I’m not going to bother to link to click bait. (seriously, googled my name for the last 24 hours to find the New Yorker article I’d been told about, and it barely made the first page, which is a pretty good indicator of how popular the New Yorker actually is)
It is more of the same old tired narrative. The Guardian interviewed N.K. Jemisin, where of course the Sad Puppies campaign was all about white men motivated by their white maleness. And the New Yorker interviewed Samuel Delany, where somehow they can interview an actual NAMBLA supporter and yet the most controversial thing talked about is me and Sad Puppies.
Since I’m really busy, here is the entirety of my Fisking of the pertinent bits, the New Yorker is in italics, and my super in depth response is in bold.
On the phone recently, I suggested to Delany that Asimov’s poor attempt at humor—which, whatever its intent, also served as a reminder, as Delany notes in “Racism and Science Fiction,” that his racial identity would forever be in the minds of his white peers, no matter the occasion—foreshadowed a more recent controversy, centered on a different set of sci-fi awards. In January, 2013, the novelist Larry Correia explained on his Web site how fans, by joining the World Science Fiction Society, could help nominate him for a Hugo Award, something that would, he wrote, “make literati snob’s [sic] heads explode.” Correia contrasted the “unabashed pulp action” of his books with “heavy handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears.” In a follow-up post, citing an old SPCA commercial about animal abuse, he used the tag “Sad Puppies”; what he later called “the Sad Puppies Hugo stacking campaign” has grown to become a real force in deciding who gets nominated for the Hugo Awards. The ensuing controversy has been described, by Jeet Heer in the New Republic, as “a cultural war over diversity,” since the Sad Puppies, in their pushback against perceived liberals and experimental writers, seem to favor the work of white men.
Diversity my ass. Last years winners were like a dozen white liberals and one Asian liberal and they hailed that as a huge win for diversity.
Delany said he was dismayed by all this, but not surprised. “The context changes,” he told me, “but the rhetoric remains the same.”
Well, that’s a stupid conclusion.
In the contemporary science-fiction scene, Delany’s race and sexuality do not set him apart as starkly as they once did. I suggested to him that it was particularly disappointing to see the kind of division represented by the Sad Puppies movement within a culture where marginalized people have often found acceptance. Delany countered that the current Hugo debacle has nothing to do with science fiction at all. “It’s socio-economic,” he said. In 1967, as the only black writer among the Nebula nominees, he didn’t represent the same kind of threat. But Delany believes that, as women and people of color start to have “economic heft,” there is a fear that what is “normal” will cease to enjoy the same position of power. “There are a lot of black women writers, and some of them are gay, and they are writing about their own historical moment, and the result is that white male writers find themselves wondering if this is a reverse kind of racism. But when it gets to fifty per cent,” he said, then “we can talk about that.” It has nothing to do with science fiction, he reiterated. “It has to do with the rest of society where science fiction exists.”
Really, nobody cares.
SJWs are the only people who seem to care what color an author is. Everybody else just wants to be entertained rather than beaten over the head with the cause of the day. If our secret goal was to keep publishing white and male we sure sucked at it.
Great. Micro Fisking complete. Sure, the Sad Puppy related parts of these are filled with nonsense and I could do a whole giant Fisk, but I’m tired of repeating myself. Now I’ve got to get back to work, because “economic heft” has nothing to do with winning snooty awards, and everything to do with producing work that people want to give you money for.
