

Ah, the old “some of my best friends are dirty fucking Mexicans” ploy. I don’t know about individuals. Its possible you are not. I’m saying that by and large the “anti-amnesty” Malkinite argument is that Mexicans deserve special attacks and exclusion is that 1. Mexicans commit a lot of crimes (while posting anecdotal news items about illegal immigrant crime 2. Mexicans use a lot of services and cost the community more money than they are worth 3. Mexicans are uneducated and unskilled and unworthy of being Americans 4. go back to Mexico, we don’t want your culture here, we don’t want your language here, assimilate and “act white” or you dont deserve citizenship.

Maybe not you personally. But taht’s the way the argument has been framed. And I call racism. A lot of you say “I love Mexicans my best friend is Mexican I work with Mexicans I love Mexicans, btw, fuck Mexicans, we don’t need any more in this country, expel as many as possible and lock the rest out.

The bottom line is, I don’t believe the people who make racist arguments against Mexican immigration, then say they aren’t Mexicans: face it, live with it, if you try to STEREOTYPE an entire ethnicity by thea few criminals you are a fucking racist, period. You don’t like it and you reject it, but you are one anyway, motherfucker.
Posted by: docweasel at March 29, 2008 03:32 PM

And just 8 years later:

That image posted at the top of post isn’t what I’d call “Christian”- I’m the last one to be over-sensitive or pulling the race card, but that image is flat out racist.

No one who calls themselves Christian or bemoans the loss of Christian ethics has any business posting something like that, or else they have a thin grasp of exactly what Christianity is in the first place.

I only started reading this site regularly a few months ago when a link from somewhere else brought me here. If this is the tone I don’t guess this is the place for me.
Posted by: docweasel August 16, 2016 4:04 AM

Clearly the very last one to pull out the race card. SJWs ALWAYS lie. The appropriately named docweasel is banned for SJW. We neither want nor need SJWs here.


The Gathering of the Shoggoths

I’m a little sorry to miss the spectacular gathering of the science fiction SJWs now taking place in Kansas City. The lumbering of these majestic beasts, their euphonious cries for MORE DIVERSITY and MORE PEOPLE OF COLOR, and the distinctive odors they give off as a part of their annual mating ritual simply cannot be truly appreciated at a distance. Although I do detect just a whiff of Eau de Zoloft from the grinning larval one in the front row.

What do you think the over/under on psychotropic drug prescriptions is in that bunch there, 45? By the way, when we talked in the past about the shoggoths known to inhabit File 770, the photo above is to whom we are referring. The best part is that these are the lesser SF-SJWs, they are the mere fans. The greater SF-SJWs, the writers, really need to be seen to be believed.

No, upon further reflection, that’s not the best part. The best part is all of that very important diversity on display.


Reality TV and the fall of civilization

James Delingpole observes that troglodyte culture matters even to the highbrow, because politics is downstream of culture, in The Spectator:

‘But why do you even care about this crap?’ people sometimes ask me. They’re the same sort of people who, were they living in Rome circa 476, would be congratulating themselves on how bloody marvellous aqueducts and hypocausts and testudo formations are. Yes indeed. But that was then and unfortunately we’re living in now. The barbarians are through the gates, imposing their weird, alien values, but the forces of civilisation are holding their noses and looking the other way because they find modern culture so vulgar, ugly and incomprehensible.

What I think should trouble us most about the Biggins eviction is the perverse moral inversion it represents. Instead of inhabiting a universe where sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us, we’ve been ushered into one where the language you use carries more weight than the way you behave. As a writer and English literature graduate I ought to be delighted by this — except that the new rule seems to have been invented by incredibly thick people with no sense of tone, nuance or context.

At the time of the Leveson inquiry, there were lots of wise, nicely turned, historically literate articles in civilised journals about the importance of free speech and how defending it must of necessity include protecting the right to offend. The problem is that the only people who read them were clever, sensible, well-balanced types like us. Unfortunately, we’re not the ones who make the rules.

Why do you think the Big Brother bosses axed Biggins? They’re rather less concerned about what Mick Hume, Claire Fox, Douglas Murray or Nick Cohen might write in an erudite essay on the significance of Areopagitica and the importance of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ than they are about what a noisy minority of pigshit-thick but Taleban-zealous social justice warriors might say on social media.

This is why it matters when the Hugo Awards anoint mediocre SJW detritus as the best that the field has to offer. This is why it matters that we tear down the gatekeepers, we tear down the SJW-infested institutions, and we replace them with new ones. This is why it matters when even people we despise are attacked by those who seek to control them and us, and why it is important for us to defend them regardless of how we might feel about them.

Delingpole understands this, but then, he is demonstrably well-read on the subject.

How do we resist this loathsome trend? Well, the first step is to acknowledge that it’s happening; and the second is to create a stink. I’d highly recommend reading Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie, which outlines how these activists operate (‘point and shriek’, ‘isolate and swarm’) and then describes how to defeat them. Absolutely key is refusing to let these malign professional grievance-mongers set the terms of the debate.

And we’re not. Read the whole thing. Have you noticed that the Alt-Right is beginning to drive the public discourse on a few small issues here and there? That’s just the start. The mainstream media is on its heels, forced to respond to the issues that are being raised by a new generation of social media that is filling the role that AM talk radio once did. The difference is that while the talk radio guys were still subject to gatekeepers in the form of station owners and the FCC, we are only limited by the potential biases of Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Also, an AM signal doesn’t carry very far, but the Internet reaches to the ends of the Earth.


Mailvox: an SJW Narrative sale

One of the things I describe in the political philosophy bestseller SJWs Always Lie is the way in which SJWs communicate like advertisers who are trying to sell you something. SJWs don’t talk about the world that is, but rather, the world they are trying to convince you it should be. From Chapter 2:

The reason SJWs are so inclined to make false assertions stems from a motivation that is very similar to that of the professional propagandist, which is the need to disregard existing reality in order to bring about the preferred alternative. In the case of the SJW-preferred reality, this nonexistent alternative is known as the Narrative. The Narrative is the story that the SJWs want to tell. It is the fiction they want you to believe; it is the reality that they want to create through the denial of the problematic reality that happens to exist at the moment.


A recent comment from HGL is an almost flawless example of this. Here is his attempt to reshape reality by doing what SJWs always do:

Meh, Wright had some talent befor castalua. I think what’s telling is that although vox makes himself out to be the next big thing (constantly), his scifi posts get fewer and fewer hits and everyone ignored the hell out of him on Brad’s blog recently. No one who matters is buying it.

Let’s count the false assertions. I get five.

  1. He implies that John Wright has less talent now than he did 36 months ago. Speaking as an 3x Hugo-nominated editor, who has read and edited the forthcoming Swan Knight’s Son, Mr.Wright clearly has no less talent now than he did when he published the Nebula-nominated Orphans of Chaos, or his excellent debut novel, The Golden Age. In my professional opinion, the first Moth & Cobweb novel is better than the Dragon Award finalist Somewhither, and I expect the reviews will demonstrate that accordingly.
  2. I do not make myself out to be “the next big thing”, much less “constantly”. I think it is entirely obvious that Mike Cernovich is the next big thing. I am content to simply continue doing what I do.
  3. My SF-related posts do not get fewer and fewer hits. The site traffic has continued to increase; it hit 2.5 million pageviews in July and is on track to exceed 2.7 million this month. The month-to-month growth alone exceeds the total monthly traffic of most SF-related blogs.
  4. I’m not sure what the level of interest in a single comment on someone else’s blog is supposed to indicate, but the Dragon Award finalist Dave Freer responded directly to my comment there. 
  5. There are tens of thousands of people who are buying Castalia books. All of them matter. Regardless, the key thing to note here is the appeal to those “who matter”, which is typical SJW-speak, because it permits them to disqualify everyone whose behavior falsifies their false narrative.

The divergence between HGL’s Narrative and the objective, observable reality demonstrates why SJWs are so desperately unhappy, and explains why so many of them, like HGL, are mentally unstable and on various mood-altering medications. Reality is simply not what they want it to be, and so they insist on constructing their own delusional form of it, then attempt to sell others on their false Narrative.

After all, if you can convince someone else of it, then it must be true, right? As the Anonymous Conservative puts it, “their whole focus is on establishing a false reality in which everyone else is defective, and they are superior”. Here he uses the same technique of example analysis to demonstrate SJW projection at work:

Now, the analysis:


“Could it be perhaps that you are out of sync with the mainstream?”

You will see this throughout his writings. This, to him, is exposing an amygdala bombshell. If you exposed him as “outside the mainstream,” it would elicit reflexive waves of angst, terror, and misery. For him, being on the outside is associated with agony. That is why he put this here. Remember “out-grouping,” in Touching the Raw Amygdala? This is it.

Since deep amygdala pathways are either laid through isolated, but massive and shocking stimuli, or minor, but highly repeated stimuli, and they are best inculcated in childhood instead of maturity, you can usually assume the trigger you see was most likely created repetitively, when the individual was young. Larger stimuli, or stimuli repeated enough in adulthood to burn in these pathways are far more rare, than small stimuli seen often when young.

So here, Sam was conditioned to feel aversive stimulus whenever he let himself be “outside the group.” It speaks to a childhood spent around bullies, and his coping mechanism was to try and disappear into the crowd, which was controlled by the bully. When he was under the bully, in the bully’s group, he felt safety. When the group was focused on someone else, he felt safety. If he were thrown outside the group he felt horror. The amygdala learns from precisely that type of thing. Now, that simple picture – being outside the group – is a trigger.

Once you are in that milieu, it is a small jump to realize that if you can cast someone else out of the group, and expose them to that terror, it would feel good to do it to anyone who bothered you. From there, it is a small jump to being conditioned to feel good about doing it, even to people whom you don’t really care about.

Despite their solipsism and penchant for navel-gazing, SJWs are astonishingly unself-aware. That is why they will blithely hand you the keys to carving up their psyche, not only without hesitation, but under the delusion that they are doing devastating damage to your psychology by doing so.


Star Trek goes full SJW

The inevitable convergence of Gene Roddenberry’s vision is Star Trek Diversity:

After Star Wars was rebooted with a female heroine, Rey, at the center, the other famous space franchise is taking a similar route with the new series Star Trek Discovery for CBS All Access. I’ve learned that the show, from Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, will have a female lead and she likely will be non-white.

William Shatner, Chris Pine and Scott Bakula might be the better known Star Trek stars, but there was a Star Trek series, the 1995-2001 Star Trek: Voyager on UPN, that had a female lead: Kate Mulgrew, who played Commanding Officer Kathryn Janeway.

Still, Star Trek Discovery possibly will boldly go where no other Star Trek installment has gone before: with a woman of color as the lead. I hear virtually all women seen for the part so far — and there have been a lot of them as the casting process has kicked into high gear — have been African-American or Hispanic.

No one has been cast yet, so it is possible that the role ultimately could go to a Caucasian actress, but the intention is to go diverse.

As for what that lead role is, there had been speculation that it is the captain, but I hear that likely is not the case.The Star Trek franchise is known for its inclusiveness, and the new series will try to continue that tradition. I hear that that there will be a an openly gay character on the show. (Of course, there also is expected to be a Klingon).

“Star Trek celebrates diversity,” Fuller said at the Star Trek 50th anniversary panel at Comic-Con last month.

UPDATE: Later this afternoon, during a CBS All Access panel at TCA, Fuller confirmed that the lead in Star Trek Discovery will be woman and that she IS NOT a captain, but “a lieutenant commander with caveats.” He also confirmed that the show will feature a gay character.

A black, lesbian female lead. That’s so totally new! She should go nicely with the black female James Bond, the black female Dr. Who, and the white lesbian Luke Skywalker. So, Star Wars is fully converged, Star Trek is fully converged, and Pink SF is fully converged. The famous Chesty Puller quote seems appropriate here:

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.”

This is actually very good news, because we all know what happens to converged institutions. What it means is that we now have the chance to replace them, and we are, in fact, already working on that. I’m not going to go into more details, except to say that we will be introducing several new series that are likely to be of considerably more appeal to the longtime fans of certain existing science fiction franchises than the converged versions of the franchises.

We’re not going to step on any toes, of course. That would be foolish and is completely unnecessary. But just as 50 Shades of Grey proved more popular than the Twilight books that inspired it, I suspect our new science fiction series, the first books of which will appear in 2017, will be received very well by science fiction fans.

The Pan-Galactic Divergence might not be the heroes you’re accustomed to, but they just might be the heroes you need. And as long as we’re on the subject, I have to say that I find it rather amusing that the SJWs still haven’t realized that they are the Borg.


Larry Correia fisks the latest SF-SJW drama

In which the an insufficiency of Negroes publishing short science fiction stories is lamented:

While science fiction can be found across novels, television, and film, the short fiction market is a particularly important marketplace to consider. It publishes a relatively high level of content, and allows newer authors to break into the field with their own fiction.

Eh… Sort of. In reality the short fiction market is a good place to get started because it is easier to finish a 5,000 word piece than a 100,000 word novel. Shorts are good practice but the pay is awful. I’ve known some of the most prolific and successful short fiction authors alive, and they don’t make enough off of it to live on. Also of those 2,000 short stories, probably half of them were written by the same 100 or so, already popular/prolific short fiction writers, which will further skew the stats.

Successful authors such as Ken Liu, N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, and Paolo Bacigalupi each got their start writing shorter stories for a variety of magazines, which helped them as they began writing novels.

Yep. Good for them. Luckily for you there are a hundred ways to get into this business.

Short fiction also allows authors to experiment with form, style, and narratives which can have great impact on the field as a whole.

Uh huh. That sounds great and all, but it’s really kind of bullshit. Not the authors experimenting part. That’s cool. That’s how we learn. The “impact on the field” part, that there is some pretentious literati twaddle. Outside of a tiny circle jerk of critics, nobody cares. Your story probably isn’t got to blow any minds or shake the foundations of the world.  Just write your shit, and if it is entertaining and good enough, people will want to give you money for it.


Barriers for specific groups of people hurts the field as a whole by blocking new voices and styles from reaching a wider audience.

Funny, when I said that same thing years ago I was the bad guy.

I actually think the most ridiculous thing about the SJW lamentation is the idea that Charlie Jane Anders is a successful author. He’s published one novel. Its Amazon rank is unimpressive and it’s got fewer reviews (163) and a lower rating (3.9) than either A Throne of Bones (180, 4.2) or SJWs Always Lie (453, 4.6).

If Anders is a successful author, then everyone is a successful author. Anyhow, read the whole thing. It’s vintage Larry.

It’s strange, but they never seem to be concerned about the plight of the American Indian in science fiction.