SF creeps are creepy

Yet more sex-related scandals in the freaky world of science fiction:

Over the last 48 hours or so, the science fiction and fantasy literature field has been rocked by multiple accusations of multiple authors of improper behaviour, abuse, gaslighting, racism, misogyny, sexual coercion and authors using their platforms to engage in dogpiling and bullying.

The number of accusations has been almost overwhelming. Genre Grapevine is currently running a list of the allegations where the facts of the matter are not in dispute. Authors Paul Krueger, Myke Cole and Sam Sykes have been accused of inappropriate behaviour (Cole has subsequently been dropped by his publisher and agent, and Krueger by his agent) and others of enabling that behaviour.

It's the exact opposite of "shocking" to be informed that a field that lionizes convicted and admitted pedophiles and celebrates its sexual freaks is rife with creeps. Like, you know, our old pal McRapey, who has a pain in his tummy over the possibility of his own peccadilloes coming to light.

My friends fucked up. Not accidentally, to be clear. They made choices.

They are responsible for their wholly intentional fuck ups.

Also, I am responsible for my fuck-ups in relation to them — to what extent my friendship implies complicity with their actions, or provides cover, or has allowed me to overlook things I should have been paying attention to, or has allowed me to excuse what they were doing. This is one reason I feel like I have a small ulcer at the moment; the gnawing feeling in my gut that wonders how much of their fuck ups are at my door. In some cases, not much! In others: well, more.

(You should also know right now I definitely have that exasperated part of me that is all, like, look, I haven’t been in the same room as this guy for a couple of years! I don’t have a body cam on him! I don’t see every goddamned thing he does as he does it and to whom he does it! My brain is very full of defensive frustrated whining right now! Which is also a thing I have to work through.)

(And while I’m at it, I’m going through my own interactions with people, especially women, at conventions and other places where it turns out the power differential slides toward me. I can admit that this power differential wasn’t something I truly clued into for a while — I think it took being SFWA President to get it drilled into my head, because that was a big fuckin’ neon sign, wasn’t it — but it was there fairly early, so, uhhh, yeah. I’ve seen people commenting “well, at least we still have Scalzi,” and there’s part of my brain going, oh, man, I sure hope you do! But I also know that I have fucked up before in other places where I didn’t understand my power (see: RaceFail, now a decade back), and because of that what I did or said hurt people. That’s also a thing.)

So, yeah, I have to sit with and work through all of that.

It's delightful to be able to state that I have absolutely no connection with any of these awful people on either side. And I can't say that my own tummy hurts from laughing so hard, because I'm not really the laugh-out-loud type. But I may have smiled.

UPDATE: If, like me, you have no idea what the latest tempest in the freakshow teapot is about, it apparently is related to this:

In last night’s episode of The Horror Show With Brian Keene, he said the show’s team was aware of 10 cases of allegations involving everything from sexual coercion to sexual assault that have been made “against ten different individuals in the comic book, horror, science fiction, book-selling, convention organizer, and cosplay sectors of our industry — all of which had publicly come to light in the last 7 days.” When Keene followed up the podcast today with a public Patreon post, “Behind Closed Doors”, he said the number is up to 17.

The soyboys are finally beginning to understand why the men's club was necessary, even by their idiotic equalitarian standards. It's fine to decry the creeps and all, and I have no doubt that most of them did what they are accused of and more, but the fact is that there has been a lot of significant art created by very flawed men. I am dubious that all of the art, science, and technology created by sub-Alpha males and good Christian married men can be adequately replaced by female creators.

The truth always comes out... eventually

This is, in retrospect for those familiar with the history, hilarious:

Looking above at my novel advances, I see four distinct eras in them:

Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;

Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;

Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;

Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.

Now, at this point, it's almost uniformly recognized by anyone who has read both of our works that I am a much better novelist than old Johnny Con. Whereas I can credibly write everything from 4-panel comics to movie scripts to 900-page epics, he struggles to put together a 250-page novel without ripping off one or more better science fiction authors. If you don't believe me, just read a few reviews of our works, then compare short story to short story or novel to novel.

But what is amusing in light of the long-running SF-SJW "envy" narrative, to say nothing of the ludicrous "awards" metric, is that this talent gap was obviously recognized by our mutual editors from the very start. As it happens, I was getting paid more to NOT write books than Scalzi was getting paid to write them at the same time that his fan club was insisting that I was envious of his "massive success". But his literary success turns out to have been the same sort of manufactured charade that his "extraordinary amount" of blog traffic was.

My first two novel advances were $20k and $20k, or nearly five times more than Scalzi was paid for his first two novels. And here is the punchline: writing has never been anything more than a pasttime for me. I still don't consider myself to be a writer; I am first and foremost a game designer. It's also a bit amusing to see him labeling himself a franchise writer, especially when we've got multiple film studios inquiring about the availability of everything from Alt-Hero and Avalon to Vampire Lords (not the actual title).

The lesson of John Scalzi is this: ruthless self-promotion, shameless dishonesty, and genuine hard work can pay off, as long as you can find the proper victim for your con artistry. His literary career, to the extent that one can even call it that, is nothing more than a house of cards constructed on a color-by-numbers basis.

And speaking of writing, the new Hypergamouse is up. It's a good one.


UPDATE: Comments are closed. Quelle surprise!

I humbly accept

While I do not seek this grave responsibility, given the historical context of the current situation, if SFWA requires a POC President-for-Life in light of the horrific structural racism of the organization, I will humbly accept the position once the white racist Mary Robinette Kowal resigns her office:

Yesterday, SFWA announced a racist — and illegal via several Civil Rights statutes — action in which if you are a member of a certain race, you do not have to pay SFWA dues nor do you have to pay to attend their convention. Moreover, the California Incorporated SFWA announced they would be giving money from their coffers to causes which have nothing to do with club members nor science fiction.

As a corporation, SFWA has to abide by rules which do not discriminate via race, gender, religion, etc. And yet with their denying my entry when I duly qualify, and now these initiatives, they are showing that they do not respect minority authors at all, but view us as slaves who are too poor to be able to handle business as their “proper” white authors like Mary do, and also they believe we are too stupid to be able to handle our own charitable causes or have our own opinions on public matters which are different than what Mary or Cat (both white women) advocate for.

I recommend she step down from SFWA leadership and appoint a PoC in her stead who will guide SFWA in matters only someone who doesn’t try to culturally appropriate a cause would do. What Mary Robinette Kowal has done these last 24 hours and during her tenure of leadership of SFWA is deplorable and irredeemable and must be disavowed by any non-racists.

My program is straightforward.

• Appoint an African editor of all SFWA publications. Preferably one who speaks an African language and does not speak the language of the oppressors.
• Award the 2020 Nebula Best Novel Award to Octavia Butler (posthumous)
• The 2021-2025 Nebula Best Novel Awards will be given to NK Jemisin, the greatest SF writer in the history of SF writing.
• Award the 2020 SFWA Grand Master to NK Jemisin.
• $5,000 annual reparations will be paid to all POC authors from a pool collected from the white membership of SFWA.

Anything less would be racist. #BlackLivesMatterMost

Black science fiction matters

These are the actions that SFWA is taking as first steps to clean our own house and work towards making our community safer for Black writers.

• For the month of June, 100% of registrations for the Nebula Convention content will go directly to the Carl Brandon Society and the Black Speculative Fiction Society.
• We are creating a matching program for the Nebula convention so that each registration purchased this month creates a seat for a Black writer.
• For the next year, we are waiving fees for SFWA membership for Black writers.
• We are waiving registration fees for next year's Nebula conference attendance for Black writers.
• We are creating a travel fund to help defer the costs of Black writers attending the Nebula conference
• We are committing to reaching out to Black-led science fiction and fantasy organizations about applying for the additional grant money that we have available. 

And here I would have thought handing NK Jemisin the Best Novel Hugo for three straight years would have bought them a certain amount of protection. Apparently not. But wouldn't it be more meaningful if Tor Books agreed to publish only black authors for the next ten years to make up for their past racism?

And, of course, it's a given that they will name Ms Jemisin the 2020 SFWA Grandmaster. Anything less would be r-r-racist!

Goodbye, Uncle Hugo

SF-SJWs on Reddit were optimistic that this was all just a right-wing plot to make them question their allegiance to diversity.

• Just did a search about the fire, and nothing. This could be a post trying to get the sci-fi nerds of Reddit pissed off.
• That's what I'm going to choose to believe until I see something from a real news site or the store's own social media.
• It's all just fantasy until then....
• Probably to make people who want to protest peacefully feel bad. To me it doesn't look the same at all.

Yeah, so, about that....

Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's 28th and Chicago: Destroyed by fire.

Interpreting the Gamma

John Scalzi attempts to finesse a tricky social triangle. And he actually does a pretty good job of walking the tightrope, in which he simultaneously:

1. Insinuates that he is friends with Neil Gaiman.
2. Implies that he does not approve of Neil Gaiman's heavily-criticized globetrotting excursion in the face of the Scottish lockdown.
3. Insists that he is not obliged to publicly condemn Neil Gaiman's behavior.

And all without actually staking a position to which he can be held accountable. Comments, of course, are closed. Secret King wins again!

A solid, creditable performance. I give it 8 of 10.

If you think the Puppies didn't win

Think again. We said we'd leave a smoking hole behind and that's precisely what we did. Only it's turned out to be a smoking, stinking hole.

Look Upon Their Works... and enjoy a hearty laugh at the incestuous wasteland the once-prestigious Hugo Awards have become.

Best Novel

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)

There is a reason these "best novels" can't scare up an Amazon rank that's even within amplified shouting distance of the average pulp mil-SF novel. That's because the Hugos are nothing but fake praise for pseudo-SF SJWage strung together by fatties, trannies, and peoplx of colorx, then published by Tor.

It doesn't matter how hard the SJWs try to convince you their SJWage is good, people simply aren't being fooled anymore.

*The Verge's Science Fiction and Fantasy Book We're Looking Forward to in 2019
*Amazon's Best Books February 2019
*Book Riot's Most Anticipated Books of 2019
*Kirkus Reviews's 30 Speculative Fiction Books You Should Read in February 2019
*Bookish's Winter's 10 Hottest Sci-Fi & Fantasy Reads
*Bookbub's Best Science Fiction Books Coming Out in 2019
*YA Books Central's Buzzworthy Books of Winter 2019

Meanwhile, on Amazon: 3.9 out of 5. #71,483 in Books

It’s a sad love story about a woman in love with a terrible person who treats her terribly. Also it’s on an alien planet where it’s always night in one direction, and always day in the other. But if it’s the setting that intrigued you, this book isn’t for you. This is a clumsy slog of a love story, with some themes about doing good in the world.

Imagine that....

One can't "ruin" Star Trek

Nor can it "collapse", as it came into being pre-collapsed from the mind of a proto-SJW who sold it under false pretenses. All one has to know to confirm that an individual's mind is intrinsically off-balance is to learn that he's a fan of Star Trek in any iteration:

Star Trek very much embodied what liberal American white males of the 1980s and 1990s thought the future would (or should) look like: secular, sexually liberated, humanistic, meritocratic, equitable, and technological – a man’s world, basically. In this world, religion plays practically no role in public life. Problems are solved with diplomacy instead of violence. Money doesn’t exist, so there is no capitalism, greed, or want. People spend their lives bettering humanity and doing other such noble things like negotiating peace with aliens or exploring the universe in one of Starfleet’s advanced starships, each equipped with a plethora of miraculous technologies. In their leisure time, the crews of these starships visit a holographic room, the holodeck, which can conjure any fantasy into a photorealistic facsimile of the real thing.

Probably the only place in the Western world where this mentality can still be found is California’s Silicon Valley. As in the fictional world of Star Trek, men do most of the work; they advance through meritocracy; and there is something akin to a fraternal culture, irrespective of the prevailing progressive ideology. Silicon Valley is also still largely free of the odious diversity requirements imposed on the rest of society.

That was also once true of Hollywood itself, and it showed in the television they produced — Star Trek, for example. That franchise, spanning hundreds of television hours and a number of theatrical releases, was mostly helmed by men who got their jobs through merit – actors, writers, ship designers, show runners. The main characters of each of the television series were also men. The Original Series (TOS) featured a lead triangle of male actors – Kelley, Shatner, and Nemoy. The sequel, The Next Generation (TNG), featured mostly male characters, certainly all the most popular ones. These characters often featured something educated men are interested in: the second officer is an android; the chief engineer has a technology-supplemented vision; the executive officer is a ladies man and a master strategist who plays games of skill underpinned by mathematical rules; the captain is a wise and cultured authority figure who reads Shakespeare; the security chief is a noble warrior from an alien species whose culture is based around rules of honor.

Meritocracy in Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is "largely free" of diversity requirements?

This guy is still stuck in 1985. When Star Trek was differently, but equally awful.

Asimov: portrait of a supergamma

The man who set the stage for modern science fiction in so many ways:

If you wanted to construct the most productive writer who ever lived, based solely on first principles, the result would look a lot like Asimov. He emerged in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, which rewarded writers who could generate reams of publishable prose on demand; he eventually learned to produce serviceable material after only two drafts. Asimov was a rapid typist; he was fond of enclosed spaces and hated to travel; he had a prodigious memory; and he specialized in popular science texts that could be researched straight from the dictionary, encyclopedia, or other common reference books.

When the playwright David Mamet was asked about his writing routine by John Lahr in The Paris Review, he said, “I’ve got to do it, anyway. Like beavers, you know. They chop, they eat wood, because, if they don’t, their teeth grow too long and they die. And they hate the sound of running water. Drives them crazy. So, if you put those two ideas together, they are going to build dams.” One could say much the same about Asimov, whose existing tendencies were enlarged—by fame, a receptive audience, and supportive publishers—into a career that bears the same relation to the output of most writers that the Great Wall does to the work of the average beaver.

When you consider Asimov’s treatment of women, you find an identical pattern. As a young man, he was shy and romantically inexperienced, which was reflected in the overwhelming absence of female characters in his fiction. He openly stated that his relationship with his first wife was sexually unfulfilling, and it was shortly after his marriage that his fingers began to rove more freely. While working as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, he liked to snap women’s bras through their blouses—“a very bad habit I sometimes can’t resist to this day,” he recalled in 1979—and on at least one occasion, he broke the strap.

After the war, his reputation as a groper became a running joke among science fiction fans. The writer and editor Judith Merril recalled that Asimov was known in the 1940s as “the man with a hundred hands,” and that he “apparently felt obliged to leer, ogle, pat, and proposition as an act of sociability.” Asimov, in turn, described Merril as “the kind of girl who, when her rear end was patted by a man, patted the rear end of the patter,” although she remembered the episode rather differently: “The third or fourth time his hand patted my rear end, I reached out to clutch his crotch.”

It was all framed as nothing but good fun, as were his interactions with women once his success as an author allowed him to proceed with greater impunity. He writes in his memoirs of his custom of “hugging all the young ladies” at his publisher’s office, which was viewed indulgently by such editors as Timothy Seldes of Doubleday, who said, “All you want to do is kiss the girls and make collect calls. You’re welcome to that, Asimov.” In reality, his attentions were often unwanted, and women found excuses to be away from the building whenever he was scheduled to appear.

Given the psychosexual issues and socio-sexual shortcomings of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, it's not at all hard to understand why the two or three generations of boys who grew up reading them, and were influenced by them, featured so many sexually maladjusted individuals.

I think I was fortunate in that although I read all three of them, I was much more influenced by their contemporary, Jerry Pournelle, who, despite his prodigious IQ, was the only socio-sexually normal one of the four of them. Even as a boy, the two things that most struck me about Asimov was a) his infelicitous names for his characters, and b) his total inability to describe women or intersexual relations.

Relax, McRapey

John Scalzi looks back over the last ten years of his literary career and devotes nearly one-third of the article - 31.6 percent - to his critics:

Any discussion of my career over the last decade needs to include the antipathy of me by a certain cadre of right-wing SF writers and fans, a group which overlaps (considerably) with the “Sad/Rabid Puppies” who publicly shat themselves so dramatically during the middle bit of the decade with regard to the Hugo Awards and other aspects of the business and community of SF/F literature. I noticed the first real push of the antipathy after Redshirts won the Hugo, and certain dudes suggested that Redshirts won because I had sucked up to the Social Justice Warriors sufficiently, rather than because, say, it was a popular book riffing off a beloved science fiction franchise in a clever and affectionate way, written by a writer who’d been nominated for Best Novel a few times before.

In the full bloom of the Puppy beclownery there was more of the same, a fair amount of snide discussion of my sexuality and gender, and general allegations that my sales numbers were inflated and/or propped up by bulk purchases by my publisher, which, by the way, was doing terribly and would soon be out of business. My personal favorite bit of this was when there was a long discussion about how my 2014 novel Lock In had been a massive sales failure and that Tor was about to drop me as an author; this discussion was happening simultaneously with me negotiating with Tor for my multi-book, multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract (which included not one but two sequels to Lock In). When the contract was announced, the narrative shifted to how much more I would have made self-publishing, and then later how I’d never really make as much money as the public figure of the contract. Which, well, okay, dudes. In time most of them have left off this nonsense, but there are a few of them still out there on this bullshit — why, I was chucklingly misgendered just this week!

What is it about me that bugged and in some cases still bugs these dudes? If you ask them they will give you all sorts of reasons, but having dealt with this nonsense for a better part of a decade I’ll tell you it’s mostly envy, and frustration about the state of their own careers, which they feel should be better because they write the sort of science fiction they’ve always loved and assume others still love as well. And which I also do, so why the hell do I get the big contracts and they’re (mostly) left to scrape by? There has to be something else involved — thus the secret cabal of SJWs, bulk purchases, also I’m gay and/or trans and thus not a man at all, hur hur hur. Add to this the fact that at least a couple of these dudes legit dislike me for other reasons (most of which boil down to the fact they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag and at one point or another I pointed that out to them in public), and some of them just happen to be bigoted as fuck, and you’ve got a fairly toxic mix of resentment and complete bullshit.

This hasn’t affected my career in any meaningful way — see the summary earlier in the piece — but on a personal level it could be tiresome. I’m guilty of taunting some of these dickheads on occasion, because they deserve the taunting and because I know my successes irritate the shit out of them. But mostly I’m glad it’s largely done and over with, save a few stragglers. I think after a certain point it just became difficult to argue that I was a failure, and that their doing so just accentuated their own relative positions, which they preferred not to do. And also, after a certain point you do just have to get on with your life and write your things. To the extent that some of them are doing that, good for them. Those that aren’t, well. Bless your hearts, dudes.

As always, Ol' Johnny is lying and attempting to retroactively spin the narrative when he thinks no one is going to call him on it. No one was ever saying that he was a failure - quite to the contrary, he is almost certainly science fiction's most financially successful grifter of the last fifty years.

What we said, and still say to this day, and what we can prove, is that he is a serial liar, a fraud, and a literary mediocrity. That's all there ever was to it. And the reason no one even bothers to criticize him any more is because it is obvious to everyone that he is over and done. He can relax now. The hounds, like everyone else, have lost interest in him.

Your kung-fu waifu is not enough!

No matter how hard you bend over backward to appease SJWs, they will NEVER be content. It's not enough to have 90-pound butt-kicking science fiction princesses in the place of the traditional male hero, now they've got to be post-menopausal, overweight, butt-kicking science fiction crones who nevertheless remain inexplicably attractive to the handsome, wealthy heroes who desire them as much as they respect them:

As women get old, they gain a superpower: invisibility. And not only in real life. ‘Young adult’ fantasy and science-fiction hits such as Suzanne Collins’s novel series The Hunger Games and Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight series have been taken to task for doing away with mature women. In fantasy generally, older women mainly occupy supporting roles, such as fairy godmothers, wise crones and evil witches. The best are subversions — George R. R. Martin’s Queen of Thorns in A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, or Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg in the Discworld series. All of them embrace old age with gusto.

I expected better from science-fiction novels, where alternative worlds and alien nations explore what it means to be human. In 1976, after all, Ursula K. Le Guin argued in her essay ‘The Space Crone’ that post-menopausal women are best suited to representing the human race to alien species, because they are the most likely to have experienced all the changes of the human condition. And Robert A. Heinlein offers a fantastic galactic grandmother in The Rolling Stones (1952): Hazel Stone, engineer, lunar colonist and expert blackjack player irritated by the everyday misogyny of the Solar System.

Over the past year, with support from such authors and readers all over the world, I’ve searched for competent, witty female elders in major roles in sci-fi novels. I found no shortage of fantastic female characters across the genre, from the gynocentric utopians of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland to mathematician Elma York in Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2018 The Calculating Stars. But I have so far confirmed just 36 English-language novels in the genre that feature old women as major figures. The earliest is Gertrude Atherton’s 1923 Black Oxen; the latest, from 2018, are Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller and Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

It never stops. It never, ever, stops. This is why it is a mistake to even give them so much as a nanometer.

All the flavors of oppression

The Greatest "Science Fiction" Writer Ever explains why her work is such a joy to read:

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

And yes, reading her work is EXACTLY as painful as this little vignette suggests.

...

Only more ellipses. A LOT more. The only thing Jemisin enjoys more than oppression is ellipses.

The pirate China Mike

Larry Correia chronicles the sad decline of China Mike Glyver from science fiction historian to open piracy:

A while back Richard Fox got nominated for a prestigious award for a story he wrote. Problem was, Richard is a financially successful indy author, and the snoots have a hate boner for indy authors, (snoots are all about writers having to go through proper thinking “gate keepers” first). Since Glyer is addicted to stirring up controversy, the world’s fattest vulture swooped in and started posting about Richard Fox’s nomination.

Wait… You know what? Glyer is right about one thing. Accuracy is important. Vultures are actually noble, social creatures who play an important role in the ecosystem, which is basically the opposite of Mike Glyer, so I should not have compared him to a vulture. I apologize. To vultures… Not Mike Glyer. He can fuck right off.

Problem was, Richard was already wise to Glyer’s game, and told him to keep his name out of his whore mouth, up to and including sending an official take down notice.

Good. Because fuck Mike Glyer. Every author should tell him to keep their stuff off his awful website.

At the time I didn’t really know or care who posted the story on the internet. That’s obfuscation. If Richard did post it himself, that’s up to him. When I throw out the trash, that doesn’t mean I want racoons rummaging through my garbage can. Nobody wants racoons in their trash. Now imagine Mike Glyer rooting around in your dumpster. No. Shoo, bad Glyer! BAD!

Except after seeing the email exchange, it’s worse than that. Richard posted the link to a private closed forum only readable by SFWA members (the people who would be voting for the award). Somebody (Richard says he doesn’t know who) took that private link and stuck it on Google Drive and Glyer linked to that to get clicks for his shitty public website. When Richard contacted him, rather than be a decent human being and go “Oh, my bad. Sorry.”  Glyer acted like an entitled shit and started lecturing the author he was trying to screw over about his tone and lack of civility.

It's always amusing to see how SJWs are shocked to discover that the laws apply to them too. Ever since John "McRapey" Scalzi helpfully came up with the bright idea to make award-nominated fiction available to the voters, the SJW gatekeepers of science fiction have been distributing the award-nominated works to the public, mostly with the permission of the rights holders.

However, Richard Fox did not give his permission to have his work publicly released outside of the private SFWA forum to which I totally do not have access any longer. And while China Mike was not the only individual to provide a public link to Fox's work, he was the only one who refused to take the link down and leave it down when requested to do so by the rights holder.

Needless to say, the usual suspects have been whining and crying about Fox's "timing" and "motivations" despite the fact that none of that matters. The law is clear. If a rights holder tells you to take something down, it doesn't matter why or when he tells you to do so, you either comply or you are in violation of U.S. copyright law. End of story.

On a side note, doesn't "China Mike, space pirate" have a great ring to it?

Science fiction is dead

The SJWs who killed science fiction and wore it as a skinsuit can't even bother wearing the skinsuit anymore. An Analog professional writes of the latest SJW atrocity against science fiction history:

I got my start as a pro writer at Analog, and for a couple of years I was one of its most published writers.

That was past Campbell's day - my editor was Stan Schmidt.

But it's disheartening to see one of the giants of my field disenfranchised from the award named after him because of the shrinking SJW pussies currently dominating "formal" SF.

I quit SFWA thirty years ago, because even then it was obvious what it was becoming.  I hate to see this cancer continue to destroy a field I used to love.

What he's referring to is the disappearing of one of science fiction's most important figures, John W. Campbell, as signified by the renaming of the Campbell Award:

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer began in 1973 as a way to honor exemplary science fiction and fantasy authors whose first work was published in the prior two calendar years.

Named for Campbell, whose writing and role as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog Science Fiction and Fact) made him hugely influential in laying the groundwork for both the Golden Age of Science Fiction and beyond, the award has over the years recognized such nominees as George R.R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, Carl Sagan, and Lois McMaster Bujold, as well as award winners like Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, and John Scalzi.

However, Campbell’s provocative editorials and opinions on race, slavery, and other matters often reflected positions that went beyond just the mores of his time and are today at odds with modern values, including those held by the award’s many nominees, winners, and supporters.

As we move into Analog’s 90th anniversary year, our goal is to keep the award as vital and distinguished as ever, so after much consideration, we have decided to change the award’s name to The Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

It is debatable when science fiction officially died. Historians may date it to John Scalzi's ill-fated Tor contract, to NK Jemisin's unprecedented and unbelievably absurd three Best Novel awards in a row, or to the disappearing of one of the genre's leading figures. But whatever the date of expiry, there can be no doubt that it has now expired.

Unsurprisingly, McRapey enthusiastically applauds the latest turn in the Narrative. He's desperately hoping to be eaten last.

As a Campbell Award winner (and now, an Astounding Award winner!), I applaud the choice, and the decisiveness with which this change was made. Thank you!

Mandatory transgenderism?

A reader wonders about a new trend he's noticed in mainstream science fiction:

I’m a big science fiction fan.  Lately I’ve noticed “non-binary” or transgender characters added to some recent books.  These characters are pretty much just thrown into the story with no mention of how they got this way or what changing societal norms led to this becoming a valid choice for the character.

Some examples:

• Alastair Reynolds – On the Steel Breeze:  Has a “non-gendered” character.  The other characters refer to it using pronouns such as “ver,” as in “Ve rolled ver eyes in disgust.”
• Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck – the Expanse series:  In one of the recent Expanse books I saw a character using the pronoun “they.”
• Peter F . Hamilton – Salvation:  A transgender character appeared by page 15, referred to by “sie.”  “Sie had a pretty face with sharp cheekbones, highlighted by an artfully trimmed beard.”

Of course the Expanse authors have always been pretty SJW, with characters in homo marriages and such, but Reynolds and Hamilton seemed like normal guys up till now.  My guess is that they are being forced to throw this stuff in, just to get their books published.  I can imagine them sending their manuscripts in to Del Rey, and some blue-haired landwhale sends back an email saying, “Needs more diversity/inclusiveness.”

I have no idea, but at this point, nothing would surprise me. After all, Nick Cole was dropped by HarperCollins for a single, throwaway joke about aliens concluding a species that aborts its own young cannot be intelligent.

Speaking of which:

Dr. Elizabeth Sandifer@ElSandifer
"Who should I believe, Ethan van Sciver or Vox Day" is sort of like "how do I get these water moccasins out of my microwave" in that you've made some very major fuckups in getting to this question.

You think, Phil?

The Toad of Tor returns!

It's going to be beautiful seeing how the SF-SJWs react to the coming collapse of Tor Books. They are just horrible little creatures. The Toad of Tor is still so bitter about her husband's muting by Macmillan that she is after anyone who dares to so much as speak well of me.

This week I launched Flying Sparks, my beautiful superhero comic of a hero and villain in love, and the mantra of Jon Del Arroz “isn’t really a bestseller” continued. The publisher’s wife and employee of the company Teresa Neilsen Hayden launched an attack on me because I spoke positively of fellow author Vox Day, who has recently taken a generous amount of time actually criticizing some of my work in a constructive way and guiding me to help me become a better author, something no one from Tor has ever come close to doing in their childish namecalling and gaslighting attacks.

But the Nielsen Haydens still have just enough influence within the creepy little SF fandom community to put on a show for the Twitter Trust & Safety Council at the expense of the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction. Based on my experience, this is the prelude to Jon Del Arroz's eventual banning from Twitter.

I don't know about you, but I'm truly going to enjoy Arkhaven and Castalia House crushing these evil grotesqueries. They have already failed, they simply aren't fully aware of it yet. Once the full extent of what we're now in the process of doing becomes clear to them, they're going to need to seriously up their medications. And speaking of Jon Del Arroz, I can confirm that Dark Legion Comics will be publishing the retail editions of his successfully-funded Flying Sparks comic.

A belated discovery

John Scalzi finally realizes that the science fiction community has passed him by.

John Scalzi@scalzi
Just saw my WorldCon schedule.

Single panel and a kaffeeklatsch.

Huh.

They don't respect Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore. They're certainly not going to take long to forget about a mediocre, middle-aged white male.

UPDATE: If you can't win, pretend not to have been playing the game.

John Scalzi@scalzi
It's a trend. Also, after noting last night I'd be happy to give up my panel slot, this morning I went ahead and withdrew from programming entirely, to open up slots for folks previously excluded from programming, including other Hugo finalists.

Such magnanimity! It almost brings a single tear to my eye.

Too much social justice

At least two conventions have decided not to let SJWs talk them into self-evisceration:

Dragon*Con decided that alienating half the country was not worth the loud-mouthed SJWs who only accept people who are just like them, as Ms. Stromborn wanted the convention to be.

Her refusing to back down unless certain authors were uninvited and Dragon*Con taking a stand against the attempted political mobbing marks the first time a convention has openly gone against the SJW hate mob. This is a big shift in culture as people are fast learning that the SJWs don’t actually create “inclusive spaces” they actively attempt to exclude normal people which eventually shuts down a convention, or kills the audience off and harms a group financially.

ConCarolinas Back On Track

But there was a second instance this weekend. ConCarolinas at their closing ceremonies announced they made a mistake with John Ringo, and henceforth will no longer be using political ideology as a litmus test for who gets invited. This is great news as well, and it means that ConCarolinas is going to stick to their original mission of promoting geek fandom and literature, and is standing up to the bullies who successfully mobbed Mr. Ringo out of the convention earlier this year.

Good for them. At this rate, they may be the only two conventions remaining in ten years.

Mailvox: the irrelevance of psychology

A reader emails to write of his reflections on the way in which the psychological approach is entirely unsuited to handle genuine evil.

On a serious note, the JBP discussion brought up something I wrote out and saved.  You saved me the same few hours of reading, to reach similar conclusions.  I’m disturbed by the dreams and unmoored personality, and disturbed similarly by the “Clean your room.  Take your meds.  Be Nice”  set of commands.

Normally, suicide prevention is one of those mandatory training things that you nod through and then forget immediately.  We had the unexpected benefit of having parents come in to “share their story” about how their son suicided at age 21, after years of drug issues.  The emotional testimonial is one that I loathe, so I was busy tuning them out.  It was crisis acting in action, complete with the special choreographed music for the slide show.  But in the middle of mom’s opening speech about her dead son, she mentioned reading Gene Wolfe stories and going to conventions hosted by the local Science Fiction Society.  Oh, now you got my focus.

The father was distant and not really involved with his family, and mom was associated with the SF scene in some way.  I had read the Castalia House blog posts and The Last Closet, so at this point I tuned out the mom and soundtrack and paid attention to the boy’s pictures.  What really got my attention were the activities the pictures came from: Scouts, swim team, boys’ choir, lead role in the school musical.... 

Oh, ye cats indeed.

The pictures were random and not in time sequence. Starting at about age 9-10 the boy’s stance, facial expressions, and attitude began changing in the pictures.  It became overacting and getting outrageous in pictures shown to the public.  The behavior changes did not look normal for the age. It was about age 15-16 where his drug use went into heavy opiate addiction, according to parents, and the pictures shown were of a ravaged young man with some serious ghosts in his eyes.

Short of adding peer counselor or gymnastics to the above list, it’s hard to consider a worse combination of potential exposure to pedophiles or homosexual groomers.  After ten minutes, I wondered if drugs were used as part of the grooming, or if he turned to hard opiates to try forgetting.  Moira Greyland’s words came back to haunt me for the next couple days.Were the parents blind to this possibility?

I thought I had this out of my system, but then came the issues concerning Jordan Peterson.  I listened to about one and a half of his videos, and tuned out.  Your analysis, including the diabolical influence, was on target.  My thoughts came out of background.  Peterson advocated therapeutic measures to mitigate the pain, and nothing to stop it, defend the youth, and counterattack.  Then there were his writing about the cannibalistic and incestuous dreams.  This does NOTHING to help young men.  &*^% that, there are souls at risk.

The sickness in science fiction

They should have listened to Moira Greyland:

Floyd "Huston" Huddleston - founder of the Hollywood Science Fiction Museum, has been arrested for the following child pornography charges (in the comments) - Seriously, we HAVE to get people like this OUT of the Entertainment industry.

The challenge is that if they get rid of all the criminal pervs from science fiction, Castalia House will be about all that is left.