I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to finish the rough draft of a novel for a gaming IP by the end of February, and then I’ve got two short stories due the first part of March, but Monday morning I see this nonsense. How could I not take a minute to fisk it?
As usual, the original is italics and my comments are in bold.
I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year
Bold headline. Short answer? No.
I thought: what if I only read stories by a certain type of author?
On purpose? Then you’d probably be a racist.
K. Tempest Bradford
Pick any whackadoo Social Justice Warrior controversy in sci-fi/fantasy publishing over the last few years and you’ll find K. Tempest Bradford in the middle of it. She is perpetually outraged that someone may be out there, right now, having fun wrong.
Let’s start by analyzing this picture of Tempest giving America a good scolding.
Now, you might be wondering why Neil Gaiman is the designated bad guy this time. By all accounts, Gaiman is a brilliant, entertaining, extremely successful author, who also has a reputation of being a very nice guy to his gigantic fan base. Not only that, but I believe politically he is on the left, so you’d think he would be at least marginally more sympathetic to the various SJW causes.
But he’s Tempest’s Evil White Cismale Oppresor because of this other recent bit of SJW nonsense by Hugo winning feminist Kameron Hurley. http://www.scifinow.co.uk/interviews/kameron-hurley-on-neil-gaimans-trigger-warning-responsibility/
Sadly, I don’t have time to fisk the one I’m fisking, let alone fisk the background fiskings, but that Hurley article is very fiskable. My favorite part is where a SJW laments how awful it might be to have other creators attack you in social media… Yes… I can’t possibly imagine what that would be like.
Basically, Gaiman wrote a book called Trigger Warnings, which triggered SJWs. Now, Gaiman has offended these people before by saying that maybe they shouldn’t be so quick to form angry lynch mobs against innocent people, like when they attacked and slandered his friend comedian Jonathan Ross into resigning from being the Hugo MC because he *might* hypothetically, in the future, tell a fat joke.
For those of you just joining us, not I’m not making that up. SJWs are really that paranoid and vindictive.
But anyways, because he stood up against witch hunts, and was in favor of telling the truth about someone rather than the narrative, Gaiman equals Satan-Hitler.
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
Back in 2012 I faced a conundrum. I write short fiction, and I wanted to get better at writing it. To do that I had to write, write, and write some more.
I actually agree with that. The more you write, the better you get.
But just as important was reading, reading, and reading a lot more.
Also true. Authors need to read in order to become better writers. Exposure to other styles will help you improve your own.
Reasonable so far, but don’t worry, she’s about to go off the rails into racist crazy town.
And I tried. But every time I thought about delving into one of the many science fiction and fantasy magazines at my disposal, or even reading compilations of the “best” stories that had been nominated for and/or won awards, my brain resisted.
Her brain resisted? But, remember, it is my side that is supposed to be small minded.
Also, I want you to think about what kind of stories have been nominated for and/or won awards in recent decades. Plus, I’d invite any of you to go check out some of the various years best compilation anthologies. Go through them with a critical eye and see how they skew politically.
Because every time I tried to get through a magazine, I would come across stories that I didn’t enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I ragequit the issue.
She RAGEQUIT? (anybody who ever played Call of Duty knows that word is spelled all caps).
Now normally people, when investing their valuable free time into something, when they find that item isn’t to their taste, stop, and simply switch to something else they think they’ll like better. There is after all, a whole lot of things to choose from competing for your entertainment dollar.
But not Tempest. She is powered by RAGE. I bet she RAGEQUITS lots of things.
Go through enough of that and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.
Uh huh… It must suck to be confronted by such dangerous badthink that it would cause a professional writer to give up reading. That would be kind of like an artist saying she was so offended by someone’s painting that she wanted to pluck her eyes out. Or in other words, complete bullshit.
But hang a minute… She doesn’t name any names, but If you look at award winning/nominated short fiction, and Best Of compilations of short stories, you’ll find tons of them that already cater to Tempest’s world view, and yet she still RAGEQUIT. What was she reading exactly? FIRE HOSES & ATTACK DOGS. Bull Conner Presents the Best Fiction of 1965?
Then I thought: what if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers. Essentially: no straight, cis, white males.
I suppose that would make sense, if you’re a huge bigot blinded by irrational hatred.
Cutting that one demographic out of my reading list greatly improved my enjoyment of reading short stories.
Now just flip that “that one demographic” to Jews and see how much that sounds like a skin head.
That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than previously.
So, Gay and Lesbian People of Color, you still offend Tempest, but not enough to cause RAGEQUIT. Don’t worry. Once all the White Cismales are gone, you will be reeducated so that there is no danger of you having fun in an unapproved manner and causing microaggressions.
Limiting myself in this way also made me aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues in which no women or POC authors made an appearance.
Fun Fact: Did you know that when you submit a story to an editor, there is no place on your query letter to tell them about your Race/Sex/Orientation?
And pretty soon I didn’t even bother looking at those magazines when I went on my monthly search. When I ran out of known-to-me magazines, I went on the hunt and discovered several that published new-to-me writers and also a surprising number of magazines dedicated to underheard voices.
The key here is the known-to-me and surprising bits. Most Social Justice Warriors aren’t well read. They like to pretend they are, but when you start talking about what is actually out there to choose from, they are shockingly ignorant. But what do you expect from people who RAGEQUIT when exposed to offensive opinions? This is why when you see them attacking other authors’ works, it is almost always stuff gleaned from the Wiki summary or something completely fabricated.
I ended that year with a new understanding of what kind of fiction I enjoy most, what kind of writers are likely to write it, and how different the speculative fiction landscape looks when you adjust the parallax.
People like different things. That’s fine. Everyone is going to gravitate toward whatever kinds of work pleases them the most. Some of us like action, exploration, or drama. Others like character driven works, or big questions, or even strong message fiction. Tempest hates white men. So, whatever works.
This past week Sunili Govinnage wrote in The Guardian about her experience reading only novels by writers of color for a year. It’s a challenge she set herself at the end of 2013 inspired by a similar project by Lilit Marcus who read only books by women for a year.
Now, most of us read whatever books sound the most interesting to us, and truly don’t give a shit what skin tone the author is, or who the author likes to have sex with. But then again, we don’t write for the Guardian.
Just like opening up space for more stories from women,
No anthology editor anybody who has ever heard of is trying to keep women out of anthologies. This is one of those things SJWs like to toss out, figuring people will accept it as truth.
Recently I was speaking with an editor who put together a charity anthology. The sales of this anthology went to pay for another author’s medical emergency. The authors who contributed stories to it were not paid. They were volunteers. Because time was of the essence, the editor put out a rushed call for submissions and said he would run with whatever he got by a certain date. Many authors volunteered stories (again, without pay!) and the editor went to press in a hurry (again, medical emergency!), only not a single female author volunteered a story. So of course, when this anthology came out the editor was attacked by SJWs as misogynist woman hater trying to keep female voices out of fiction.
there needs to be a conscious effort to support multicultural voices and fight the assumptions surrounding what the mainstream market supposedly wants.
I like the “supposedly” there. Stupid markets. With their freedom and choices. What the mainstream market really needs is to have people like Tempest Bradford scold them for having fun wrong.
The mainstream market wants to enjoy itself. It doesn’t like to be yelled at. It gets annoyed when you call it racist. Since most books don’t even have back cover photos anymore, the mainstream market probably doesn’t know what color the author is. The mainstream market has zero clue what culture the author grew up in, and if that information is available at all, the mainstream market probably doesn’t give a shit.
The mainstream market buys books based on the following criteria:
- This cover looks cool. I will pick it up/click on it.
- The back cover blurb/description interests me.
- It has good reviews/word of mouth.
- I will purchase it with my money.
- If I liked it, I may purchase other books from this author.
Govinnage is a writer of color herself,
Writer of Color is a stupid term. I hate the term People of Color. It is just Colored People backwards.
yet she still learned a few things from the experience, including “just how white [her] reading world was.” Even when you’re coming from the viewpoint of a marginalized identity, the privileged view is everywhere and pervasive. It’s easy to buy into it without really knowing that you are.
Privilege huh? From what I’ve heard about Tempest, she grew up in a rich family. Luckily one of my readers copy and pasted some stuff from her bio into the comments. She attended NYU—which I believe is the most expensive undergraduate program in America—to study opera. She then dropped out to attend the “Gallatin School for Individualized Study” where “There we had no “majors”, only “concentrations”. My concentrations were in performance, writing, the history of mythology, interstitial art (though we didn’t call it that, then), and the collective unconscious”
But wait, there’s more about what it means to live such a life of marginalized hardship: “After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous, I decided to throw it all away so I could attend Clarion West in 2003. I left my job, left New York, and left any notion that I’d be leading a normal life in the dust. After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends. In 2006 I returned to New York City and took up freelancing to support myself.”
I know when I think of marginalized lives, I think of mooching off your rich friends while playing tourist.
I only say that because I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an alcoholic mother and a functionally illiterate father (who is way darker skinned than Tempest), where I got to spend my formative years knee deep in cow shit at 3:00 AM, so that I could later work my way through Utah State (only after getting a scholarship for my freshmen year because I knew a whole lot about cows), to then spend my adult life working corporate drone jobs of increasing difficulty and skill requirements, all while writing on the side while I supported my family, until I could make it as a professional author.
Lecture us more about privilege, Tempest. It’s fascinating.
It doesn’t help that most high-profile venues that exist to alert readers to new books and their worthiness are skewed heavily toward privileged voices.
Who? Publishers Weekly? Locus? Io9? Tor.com? GoodReads?
No, seriously. Name some high-profile venue names here, Tempest. Or is this the Bull Conner Upcoming Books of 1965 Alert List? Because I didn’t sign up for that one either.
The funny part is when Chaos Horizon did an unbiased breakdown of the pro review sites comparing my last release to Scalzi’s novel coming out around the same time, despite our selling about the same, all of the pro places reviewed him, and none of them talked about me. So if there’s a bias there, it sure as hell isn’t in the way Tempest is thinking. (But to be fair, Scalzi may be a SJW, but he is super white and has professed to living life on the easiest difficulty setting.)
A few years ago some best-selling women writers pointed out that the New York Times reviewed significantly more books by men than by women.
Which is funny, since the New York Times is so super right wing. Oh, wait…
The problem is not limited to the Times. Nor limited to just men vs women. If the majority of books being held up and pronounced Good and Worthy are by white, straight, cis men, it’s easy to slip into thinking that most good and worthy books are by authors that fit that description.
You know, in all the time I’ve been doing this and fighting with these people, I can’t find a single mainstream example of anybody of note holding up a book and declaring it good and worthy because it was written by a white heterosexual male. Normally, when regular people declare a book good, it is because they thought the book was good.
I have however seen hundreds of examples of Tempest’s side holding up a book as being good and worthy because of the author’s racial/sexual identity.
Most of us judge books on their content, not the color of their author’s skin.
And, of course, that’s bull.
Nope. And as we’ve already established, because of my Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, I know more about bulls than Tempest does.
“Slowly but surely, the world is noticing that ‘meritocracy’ in the arts and entertainment industries is as fictitious as Westeros,” Govinnage says.
You can declare merit a myth all you want. You can do the same thing about gravity. Doesn’t change reality. Falling off a roof still hurts, and you’re more likely to make a living as a writer if you entertain people. At the end of the day, regardless of their genetic makeup, Neil Gaiman has more talent in his pinky finger than Tempest Bradford has in her whole body.
The fact they used Westeros as an example of fictitious is illuminating, because it was created by a straight white cismale, but everybody knows who George R.R. Martin is and has heard of his work, because it is popular, and people like it.
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take.
No. We shouldn’t. Because we’re not boring racists.
You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color.
How do you guys even know? For example, it wasn’t until last year I learned that Steve Barnes is black. I first read his stuff in high school. When you see an interesting book, do you rush off to Google to make sure the author is racially acceptable?
Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women,
Is there like a special search box to check for this on Amazon that I don’t know about?
books by people from outside the US or in translation,
I’m a Akira Kurosawa junkie, doesn’t mean I’d want to only watch his movies for a whole year.
Side note, do you think it would pain Tempest to know how much money I’m making off of foreign translations? 🙂
books by people with disabilities.
Or how about we read books because they look interesting/entertaining, rather than because the author checks some arbitrary box on an EEOC form? It wasn’t until I saw a Facebook thread this morning that I found out two writers I’ve known online for years are disabled and one is in a wheelchair.
Because who gives a shit?
After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author.
No. They don’t have to do anything. We’re entertainers. Our job is to entertain the readers. Tempest is getting this backwards. The writer works for the readers. Not the other way around.
In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths,
Again, how do you know? I’ve plugged books by everybody from Atheists to Asatru, and I only know their religion because of conversations in real life.
working class or poor,
Kiss my ass. This one in particular really pisses me off. Working class or poor describes most writers.
and asexual (as a start).
No shit. For a year? Only books by asexual authors. How few books do you read?
Whichever focus you choose,
I choose the “this book looks interesting” focus myself.
it will change the way you read and the way you go about picking things to read.
That’s certainly an understatement.
When I settle in to read a magazine now, I read in order of stories I think I’ll like best. And if I do decide to read one by a new to me author who appears to be a straight, white, cis male, it’s usually because I trust the editor and the magazine.
Read that sentence again and mull over how incredibly racist and sexist that is.
Feel free to change it around. Change it to Black or Jew, but it’ll be okay if she sees a Jewish sounding name or a Black sounding name, because she trusts these editors, and they’ll probably be one of the good ones.
My reading sessions are filled with much less stress these days.
What a vapid, useless screed.
This whole thing really bugs me. Why would you limit your exposure to books and ideas based on such asinine, superficial things?
Louis L’Amour saved my life. He taught me to love reading. I didn’t care that he was whiter than I was, or that we were from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. Nobody engrossed in a story gives a shit about that. I was expanding my mind, not artificially limiting it.
From there I went on to read whatever I could get my hands on, and I’m sure most of those books were written by old white guys, because at the time most writers were white guys. As demographics change and there were more writers who weren’t old white guys, I read more books by people who weren’t old white guys, and again, didn’t give a shit.
The super evil mass market consumer doesn’t finish a book and say to themselves “This was an excellent read. I’d go tell my friends, but I suspect this author has slightly more/less melanin than I do, or might possibly come from a different socio-economic strata so I’d better throw it away.” That’s the kind of nonsense SJWs fret about.
Do you want to know the best way to get more people from diverse groups to be writers? Get them to be readers. Readers become writers. Populations with more readers will produce more writers. Some of us are compulsive story tellers, and get them immersed in the medium, and they’ll want to tell stories of their own in that medium.
How do you get people to become readers? Introduce them to books you think they will enjoy. The sexual/racial identity of the author is irrelevant to enjoyment (unless you’re a flaming bigot, because it will make you RAGEQUIT). People tend to keep doing stuff they enjoy.
How do you know what books people will enjoy? That’s the trick. Everybody is different. Everyone has differing tastes. That’s why you introduce them to a wide variety of books. I’m talking real diversity, not the skin-deep superficial diversity SJWs glom onto, but real diversity of thoughts, ideas, and imagination.
SJWs love diversity as long as everybody is diverse in an approved manner. My side welcomes everybody and thrives on competition, whether it is art or ideas, the more the better. I want more people from every possible group writing books. Because the more books that are created, the better the odds that there will be something truly brilliant.
Come to think of it, I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that Tempest’s motivations aren’t exactly purely on behalf of social justice, but rather in the naïve hopes that if fewer people read Neil Gaiman or other white heterosexual males, they’ll buy her stuff instead. That’s one problem with statists. They think the pie is finite. If George Martin gets another dollar, they feel like that dollar was stolen from them.
Sadly, they know as much about economics as they do about literature.
To counter Tempest’s racist challenge to only read books based not upon their content, but upon the color of their author’s skin, I offer a different kind of challenge.
I challenge you to read books based upon what you think sounds awesome, and never give into the finger shaking scolds.
If you wanna see ego in action, just check the comments. Someone mentions the fact that the author is wearing a Dr. Who t-shirt (show made by white people, starring white people, etc…etc…) but “THAT doesn’t count because she’s specifically talking about books!” She’s got the whole “SJW air of smug superiority” bs down pat.
Wait, check this irony.
Neil Gaiman writes for doctor who. Two episodes I can think of at least
Take a break from reading privileged Jews, because, like the larger white instrumentality they are a part of, they are “diabolical.”
The comments section there is horrible, well actually shes being horrible. Shes just putting down people and acting like a child.
It just tickles me nowadays. I try to tell everyone; if you HAVE to deal with someone like that, just smile, mock, and ridicule until they go away.
There’s a good reason I read very few blog’s comment sections — and xojane aint in the top million.
“Child” seems to cover many of the more vocal SJW’s. Adults have the ability to understand, and deal with the fact that people think, look, act, believe, and do things differently than them.
I loved the bit where you cannot read Neil Gaiman because his wife was in a band that offended me.
What in the holy name of Frick? I’m hard core reformed, read Correia (Mormon, Methinks) Williamson (NeoPagan) and Ringo (not enough mind bleach) because they write good. I read Gaiman and Stephenson for the same reason. I read Charles Stross and Ken McLeod because they are equally good.
And I don’t care who they sleep with or what skin colour they have. I leave that up to God and them: I have enough crap in my own life to clean up.
These people want to make us neat where we are not designed to be, as if they can make people to be better. Now, I do not hold with that. I aim to misbehave.
And the only apology I’ll give is for misquoting.
Absolutely spot on. Myself I have been and still am a lifelong atheist and politically I consider myself closer to those guys then Larry. But they disgust me. Their jackbooted mindless victim plays are the most anti-liberal nonsense I can imagine. They are truly corrupt politically and morally. It grosses me out, that I a liberal feel more welcomed at Vox Days blog where I can comment freely than at liberal bogs or tor.com where any dissenting opinion gets erased.
My honest belief, one that I will defend if challenged is that people like Tempest are nothing but opportunists. They don’t believe their own nonsense, it’s all a marketing ploy to get shit list authors publicity and money. “Stop EVIL white man privilege! Buy our books by privileged upper class white women who went to colleges most readers couldn’t dream to afford!” Divisive marketing to make up for pitiful writing.
Tempest and her crew are the genre writing version of the gay black militant in Chasing Amy, pretending to be angry for sales.
You mean the gay black militant who was secretly gay?
Loved that character. 😀
Williamson is atheist I believe.
Gay black militant who was secretly gay? So was it a secret from himself, or what? 😉
Nope. When the public wasn’t around, he cut loose and was a total flamer and proud of it. But if a fan was around, he made Farrakhan look tolerant.
http://youtu.be/SMCki0Z_AlA
https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/319852003645874176
That’s right. He’s appalled at segregated high school proms.
Heck, I’m appalled at the idea of a segregated prom. Sort of like being appalled at segregated rooms at Wiscon…
I like his writing, but he kind of lost his sheen for me when he vigorously defended Laurie Penny, up to and including suggesting authors up rate her book to “combat the trolls”
Laurie Penny is a mental case of a sociopath.
Some of the folks on the other side of this write books that I will read anyway, because I enjoy them.
Didn’t care to finish American Gods, but Good Omens is something I reread.
And yet, they don’t seem to realise that, for its day, Doctor Who was radical since it’s first executive producer was a woman. The Daleks and other bits that became tropes of the show she pushed.
I invite people to look up Verity Lambert.
They even put the story of the creation of Doctor Who in movie format. Well done, IMO. David Bradley really kills it as William Hartnell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Adventure_in_Space_and_Time
My favorite thing is when they say it’s acceptable to read things translated from foreign languages. So basically, Japanese people are minorities in Japan as well as the U.S.? I’m a white guy, but I speak/read/write several languages. Does that mean I can write something in Spanish, translate it later into English, and it will be worthy of her time?
What a sad and empty place their bookshelves must be. And what a sad and empty thing their lives must be, to be so psychotically obsessed with other people’s ethnicity and sexuality. Don’t they have ANYTHING else to do?
But if they did anything else, people would stop paying attention to them. That’s unacceptable.
Wow, I just figured it out. This must be what an atheist martyr looks like. They know there’s no eternal Paradise waiting for them when their suffering and persecution is done. The best they can hope for is the approval of their peers, the attention of the masses, and the smug satisfaction of knowing they’re Doing the Right Thing because they’re being so viciously opposed by the thugs and barbarians who scoff at their Utopian vision. So they’re going to draw out their crusade for as long as they can, because that’s as good as it gets.
Sad indeed.
But of course these martyrdoms can’t occur against people who might actually physically hurt them…
There’s little doubt Bradford is following the Scalzi plan of lighting up straight white men to boost their nominal talents as authors. Bradford is known for only one thing: race. Not art, not writing.
Oh, Chris I imagine they have plenty of books on their bookshelves, because it seems to be pretty easy to find that type of author, the message author… But how many do they have that have been read till the cover comes off? How many are the second or third purchase of that book, because they went to a friend and said, “You have GOT to read this book!”, and then never got the book back? I see a lot of pristine books, read maybe once through, if that, on their shelves
My 12 copies of MHI that I’ve loaned out and never gotten back says a little something about what people want versus what SJW’s want to require people to read…
That’s because you have failed to tell them about the evil things Larry believes.
For example, he likes GUNS!!!!111!!
twelve? I stopped loaning them after 3, and started buying them as gifts.
Far as bookshelves go, I’m rereading my Norman Spinrad right now to decide which ones to keep (not going well for him). I’ve got Jemisin and Elliot coming up (they’re racist bigots, but maybe they can write, don’t know yet), and just looking through one shelf I can find people from different races, religions, genders and whatever easily. Most of these I read before there was an easy way to get information on the authors, because they had STORIES. Not because of race, gender, religion or whatever. If a book makes me ‘ragequit’ I get rid of the book, I don’t look up the author, find out it’s a cismartian Buddhist acrophobe, and stop reading books by cismartian Buddhist acrophobes for a year to ‘remove stress’. What is she smoking?
Tom: that’s nothing! I’ve heard he’s . . . Libertarian. *shudder*
WHAT?
All that talk about freedom? Everyone knows that they don’t really believe that. They all get together in secret meetings and talk about how they REALLY want to exterminate all the left handed transgendered acrobats!!!!
> never gotten back
I keep a small stack of books just for that purpose. Nothing by Larry in there yet, but over the years I’ve probably “loaned” a dozen copies of L. Neil Smith’s “The Probability Broach” to people who had never voluntarily opened a worked of fiction in their lives.
The required research astonishes and appalls me. Even granted that as someone plugged into the writing community she would know some of the writers, there’d still be a lot of cases in which she’d have to judge sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation based on either name or someone’s web page. And she’s assuming, of course, that everyone who is gay or lesbian discusses this prominently on their web pages.
The point is not to be obsessed with other people’s ethnicity and sexuality, but to open your mind to other works from points of views that are underrepresented. I agree with the essence of what she’s saying, but I don’t think you have to cut out white cis-genered men as well.
Well, good, we agree about the part where she sounds like Heinrich Himmler railing about how the Jews run everything.
But note, Tempest is the one obsessed with ethnicity and sexuality. Meanwhile, over here in angry, red state, flyover country, clinging to our guns and bibles, my comment thread is full of “Oh, so and so is race X or sexuality Y? I didn’t know that. I love those books!”
Did you miss the part where she’s obsessed with thise things?
Read more of X == Read none of Y
But that is what she’s saying, not just the essence but exactly .
Great.
You see, we don’t give a shit either way. Over here? We’re obsessed with good stories, and if a black transsexual rhino otherkin writes a good one, we’ll probably read it.
There are others, like K. Tempest Bradford, who are obsessed with race. Hell, she’s the one who RAGEQUIT stories that challenged her assumptions and says that skipping white men’s writings made it all go away.
Who is obsessed with race?
Ah, ye auld “Skim Until Offended”.
Remember kids, Reading is Fundamental!
What a racist comment.
She is not even thinking of points of views that are underrepresented. It would be trivially easy to keep to her standards and keep within a point of view so narrow that the Thought Police would approve of her self-regulation. If she actually wanted underrepresented points of view, she would go straight for that.
Choose, for instance, to read only conservative SF. That would be different.
“[whatever combination of not white and/or straight and/or male and/or cis] doesn’t have to go all the way to white straight cis male’ to shake up their reading lists. And also, and again as a practical matter, the number of people only or primarily reading [whatever combination of not white and/or straight and/or male and/or cis] is likely relatively small compared to those reading only/primarily straight white cis males.” – John Scalzi on the subject of not reading whites, Jews, cis-hets, male cow milkers, Christian Albanians and rodeo clowns for a year.
Oh good. Scalzi managed to straddle the fence, excuse an actual racist’s racist challenge, and dismiss the people who made fun of the racist, but it’s okay, because the number of people stupid enough to listen to the actual racist’s racist challenge is relatively small compared to the number of people who aren’t imbeciles.
A bold stance.
But remember, Vox Day using a racial slur against a person with a history of using racial slurs was a crime against humanity, and possibly the worst thing that has ever happened in literature, so foul and repugnant that Scalzi threatened to resign from SFWA if it wasn’t remedied. But Tempest’s racist screed is okay, because the numbers of people she might cow or intimidate into following her racist example are relatively small.
Glad we got that cleared up.
As far as I can tell my biggest crime is that I’m rude to the racists they like.
And to think that I’d never even heard of Vox until that happened.
Day’s an amateur compared to Bradford and Jemisin. If he’d switch targets to white cis-hets cow milkers, and amped the racism up about 100 notches, he’d probably have a Nebula by now. Scalzi’s probably trying to figure out how to write The Fuzzy White Ape Turner Diaries.
Reblogged this on and commented:
BWAAHAHAHAHA, another masterful takedown of Princess Tempest Teacup by the great Larry Correia
I’m going to Amazon right now and buy Gaiman’s book. I believe in letting my money talk for me. I’m not a white, male, whatever. I am an avid reader/ purchaser of books.
It is a good one. Not great like Fragile Things perhaps, but good.
I really enjoyed it too. Go forward and read American Gods, just to piss Bradford off and not feel bad about spending the money.
I rather like Neverwhere, myself. He wrote the novel and the TV series at the same time. The TV show is good, if a bit low budget. Great cast, though, especially the villains.
‘American Gods’ is a good book. But you should read ‘Good Omens’ as a starter instead. It’s a collaboration between two straight white males – Neal Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – and is just as awesome and hilarious as you’d think based on the presence of those two writers.
Then you can go read American Gods.
Well, it was the only Gaiman thing I don’t own. It was just a really good excuse to buy a book by a white did male. Bwahaha
That’s two hits on Gaiman in a week. You see, when these birds take over a fortress and find it was abandoned, that makes their achievement less worthy. When Gaiman thumbed the Hugos, the gender-brigade took it personally. They don’t want to beat each other, they want to beat cis-gendered white males. I vote the next WorldCon be held in Cairo because Islamophobia, the non-West, color of people and love.
Not only are Pratchett and Gaiman white males, they’re both Btrits – so they must have even more privelege.
I can honestly say I have never given a second – or even a first – thought as to the gender, ethnicity, sexual alignment, or whatever-the-hell else of whatever authors I have read. if, as you say, Larry, the blurb looks interesting, I read the book. If the book was good, I find more books by the same author. If the author recommends other authors, I look into them. And so on.
And if the book was not good or was not something I enjoyed, I shrug my shoulders, donate it / sell it, and move on. I never realized those actions were so hard for some people.
If you go through life seeing everything through the lens of race / gender / sexual alignment / etc., guess what? You are racist / sexist / etc. It is entirely possible the people you are whinging about are likewise racist / sexist / etc., but if you cannot even be honest with yourself, why should I bother paying attention to your mewling?
My first thoughts about this when finding about these issues were….authors have genders? Never even registered. The books just appear magically on the shelves at the bookstore and library.
Precisely! I wasn’t even aware Larry C. was a white guy until I saw him on a Youtube video. Moreover, I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I read his stuff because I enjoy it, period.
Well, technically, he’s only an honorary white guy because he’s a Conservative Latino. And they have to call him white because that does not compute.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you. For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,” so yes, it is something that we think about every day. It’s not racist to say “Hey! Try reading books from colored women too!”… It’s completely naive to think we live in a post-racial world. Let’s not try to deny racism exists, but embrace that it does, that we are all a bit racist and that we should work to open our minds to other genders, races, and sexualities.
“You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you.”
You probably don’t know what it is like to have people avoid you during your 20s because they profile you as a hulking, terrifying, swarthy 6’5″ brute, or had women cross the street when they see you coming, or hear the car doors lock when you go through the parking lot, or been judged a dumb brute because of how you look without them having heard you say a word, because you’ve never felt it affect you… Oh, wait. I have. Which is why I know that argument is total bullshit.
For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,”
Yes. There are things which bring awareness to your otherness. Like life, on planet earth. Because we are all unique individual humans who are different from each other in a variety of ways. Just because your particular otherness is championed by social justice warriors doesn’t make you a special snowflake in the human condition, nor should life be a competition of who can out victim each other.
so yes, it is something that we think about every day.
That’s on you, because truly most people nowadays don’t care what boxes you check as long as you don’t annoy the shit out of us about them.
It’s not racist to say “Hey! Try reading books from colored women too!”…
Except for one tiny problem. THAT ISN’T WHAT SHE SAID.
Hey, I’m all in favor of reading books by everybody. In fact, my Read Whatever Looks Awesome To You Personally method doesn’t seem to care who wrote the damned book. Fascinating how that works.
If Tempest had said you should go read books by group X, here is a helpful list, FANTASTIC. But she didn’t. Don’t try to explain away her racist screed. She said don’t read books by a particular group because of their race and skin color. Scroll up to where somebody replaced all of her references to white males with Jew and tell me it doesn’t sound like Himmler.
And if you sound like Heinrich Fucking Himmler, you might want to pause and examine your life choices.
It’s completely naive to think we live in a post-racial world.
Where did I ever say that? I’ve got plenty of real philosophy to choose from without you need to make up new dumb ones for me.
Let’s not try to deny racism exists, but embrace that it does,
Duh… Look at Tempest.
that we are all a bit racist
Nope. Most Americans nowadays aren’t racist, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly meaningless. Unless of course, you use the idiotic definitions presented above where because of privilege and invisible microaggressions, everybody is always guilty, all the time, somehow. Unless apparently if you are SJW, because then you can sound like Himmler and come out smelling like a rose.
and that we should work to open our minds to other genders, races, and sexualities.
Again, I truly don’t give a shit. I’m not the one telling people NOT to read authors from a specific gender, race, or sexuality.
You want to preach about inclusion, go talk to Tempest.
hey Larry…
6’2″ 275 lbs. had people cross the street, women clutch their purse closer, etc… some similar experiences to yours…
but i guess its just lower-class white privilege?
I’m bisexual, and have to deal with the ‘fallout’ of it plenty, including from the homosexual community in some cases. It still doesn’t make me agree with her proposal though.
I don’t agree with it because diversity is not promoted by the exclusion of people, with the distinct implication that these people are bad and somehow responsible for the world’s ills by the virtue of their race, gender or sexuality. True diversity and inclusion is NOT caring what anyone looks like or what they sleep with, for bad or supposed good, and judging them solely by merit. In fact, picking out writers based on these criteria of hers cheapens them, in my opinion, as it boils them down to simple checkboxes rather than judging them on the merit of their storytelling. ‘Is this a good story?’ should ALWAYS be put over ‘Is the writer black?’. Like I said above, I’m bisexual, and I’d be pretty dang disappointed if I found out someone read my stories, which themes and worlds I obsess over in their detail, simply because I fit some socially concious LGBT criteria.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you.
Or we weren’t indoctrinated into thinking about it.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you. For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,” so yes, it is something that we think about every day
Step off the horse, the poor animal needs a break. Piling such a load of narcissistic twaddle on high would give anybody a backache.
You probably don’t have enough awareness of other people as discrete and separate beings to realize that your arbitrary categorizations don’t shield anyone from ostracization or otherization.
You’ve established you don’t have enough awareness to realize simple categorizations do not define people or their experiences.
I guarantee there are people in this community who have suffered far harsher experiences than the spoiled bigot who penned the divisive screed under discussion. Her incidental characteristics be damned. But — you’re not going to hear from them because they grew up and moved on.
So take your PC sanctimony and concerned apologia and fuck off. Your philosophy angers me, your bigotry disgusts me, and your lecturing bores me.
Tell us how you really feel, Eamon.
It’s not good to keep your emotions bottled up like that. 😛
You know me, T.L., always trying to be polite.
This is true. 😀
Victor: If you speak against SJWs and approve of wrongfun, then you are no longer considered bi by SJWs, but are now trans-cis.
Nor is it racist to choose a book that is written by a white author over a book written by a black author (assuming you bother to look up the so called race of the author) because the former looks interesting while the latter doesn’t. Unfortunately Tempest doesn’t bother with the last part of that statement. While I don’t think she actually came out and said it in the article she strongly implies that the choice of the former author in my example IS racist.
You’re sadly right, Kristophr.
These SJWs, their hypocrisy is nothing short of staggering. She can take her challenge and go screw off. I plan on reading many white cishet authors this year and enjoying the hell out of them. And good lord, but she has Anna Grodzka hands.
Now that I look at the pic again, she and Grodzka could be sisters, too. *shudder*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Grodzka
Thanks, Dave W. I can’t unsee that. Talk about needing a trigger warning. 🙂
You’re welcome! 😀
Also she kinda reminds me of Andrea Dworkin… bad character will eventually show, I guess.
One of the funny things about her appearance is that she doesn’t look particularly black, even though she rants on about it and once famously claimed that in America it was legal to shoot people like her. What did she mean by “people like her?” (Obvious replies to my own question occur to me, but most are just RUDE). 🙂
If I read a bunch of white cis male authors this year it’ll be by accident. The idea of picking books purposely by the author’s pigment and plumbing isn’t something that exists, or that I want to exist, in my mind space.
The only reason the authors I mentioned are male white cishets is pure coincidence and the fact that I’ve previously enjoyed their work. I plan on reading Sarah Hoyt and Cherie Priest as well because I’ve enjoyed their work in the past. Bradford and her “challenge” can go suck lemons.
Curse you for exposing existence of our natonal shame to the world. We hoped that if nobody notices he/she will go away.
Curse you for exposing existence of our natonal shame to the world. We hoped that if nobody notices he/she will go away.
LOL! You can hardly watch an episode of Wiadomosci without a mandatory appearance by either Grodzka, Palikot or Leszek Miller! It’s an ongoing joke in our house. 😀
Gah, I messed up the quote marks.
Why would I question the motivations of a black radical lesbian feminist who has referred to a white woman on Twitter as “cracka ass cracka” and who has teamed up with an Asian feminist who referred to a white actor as “sour dough-faced” who together created a racially segregated non-whites-only room at the feminist WisCon SF convention?
I must be paranoid.
She’s just asking you to open your mind to other authors that you may not directly relate with (I’m assuming you’re a white man).
We can read, Amber. Her words are all right there. The original link is right there. I quoted the whole damned article.
See, unlike when the SJWs need to fabricate quotes from me to fit their narrative, I like to let my opponent’s words stand on their own.
No she isn’t. She didn’t say “read this.” She said “don’t read that. That’s not opening your mind. It’s closing it.
She’s just asking you to open your mind to other authors that you may not directly relate with (I’m assuming you’re a white man).
No, no she’s not. We’re capable of reading her words, so you don’t need to try to be an apologist/distort what she said.
Sounds like she’s saying that people shouldn’t buy any of my stuff, let my family suffer because I happened to be born white and male, simply because I was born white and male.
What do you know? That’s EXACTLY what she’s saying.
Happened across Michael Z Williamson elsewhere on the internets in a thread for an article with approximately this exact same call to exclusionary-by-race reading (at first, when I saw this, I thought… doesn’t Larry realize this is OLD?) and one of the commenters there proclaiming that she would never never never read any of the crap that he wrote.
I explained that if she wanted *something different* and if she wanted something that would *challenge her* and if she wanted to stretch her horizons in ways they hadn’t gone, if she valued diversity in her reading, and *even* if what she was looking for was superficial diversity in character’s ethnicities or orientations… the person she *ought* to read was Williamson.
But she was very certain that she didn’t WANT TO. Which was her right. None of us should spend precious time (or money) reading stuff that doesn’t interest us. But please don’t pretend that it’s about diversity.
Tempest wasn’t rage-quitting stories because they were too much LIKE her own experiences, but because they were different. So she went out trying to find stuff (as someone pointed out) with HER in it. Stuff that she wanted to read, that she liked, that made her comfortable with her ideas. Fine so far, really. Why not? And (as someone also pointed out) had she appended a list of recommendations, that would have been useful. For anyone, if they were looking for something they were *comfortable* with, as she was… or if they were looking for something different than what they usually read.
For a whole lot of people… reading something they don’t normally directly relate with would be reading Williamson… like that woman who swore she’d NEVER do so.
And may we ask just how many books you have read that go against your world view? Are you able to open your mind to other viewpoints, ideas, or stuff you don’t relate to?
Or are you sliding back into the old pre-liberal area where the sum total basis of a person’s merit was entirely based on their background?
Joe, you have to understand. They don’t mean that THEY should open their minds and seek about books that challenge their preconceived ideas.
That’s for the little people like us.
She’s just asking you to open your mind-
No, she isn’t.
Oh sorry, am I interrupting your script?
Doubleplusungood crimethink, Larry.
Amber has consigned Ms. Bradford’s actual text to the memory hole, therefor calling attention to the oldspeak is treasonous.
Amber,
Why are you incapable of accepting Bradford in her own words? She is not saying, in addition to your normal authors here are some underrepresented ones I think you will like. She is directly asking the reader to not read any books for one year based solely on the race, sex and sexual orientation of the author, period, full stop, end of sentence. Now how is exluding authors based on race and sex “opening your mind?” Isn’t it really closing it? Please acknowledge what she actually said (not the ridiculous re-write you came up with) and tell us why she shouldn’t be seen as a grotesque bigot.
Do a quick Ctrl-F search for “Amber” on this thread. She posted comments at 12:09 AM, 12:14 AM, 12:16 AM, and 12:18 AM of February 25th… and that’s it. No more comments. Classic drive-by commenter (not to mention a classic “skim until offended” pattern) who shoots off a few comments and leaves the thread, never to return. She’s been fully answered by the other people in this thread, and there’s no point in writing anything further to her as she’s never going to come back and interact with anyone’s responses.
That is, in part, because she can’t. We’ve addressed her comments in ways she’s unable to refute with any success.
Even if she were inclined to return, she’s been taken to school but is too intellectually dishonest to admit it outwardly, so instead she’s just stay away.
Why do the way her hands look matter?
Once a writer starts bringing up personal appearance, genetic heritage, and skin tone, it’s certainly fair to talk about her hands’ resemblance to someone else’s hands. Also, it’s funny.
Meanwhile, my icon picture clearly warns people that I’m an Irish bitch. 🙂
Yep. Read what you want. Write what you want. Don’t try and push your stuff by blocking or tearing down others.
Such a radical concept. Sigh.
The only time I “gave up” reading any sort of book from a publisher or person for a year was when I lived in Thailand and couldn’t get a hold of them.
Why limit your reading materials in such a way by stating the ethnic/sexual identity/political guidelines that you won’t consider reading? How will cutting off an avenue of potential enjoyment benefit you? Being widely read is a wonderful thing, and that includes reading stories by white, cis-males or whatever group gets your dander up.
I hate these people, if they can be called people. They seem absolutely determined to keep me from enjoying anything that I want to enjoy. This past year and a half have been dismal in video games, and I blame the SJW contingent almost entirely (as well as EA, but whatever). If they get into publishing in such a way that my favorite authors feel pressured to produce this bull, I don’t know what I will do.
You’ll do what they did in the Eastern Block, smuggle in things from Americ….oh…
We’ll smuggle in things from the former Eastern Bloc.
Companies from Eastern Europe and Russia have been quite busy developing new video games. The primary downside is that the Russian companies sometimes they tend to take a slightly… more positive… view of the Soviet end of things during the Cold War (unsurprising, given that it is ultimately themselves that they’re talking about).
I would expect Russians to be the heroes in the cold war… and Japan to be where all the aliens land… and Chinese film to have Japanese or English villains.
It’s part of the fun.
Aliens aside, Japan also tends to refight WW2 a lot in its fiction. There is a good chunk of popular opinion that sees themselves as the righteous victim of that conflict. One of the behavioral quirks that underlines the difference in relationship between Germany and its neighbors, as opposed to Tokyo.
For the Japanese, it’s a bit more. They have a real problem addressing the many atrocities that the Japanese Army committed during the war. I suspect that the majority of Japanese citizens aren’t aware that the Japanese were particularly worse than any of the other nations involved in that conflict. And given the surrounding nations still have scars from that conflict that were inflicted by the Japanese, coupled with the periodic attempts from China to guilt-trip the Japanese over what happened… it’s a real problem.
I personally suspect that atrocity in warfare is inversely proportional to material wealth in the nation committing the atrocity.
Have to disagree on that. I think it has more to do with who is on top right now. The West has evolved a set of morals that discourages atrocities. It also is where the wealth is primarily concentrated.
But if the West wasn’t at the top of the pile, then China might very well be. And, well… Tianenmen Square. Need I say more?
‘If they get into publishing in such a way that my favorite authors feel pressured to produce this bull, I don’t know what I will do.’
They’re already in publishing. They have been for a very long time.
If your favorite authors haven’t bowed to the pressure that the publishing establishment exerts on content creators to write PC dreck, chances are they’re either midlisters who’ve escaped notice (for now) or best sellers with enough clout to tell the SJWs where to shove their demands (like our host).
Take heart. Recent developments have put the power where it should’ve been all along–with the readers. You can support reader-oriented publishers like Baen, or indie authors who cut out the gatekeepers and sell stories directly to their audience. You can keep reading legacy authors who refuse to compromise their integrity.
The future’s looking bright.
Thank goodness for indie. We are fully at the point where I’m not even seriously considering submitting my books to the trad houses (aside from Baen, but they’re not big enough to take all the awesome things) nor am I considering joining the SFWA – what’s the point?
It’s not like I had any say in being born white or male, nor would I want to change my attraction for the ladies.
For people like Tempest that alone means I will be discounted out of hand, before they’ve read anything I’ve actually written.
Who knows? Maybe my writing does suck, (Heck, it’ll be my first novel. I fully expect it to be less good than the one I write next. I would be very cross were it be otherwise) but I would at least like the courtesy of my work being judged by the work, not the incidentals of my birth or genetics.
‘Thank goodness for indie.’
Hear, hear!
‘Maybe my writing does suck, (Heck, it’ll be my first novel. I fully expect it to be less good than the one I write next.’
A writer friend-of-a-friend once offered this sage advice to newbies: “You’ve got to get the suck out.”
By most accounts, draining the suck from one’s system means writing about a million practice words.
Excelsior!
Oh, Chris I imagine they have plenty of books on their bookshelves, because it seems to be pretty easy to find that type of author, the message author… But how many do they have that have been read till the cover comes off? How many are the second or third purchase of that book, because they went to a friend and said, “You have GOT to read this book!”, and then never got the book back? I see a lot of pristine books, read maybe once through, if that, on their shelves
As a white cis male (I’m not straight, though) I can safely say I’ve never given a damn about the race, gender, or sexuality of any writer. One of my favorite writers in the fantasy genre is Tanith Lee, a woman. One of my favorite writers in the action/thriller genre is Andy McNab, a guy who’s an ex-SAS soldier. Other writers I enjoy are everything in between, including some mongrel dairy farmer dude who writes about big guys with Saiga shotguns shooting vampites. Read what you like, not what social justice checkboxes it hits.
He also shoots vampires.
So… vampites…
Is that a tribe composed of hot, sexy women? Because I’d certainly hope that you’re *not* reading books about shooting them with Saiga shotguns!
I wouldn’t dare!
No. They’re vampires who take tiny bites. “I was nibbled to death by vampites.” You’re confusing them with vampettes, who are pocket size vamps.
I thought they were bite sized vampires.
nom nom nom nom nom — bet you can’t eat only one.
Especially when there’s hummus to dip them in.
Nah, the small-sized suffix would be -ette, as Sarah notes. -ite means tribe or nation, ex. Israelite. So a tribe of hot, sexy women.
Of course, I suppose that they might be vampires that take tiny bites masquerading as a tribe of hot, sexy women.
Of course, coincidentally, -ette also means female. Hmm…
Either way, they certainly do not deserve being Saiga’d in the chest and/or face. I’m not a bigot.
I am laughing so hard at this exchange right now!!! Pocket-sized tribe/nation/coven of smokin-hot female vampires that prefer to nibble and taste great with hummus!!!! Larry, this has to end up in an MHI novel somewhere!!!
I prefer french onion dip over humus… Oh! Hey! These are better than Doritos!
Hummus has garlic. I’m not sure other alliums would work.
“Vampite” is a portmanteau word that refers to nanites that cause vampirism in their hosts.
Whatever Vampites might be, they deserve our understanding, and we should make sure we check our non-Vampite priviledge and work towards the full inclusion and acceptance of Vampites in society. I propose that for 1 year, we shake off our subconciously Vampitephobic preconceptions and we avoid books by non-Vampite authors. Sound good?
Bravo Two Zero is a fantastic read.
Agreed! I also love his Nick Stone series. The poor man’s James Bond.
In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths.
Right, because it’s not like novels with overtly Christian messages are stuck in a tiny ghetto of the bookst–
Oh, wait.
And wow, the SFF shelves are just loaded with books that treat the Christian religion and religious people with respe–
Oh, wait.
This really, really irritates me. As a person of faith, I actually stopped reading SFF for a long time, because every other time I picked one up, I found that faith (and by extension, me) being denigrated, made fun of, and derided as some uneducated, backwards crutch that no one would “need” in the future.
I get enough people in the mainstream media telling me I’m ignorant and wrong for my beliefs. I don’t need it in the stuff I do for fun.
Intersectionalism is this simple: it reviles males, whites, heterosexuals, the West, and Christians.
(Nods)
I was going to comment on that, but you beat me to it. That ticked me off.
There’s almost nothing but non-Christian authors in the mainstream these days. The default setting for writers seems to be “atheist shading to agnostic.”
And, while I didn’t stop reading as a result, the potshots at organized religion taken by authors like Heinlein and Piper get annoying very quickly.
Fortunately, they don’t happen all the time, and the stories are good.
As a Christian myself, the problem I’ve found is that even Christian fiction is so over-the-top message-heavy that I’ve given up reading anything in that section of Amazon unless I’m looking to research a specific theological topic, at which point I’m not interested in the “fiction” side of religious writing. Its not hard to write a decent good-vs-evil book without beating me over the head with a Bible. Case in point: Larry Correia, who will never be found on the shelves at Lifeway based on his book covers alone. 🙂 Which is why I read Larry Correia.
Yes. I find it quite tiresome.
However, there are exceptions–Stephen Lawhead, for instance.
Occasionally he’ll bring out the Axe Handle of Message, but he uses it sparingly.
Except in Pendragon Cycle, in which he clubs you to death with it.
Didn’t read that one.
Heck, I’m agnostic, and among my favorite authors are Tolkien, Gemmell, Correia, Torgersen, Dalglish. I don’t seek out Christian fiction, but I’ve got no problem with fiction by Christians.
I won’t say I ever RAGEQUIT anything over it, but for a long time there seemed to be a heavy trend toward “In the future we’ll be beyond the foolishness of religious faith… and also eating meat.” It didn’t make me MAD it just made me think that the author was sort of stupid. It’s one (of many) reasons that I thought that Bujold and Weber were so great. The stories about Miles and Honor weren’t about religious faith, but religious faith and superstition exist in those worlds, because humans exist in those worlds.
And don’t forget: no more money, plus we’ll have group marriage! Gag.
Group marriages? This is one thing I’ve never quite understood. Why would I ever want to have more than one wife? Is there some secret about marriage that you only find out after the ring is on your finger that makes having more than one wife desirable? And what happens in a divorce? What if you and wife c want to divorce but wife a and b don’t want to divorce spouse c? Does that mean you have to divorce spouses a, b, & c to get rid of c? I mean, are all of the spouses of equal status and have equal rights? Who gets what stuff? And how do you split the spousal support? What about the kids?
Okay, I’m going to just back away from this rabbit hole because I’m actually starting to visualize group marriages as algebraic equations now…
What always bugged me, in the “threw me out of my suspension of disbelief” was when the future society didn’t have any Jews. I’m not Jewish myself, and I can see a future Christian church that looks mighty alien to us now (or so marginalized as to be story-wise, invisible, see also Japan), but no Jews? That’s a tribe that kept its culture and religion nearly unchanged from the Bronze age to the present:multiple millenia and in the face of often relentless coordinated efforts to expunge it. Unless you’re writing something like the Instrumentality of Cordwainer Smith or super-super-far-future like the Night Lands, there better be Jews, or I call B.S.
Bruce, I’ve said for years that the number of suicide bombers who are Islamic is directly tied to Muslim polygamy: the ones without wives are depressed and the ones with more than one are desperate to escape….. 😎
So clearly, they need spouse distribution.
And now that I think about it. I wonder if the “humans in the future will all be atheists” thing is another of the reasons that science fiction shrank and fantasy grew.
I think there might be something to that idea. It’s unfortunate that many lack an education in the contributions of religious people to science over the millennia *as part of their faith*.
Most of the SF dismissals of religion I’ve encontered are not there principled Athiesm of Russell etc, but rather the smug “I know better than you” playground taunt. Fantasy starts with the presumption that there is something supernatural, and while there are a lot of poor caricatures of religious orders, at least the idea of being a believer is prima facie possible.
Contrast that with Babylon 5. The episode The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place includes a scene with a black gospel group singing the titular song. It’s interspersed with a rather brutal unrelated murder happening elsewhere, but the fact that JMS wasn’t afraid to include modern day religions in his universe was unusual.
This calls out for Earth’s Dominant Belief System from a much earlier episode of the same show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hg_TRynRIs
And Gaiman wrote an episode for that show, too.
Heck, one of the alien races is named for him.
A huge number of my Christian friends who wouldn’t watch a lot of TV would watch Babylon 5 because JMS, though an athiest himself, never made them feel like he was mocking them.
A-bloody-men, sister.
Heh. I was reading a short in SciPhiJnl. Two instances of uncapitalized, singular “god”, then I got to some blither about “gender”. I removed the thumb from my eye and moved on to the next story. Now that’s eclectic editing!
Good point. Contrary to the opposition’s projections, we’re not an ideological monolith (the essay defending determinism in the Matrix trilogy is another example).
I’m an atheist, but some of my favorite authors are Christians of some variety, and I don’t mind including religion in my own stories in a non-negative light.
I hear you. Nothing makes me abandon a book, tv show, or movie faster than the ‘evil religious cult’ trope. Yes there is some truth in it, but it is so distorted and never presented with any balance to the 99% of folks who aren’t planning on murdering you because you think differently
I don’t mind the cult thing so much.
Provided they don’t make every religious person out there look like brainwashed cultists.
I think that Wen Spencer did about the best treatment of “evil religious cult” I’ve ever seen in fiction. There was the “evil religious cult”, the “hostile atheist government agent” good guy, the group of good guys with an old fashioned “profound faith and belief in God,” and the “don’t ask me, I’m Unitarian,” hero. And even the “evil cult” had members that ran from manipulative evil bastiches to earnest sorts faced with actual “demons” to fight.
Agree. I’m sick to death of the rather pedestrian and intellectually-challenged pro-atheist arguments, though these are most-often seen on YouTube, comment sections, and any Bill Mahr show, not as often in published novels. I’m fine with good writing, but a lack of understanding of human nature and human history in an attempt to make an anti-religious argument is just inexcusable in a writer. I enjoy reading all kinds of SF, which often, by its nature, must contradict something in the Bible. So do many Christian speculative writers’ works. It’s not the alternative fictional worlds that I have a problem with.
All hipsters are into Dr. Who. Seriously, let’s look at the picture here. She’s wearing a Dr. Who shirt and is wearing the hipster glasses. This is her cause of the minute, and is hilarious, because I am betting that she did nothing of the sort as far as this “reading challenge” she is bragging to have done. To be honest I’m thinking she needed a topic and this one sounded good.
Truthfully, as long as she can get her ego stroked and be patted on the back by the others in her dreadfully tiny circle (I mean, it must be tiny right? She clearly likes to exclude others) I’m sure that she has achieved her goal here.
**Disclaimer: Just because all hipsters like Dr. Who, it does not follow that all who like Dr. Who are hipsters…that stereotype would just be mean.
I look at it this way: most of us (who are not hipsters or SJWs) enjoy Doctor Who because, most of the time, it’s ripping good entertainment. If someone is enjoying it for SJW and/or hipster reasons…well, that’s their call, but they damn well better keep it out of MY enjoyment of Who! 😀
I honestly have never watched Dr. Who (the old, or new version), but that’s okay. I watch The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and both of those are enjoyed by a large hipster contingent as well…and my childhood hero, Wonder Woman has been taken over by them as well, and my love of bacon…but enjoying these things does not make us hipsters. I agree with you (hence the disclaimer)
Hipsters: the REAL culprits of “cultural appropriation”! 😀
Call me a heretic, but the appeal of Doctor Who escapes me. Never have really been able to get into that show; it just seems kind of silly.
Now the DW spinoff show “Torchwood,” on the other hand, I liked a lot. It was just as over-the-top as Doctor Who, but had a more serious, adult tone that seems to work for me.
Wes S: I speak for no one else, but I enjoyed 1960s-70s Dr. Who for the sheer unapologetic goofy low-budget pulp-adventure campiness of it all. But then, when Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, and Patrick Troughton played the character, it was just that–silly adventure-serial style cliffhanger stories about narrow escapes from the scenery-chewing Master, or the Daleks, who somehow manage to chew the scenery despite not having faces or more than a single (shrill, enraged) tone of voice.
Dr. Who in post-2005 version, so-called nuWho, is an obnoxious, unsympathetic, tiresomely politically correct fellow whom one wishes would get eaten by the Silurians. My admittedly limited viewing of the 21st Century version leaves me unenthusiastic and uninterested in seeking out any more.
To each his own, of course.
Growing up we didn’t have cable, so we had four channels that came in clear, and if we were really lucky sometimes we could get the PBS channel in from a city about 80 miles away. I was almost six years younger than my next youngest sibling…and in a lot of ways he was my best friend. I remember the trying to watch the snowy Dr. Who episodes our old black and white console TV that was put upstairs in our room when mom & dad bought that fancy color TV for the living room downstairs. Normally the audio was really clear, but the video was crap. That’s why I started watching the new Dr. Who. Now if only they’d bring back the Saturday Morning Science Fiction Theater…
Sadly they didn’t at the end of the Eleventh Doctor. The Twelfth is too new to notice yet, but there were some distinctly homophiliac stories at the end of the Eleventh (I think that’s why they had to kill off Amy and Rory, they were getting a bit too heterosexual for the writers to deal with).
no one important: ” Daleks, who somehow manage to chew the scenery despite not having faces or more than a single (shrill, enraged) tone of voice.”
Daleks are SJWs!
As someone who’s a fan of “classic” and “new” (thought since it’s been around a decade now, “revival” might be a better term) Who, who may or may not have roughly two hundred original Doctor Who audio dramas stacked up in his closet, I’ll just say I think all variations of the show have their charm, though it is an acquired taste.
And I don’t think it’s a taste only hipsters of SJW types can acquire.
It’s kind of like the way a mother hen loves an ugly chick. Despite it all, even the cheesiest episodes have something I can love.
Except for Dimensions in Time and Love & Monsters. They can both be locked away in a vault. 🙂
@frompennsyltucky and Wes S.
Ya this sketch pretty much sums up Dr. Who for me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew6aAEiyeyc
Which is what really bothered me in the last three seasons, with the sudden appearance of cross species homosexual characters in Doctor Who. It seemed so forced, like they were ticking off a SJW checkbox.
I challenge you to read books based upon what you think sounds awesome, and never give into the finger shaking scolds.
Can we give the finger shaking scolds the finger?
Gonna invoke my Black Irish privilege and give her four fingers, because that’s just how obnoxious she is.
I challenge Bradford to live in a black neighborhood for a year. Living in whitesville has obviously turned her into a racist.
Wonder which one of us would get along better in North Birmingham? Oh, wait. Already did that. I got along fine in North Birmingham. 🙂
I’ve been to some great parties up in favela Doña Marta. Trust me, they’d kick out a thing like Bradford in 2 seconds, skin or no skin.
I challenge Bradford to live in AFRICA for a year. Sub-Saharan. It would be amusing hearing her go ballistic about being called “white” all the time.
SJWs dote on Muslims and non-whites to the exact extent they refuse to live around large numbers of them. They love issuing challenges but won’t actually walk the walk. Meanwhile I’ve lived among more Muslims and what these jerk-offs call “people of color” than SJWs will ever dream of, and for that Bradford calls me an “MRA,” a men’s right’s activist, a thing I have absolutely no interest in.
Nothing new- Marxist have always professed to be for the interest of the Worker, while despising actual workers for more than a century and a half.
SJW’s have a made up idea of what “real” minorities, workers, and other are supposed to be. Contact with the actual tends to hurt their world view, so they dismiss them as not being the real thing.
I lived in a black neighborhood for 4 years. Prince georges county maryland is majority black. It wasnt a big deal. When i first moved in one of myneighborhoods said he doesnt see to many white people around here. Only comment I ever got. Really wasnt a big deal. I dont recall my neighbors crossing the street in fear when I had my hood up.
It really wasnt a big deal.
Some of the classic sci-fi and fantasy worlds were the creations of female authors. McCaffrey’s Pern. LeGuin’s Earthsea (which has even had multiple bad adaptations). The latter had a non-white protagonist (whose one true love – who he eventually shacked up with – was a white woman). Maybe Ms. SJW should stop for a moment and wonder what it means for her arguments if the people she’s whining in favor of are the ones who *used* to be popular. Maybe, just maybe, the consumer market long ago learned to not automatically read books written by straight, white, males?
I’m so damn tired of the bigotry and ignorance.
Such thin, dreary standards to fly, this obsession with skin and sex.
K. Tempest Bradford, you’re a bigot and a scold. The bigotry I might forgive…
The funny thing about posts like Bradford’s is SJW Twitter feeds boil like an anthill and one can gather enough hate speech to fill a truck.
I know, it’s repugnant.
I don’t know how you do it, man. My (low average) blood pressure would pop my brain if I mined that quagmire for long.
I respect you for it, I just don’t know how you do it.
I want the KKK out of SFF and it’s as simple as that. They not only have no business being in this great literary movement, they are a thing SF used to routinely warn against. If you ever wondered how hate speech was mainstreamed in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, wonder no more.
Cole you’ve been tearing Glyer a new one. You’re right of course. It’s just hate cloaked in fancy words and justifications. There is nothing complex about these people or hard to understand. Imagine a police force that never caught and prosecuted anyone but straight white males and you have social justice warriors and the racist feminist cult which powers them. How hard is it for these morons to look in their holding pens and see they keep catching the same fish?
Thanks. I’m sure Glyer’s perspective on the thread is different, but so far all I’ve seen are attempts to discredit with mockery and shifts to less pointed aspects.
The reason that is so is because Glyer’s target – like Bradford’s – is predetermined. Like I said, it’s like a police force that only ever catches people over 5 ft. 9 inches tall. Their report will have to jump through hoops of logic to make that reflect “reality.” You are reading such a report at Glyer’s. That’s how “privilege theory” works. It’s like a automatic targeting mechanism that always keep straight white men in the cross-hairs and pretends that’s a form of logic. In fact that form of rhetoric is typical of the kind of meticulously worked out persecution fantasies of people with mental health issues. People like Glyer, Hines, Scalzi and all the rest have adopted those logic trains for themselves. For some reason they never notice the roulette wheel always lands on 19 red.
I know, I’m not surprised. I just figure I’ll play through and see what develops.
T.L. and I were discussing this earlier. I’m not arguing my case against Glyer or the other commenters, I’m arguing it before the silent majority.
@Eamon: what you’re describing is a man who has no ammunition against your rational arguments, so he resorts to bullying.
Which is exactly where you want him. Calling Glyer, Gerrib, et al. on the carpet and making them explain their defense of Bradford has forced them to publicly endorse bigotry.
Like you said, the core issue is the racism and sexism that motivated Bradford’s challenge. Glyer & co. know that, hence their circumlocutions. Keeping them talking made their exposure inevitable.
Except for the terminally morally retarded, anyone who reads that comment thread will walk away knowing Bradford’s apologists excuse bigotry against “that one demographic”.
You’ve been tenacious too, Brian. Glyer should change the name of his blog to “The Black Hole of Logic.” You’re right too. Whether Glyer is aware of it or not, he is endorsing and defending naked bigotry. That speaks to the power hate speech has when it’s mainstreamed behind a phony facade of oppression. This cult thinks if they call everything “privilege” we’ll go belly up because the KKK now wears plaid. Most of the comments at Xojane are anti-racist in the true sense of the word. This is a new hate speech form of blogging that gets a lot of clicks but in the long term it is doing irreparable harm to women’s rights. These people forget that the entire world can see this shit and trust me, they are alarmed at what they are seeing in America.
“These people forget that the entire world can see this shit and trust me, they are alarmed at what they are seeing in America.”
Amen to that, and these bigots’ false claims of martyrdom. I trust you, and I trust my own eyes. People are hearing the wake up call.
If nothing else, an important lesson to take away from this clown funeral is to never piss off you or Cole.
The discussion is ongoing over there, for the interested.
Well, these folks thought they were going to take over a genre I invented, boot me out, and use racial slurs on the way out the door. Reality doesn’t work like that. I’m like Bugs Bunny at the bottom of his hole minding his own business. I’m not ragging anyone and everything’s cool. Suddenly the construction guy comes along and decides he’s going to put up new housing because I’m a racist, woman-hating, homophobe. This means war.
I’m not listening to these hysterical mental midgets and their stupid ’50s French ideology melded with the paranoia of women who hate heterosexuality and think all men are out to hamstring them, even to the point of cleverly constructing a language and Buck Rogers just to piss them off. These are people who belong in a lunatic asylum. For folks who say they dread the ’50s they seem to love the idea of living them all over again, and re-fighting every crime they imagine a white male heterosexual ever did. They call for boycotts like people did with Beatles records, they want video games keel-hauled just like happened to E.C. Comics with the Comics Code Authority. They want Frank Frazetta banned from the genre, and everyone from Heinlein to Howard placed in a hall of shame. They spit on truth, justice, and the American way while insisting on superheroes from an ideology that saws peoples heads off and puts it on the internet like my cousin does a casserole she just made. They’re using “privilege theory” to dismantle the Constitution from colleges to the NFL by re-inventing the Inquisition and racial segregation.
There is nothing noble about what SJWs are doing. They have constructed a one-sided race war out of whole cloth, successfully destroyed the Nebula Awards in the space of less than 5 years and the Hugos are about dead. They have gutted SFF’s core institutions like a fish while putting out new webzines like Uncanny where I marvel at how many names are in the line-up you’d usually see in a thing like the KKK. From sheer lack of principle, SJWs have successfully re-imagined David Duke and awarded more stinking racists awards nominations in the last two years than the entire history of the genre. And all of this is because they don’t understand how law or a strike zone works. And they think minds like that are going to write searching and perceptive SF? Pwahhahahah.
Let me re-arrange a quote:
“The Chamber of Culture must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions. The chambers could expel – or refuse to accept – members for ‘political unreliability,’ which meant that those who were even lukewarm… could be, and usually were, excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of a livelihood…”
The question becomes how many fake trigger warnings about Reichstag Fires, Sudetenlands, Mukdens and Gulf of Tonkins this hysterical group of rape-hoaxing, statistics-bending liars will employ to make us believe the world according to Audre Lorde must come about.
Where’s the original quote from?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Worse, Cat Rambo (next SFWA president?) links us to an article (also retweeted by current president Steven Gould) titled “The Perils of Reading While Female” wherein a woman literally destroys a Saul Bellow book she disapproves of and acknowledges understanding writers who “actively hate your entire gender.” That woman is daffy feminist Sadie Doyle. She sarcastically observes she is wrongly portrayed as “an identity-politics philistine who values gender-based axe-grinding above aesthetic or intellectual concerns.”
But she writes about “books by women that helped them to orient themselves within the maledominated canon or to form their own ideas of what ‘good writing’ looks like. Judith Butler comes up in more than one conversation, as does Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick—a book about ‘solving heterosexuality’ and the self-enforced oppression therein—and the work of Eileen Myles, of whom Marcus says: ‘I was diligently trying to find some brilliantly written prose that didn’t respect boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and that dealt with young queer women hanging around in cities and fucking up.’”
Anyone who mentions Judith Butler and then calls non-gender-ideological literature by men “sexist” “dudelit” is a moron. Doyle wrote a piece about George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. It is no coincidence she wrote “…imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.” That’s because “(white) men” and “(white) women” are too high profile and “people of color were mostly invisible” and “racism and sexism have been built into the genre ever since Tolkien” and that all equals badthink not-art. The idea that Tolkien and the genre which followed him is racist and sexist is as paranoid as asserting the same thing about Jonny Quest, and trust me – the PC do.
Does Doyle even have self-awareness? She adds more about the “right to create your own vision of what is best in the culture and to have that vision influence what books other people read and value.” All this gender bullshit isn’t coming out of nowhere. Doyle and the people promoting this are a “Chamber of Culture.”
“The discussion is ongoing over there, for the interested.”
You, sir, are a wrecking machine.
As for your gracious invitation, I already got exactly what I wanted out of Glyer and friends–just enough rope to hang themselves.
But if the exhibition’s still going on, I might stop by later to see how badly you’re thrashing them.
You’ll enjoy it.
Glyer essentially admits to a double standard, but it’s OK because he doesn’t think any of us white male authors are going to be pushed from the field…no matter how much Larry “abuses” Bradford.
Yes, he used that exact word.
I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Wow. That’s “abuse”. I’m guessing somebody lived life on the Easiest Difficulty Setting.
Their tiny little rabbit amygdalas can’t handle harsh language. 😀
I would think so.
And I don’t think it’s who Bradford and Glyer try to claim it is.
I’m trying to imagine a black person verbally abusing a member of the KKK. I can’t. That’s a legitimate free-fire zone there.
She must really HATE Doctor Who then…. You know, that horrible show written by that white cishet Steven Moffat…..
Oh hey… Larry noticed that too…. Perhaps I should read the whole fisk before commenting on it……….
She must have loved it when it was written by Gavies, er, Davies.
Sorry, was that intolerant? But that was a perfect example of agenda trumping story or character. It was more than obvious that Jack Harkness was Davies’ personal Marty Stu.
“After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous”
Judging from her credentials, she really should add “lowest-level” to “corporate drone.” Because she doesn’t appear qualified for anything but a clerk’s job. Or HR work, perhaps, double-checking the diversity quotas. Which is still a lot less horrendous than wading through cowshit at 3 a.m., or unloading rail cars by hand and such.
By “corporate drone”, she meant “Starbucks barrista”.
Mr. Knighton, that’s hardly fre. Starbucks barista at least actually serve me coffee, and as a consumer, that’s useful to me.
Which is why she couldn’t do it.
She’d be damned if she served the Patriarchy coffee!!!!!!!
The fact that it was all she was qualified for with her degree in “individual study” or whatever is completely irrelevant.
No matter how challenging corporate accounting could get, all I had to do was remind myself that at least I wasn’t arm deep in a cow. 🙂
Clearly having been arm deep in a cow gives an entirely different perspective on things. 😉
The best I can claim is having assisted someone *else* arm deep in a cow.
For me it was however boring warehouse work could get, at least it wasn’t working on the chicken farm.
Hey, now – some of us still get paid for being arm-deep in a cow, doctorate and all.
OK, to be fair, I gave it up in favor or small animal medicine about 6 years ago. And, on days like this, I stare out at the -25 wind chill and thank my lucky stars. There were days where arm-deep in a cow was the only way to prevent hypothermia.
My first to leave home called me to tell me how awesome it was to be a corporate drone… full time on a regular schedule after working as a cook for a year. I have thought before that someone who can’t stand to be a “drone” hasn’t actually tried “labor”. Maybe whatever is better than a “drone” is better… but “drone” is no where near the bottom.
Couldn’t agree more. I HATE reading all the comments from writers in my community about “Soul-sucking” jobs. EVERY job sucks at one point or another. Period. To claim otherwise is dishonest. You do what you have to in order to pay your bills. If you don’t like what you are doing, work toward another job that will provide what you need.
You know what? The first thing I look for in a job is the benefits so I can take care of my wife and kids. Heaven forbid I take care of myself instead of expecting the government (ACA anyone?) to take care of me.
I have thought before that someone who can’t stand to be a “drone” hasn’t actually tried “labor”.
Yeah, that right there.
With the exception of a few careers, most work is not fun. That’s why they have to pay you to show up.
She was very obviously a rich girl with rich friends, which is why her claiming that everyone ELSE lives a life of “privilege” is pretty damned funny.
I don’t check all the boxes on the EEOC form for the white power club or whatever. Larry, I know I mentioned it to you a while back. You’re one of the few who knows that particular part. I’m also ADHD and dyslexic, meaning I meet the definition of disabled (though not legally since I refuse to get a damn handout). I’m also working class and have been my whole life.
According to Bradford, I’m one of those who meet her requirements.
Tempest, do me a favor. DO NOT SPEND A FUCKING DIME ON MY BOOKS. I don’t want your damn money. If I were to find out, I’d donate all the money I get from you to the NRA on general principle.
When I was submitting to magazines, there wasn’t anywhere to announce whether I was gay, straight, hermaphrodite, or whatever. There was no way to determine I was male except by my email address that I used at the time. No way to determine I was white except to make assumptions based on my name.
They expected me to volunteer all the ways I could meet their “oppressed people” quota. I refused.
Buy and read books because they sound good, like Larry said. Do nothing else. I can’t speak for other writers, but I personally would rather people not read my books because of some “oppressed” label, but because they think they’ll be entertained.
If anyone reads my (hopefully future) books based on the fact I’m bisexual, likewise disabled, or even non-American, I’ll be sorely disappointed, because I’d rather people would enjoy the stories I have to tell and the worlds I painstakingly crafted. People like her are the bane of real creativity.
I think most of us feel that way, really.
We might meet her alleged “requirement”, but we’d rather succeed based on our ability rather than something so superficial.
Heck, I’m legally capable of checking off the “Native American” block. By line of male descent, I’m Iroquois enough to be legally recognized a member of the Iroquois Nation. Even been to pow-wows and sweat lodge.
And, for the most part, most of the people I met there don’t check off the block either.
We consider it unworthy, and a breach of the Way of the Warrior.
Yeah, people like her really just help detract from the value of the ones they supposedly support, in the end. Making their merit and contribution in the art seem shallow.
Well dang. I didn’t know you were an author T.L. I’ll go buy one of your books right now. Hopefully many more soon after that.
Viktor, let us know when you get some out there as well and I’ll buy some books from you too.
So strange to want to read books that are interesting and fun. Oh yeah, never forget the author GETS PAID of course!
Yep. I’ve got two short stories, a novelette, and a novel up on Amazon right now.
If you get them, let me know what you think. 😀
I should also note that Clamps things my stuff is awful, so you KNOW it’s got to be entertaining. 😀
You have a deal there!
SJW read Atlas Shrugged and thought Looter’s plan of guarantee politically acceptable plays and books being legally forced consumed by the subject of the country as a good idea. It’s not the content of the art that matters, only the politics of the ‘Artists’.
If it makes you feel better, you probably don’t meet her requirement, since you’re a race/gender/abilist-traitor.
Well, I’m still white, regardless of everything else, so that does make me automatically evil most times.
Am I the only one who reads these articles/fisks/comment sections, and uses it to add more books/authors to my already over-bloated Amazon wishlist? 🙂 I swear, Amazon has a server just for my wishlist. “Ooooo….SJW this this author is bigoted/racist/ciswhateverthatis/blahblahblah? They must be good!” “Oooooo…author with one or two books/short stories came here and publicly spoke out against SJW and didn’t rant/rave/misspell words? Gotta add them!”
…now to just find that winning lotto ticket so I can afford all of these books!
FWIW, mine are cheap.
Just sayin’. 😀
RabidAlien, you’re not alone at all. My backlog of books keeps getting longer. And longer.
Not that that’s a bad thing, just tough to find the time to read them all.
Hmm. Most of the books I read are from the fantasy/science fiction genre. Does that make me genreist?
Yes. Self confessed , the very worst sort at best.
Great idea. I’m not going to read any work by ignorant racists throughout all of eternity. Let the chips fall where they may because, unlike Bradford, I don’t assign an ideology to skin and sex. I do this funny thing where I use words. Meanwhile take John Scalzi’s advice and “bone up on the concept of intersectionality” so you too can turn into a clueless Orwellian KKK of straight man-hating racists dedicated to abolishing gender and the nuclear family as if it’s slavery. You can see how that’s helped SJWs so much when it comes to clarity of thought and anti-bigotry. What a bunch of loose screws. By SJW definitions the Nazis actually did have some important points to make.
“DON’T READ JEWS CUZ JUSTICE AND FREEDOM!”
I did not know about Steven Barnes’ skin color either. Has anyone informed Niven and Pournelle?!? If I’ve learned anything from the SJWs, it’s that white, cis male (and in at least Pournelle’s case, Christian) do not like to mingle with people who are not.
(Well, at least I think Niven is white, cis male. I have seen a picture of him once, but he does live in California where anything can happen. Everything I know about Pournelle I learned from his Chaos Manor site and I think I can be more certain of his evil oppressor status. Strangely, Pournelle has never mentioned any one of his co-author’s race, ethnicity, religious inclinations, etc that I can remember. Maybe he’s losing his ability to oppress in his advanced age.)
Steven Barnes is black? Now I gotta burn a bunch of books.— wait I’m not a bigot, I’ll just keep enjoying what he writes cause its entertaing.
That changes everything. Where can I go to have someone unremember it for me wholesale?
Philip K. Dick came SO close to imagining Brain Bleach! 😀
I actually saw a picture of Steve Barnes shortly after his second book was published. So I’ve known since at least then that he is black. Didn’t alter my enjoyment of his books in the slightest. I still like them. 🙂
Amusingly I read a bunch of white female authors when I was first starting. I think the Paradise, California library back in the 70”s had someone buying and then donating books to the children’s sections. There was a very good selection of young adult British editions of books. I read all of the Greenknowe books and many others from that library.
Frankly the color of the authors skin nor the sex of the author ever mattered to me. All I cared about was if the book was good I wanted to be able to find more books by that author.
Which is probably why the best marketing is still a friend running up to another friend shoving a book at them going “YOU’VE GOT TO READ THIS!” (The one on one version of a book bomb.)
I cheated, I met him in the 80’s.
When it comes to reading I do not care about the author’s sex. I do not care about the author’s skin color (both “warm beige” and “spun gold” are fine. 😉 ). I do not care about the author’s religion. I do not care about the author’s politics. I do not care about who the author likes to boink. I care about one thing and one thing only: the words on the page and whether they entertain (fiction) and/or inform (nonfiction) me.
Or in other words, you’re biased against non-ableist writers.
H8T3R!
Are we SURE those are photos of “K Tempest Bradford” ?? Or perhaps a cousin of CorreiaTech CFO Wendell ???
(evil grin)
Wendell ain’t gonna like this…
What did Wendell do to you to warrant such an insult?
Just saying, looks like a family resemblance. . . .
I think it was out of line and demand an apology for the entire species of the noble manatee. 😛
Miss Bradford is probably a mammal, though her calculated lack of warmth may suggest reptilian descent. That is where the likeness ends.
In contrast, Wendell is objectively so much more appealing that I can only call his adorableness ‘phenomulous’. On the empirical scale I’ve devised to measure cuteness, Wendell buries the needle at over 9,000 mega-Grovers.
Which would you rather have- a Wendell plushie, or a Princess Tempest plushie?
Obviously, a Wendell.
A Princess Tempest would make me too afraid to sleep.
Wendell would slap you with his flipper for suggesting such a thing.
Hmm. . . are we SURE there’s not a Tempest in Wendell’s coral reef ????
Mr Glass, for even suggesting such a thing you should count yourself lucky that Master Wendell does not horsewhip you. To even insinuate such a distasteful scenario is outside the bounds of propriety.
You sir, should be ashamed.
It could be worse- Wendell has CM’s cell number, your address, and CM understands Manatee perfectly.
Shh. Don’t mention the word between B and D. The world isn’t ready for him to show up again, not so soon. Last time he took out a whole neighborhood in seconds. Seconds!
Yeah, and they haven’t even finished clearing the bodies, much less start rebuilding my house. :/
You *do* know Wendell carries a Combat Wombat, right? I sincerely hope you were not aware of this when you posted the comparison, for your sake….Wendell *may* forgive you.
Side question: Larry, have you ever specced out the Combat Wombat, or is it more on the order of a “By the Power of Grayskull!!!!” weapon?
I think that we need to hear from Wendell on that. He may be very open minded. Heck, some of the models on the Hot Manatees Swimsuit Edition of S.I. appeared to be in wrestle in the same weight class as our colleague in science fiction, Bradford.
If female Manatees even remotely resemble Mrs. Tempest, the mystery as to why Manatees are endangered has be SOLVED.
Did you know that I did not realize that C. J. Cherryh was a lesbian or a woman for forever! Now that I know, I’m… going to keep buying her stuff because it’s entertaining. Damn that woman’s cismale white privilege!
That changes everything. Where can I go to have someone unremember it for me wholesale?
Now don’t be Dick-ish about this sort of thing, sir.
I see what you did there! >.>
I loved Demons at Rainbow Bridge, and from the initials had no idea what sex Cherryh was. I don’t think I found out she was a woman until it came up in conversation years later.
I didn’t find out until I was in an anthology with her.
I generally work on the theory that any author using the ‘initial(s) + surname’ formula is female, so I figured both Friedman (whose books I love) and Cherryh (none of whose books I can recall) were. I just never cared (and still don’t, TBH)
Well, I do it because “Tom Knighton” and his politics are all over the web, and I had this silly notion starting out that I’d want people to read my stuff and ignore my politics.
Then I realized the people who give a damn about that kind of thing aren’t likely to read books like mine anyways, and got over it. 😀
In high school I thought Andre Norton was male and A.E. van Vogt was female. Neither (mis)belief ever stopped me from reading them.
I didn’t know that C.S. Friedman was a woman until she came to a local convention. Her Coldfire trilogy was one of my favorites in high school.
I was also the same with C.J. Cherryh. The woman can tell a rip roaring good story.
And the thing is, no one who enjoyed their work gave a shit either way.
Cherryh I’d always figured was female. Which was rather odd, considering that the only thing we had was her initials.
I had no clue on C. S. Friedman, though. And given that her Coldfire protagonists were males, I don’t think they’d make the SJWs very happy.
I knew Cherryh and Friedman were women from day one, which would be Kesrith and In Conquest Born. The whole community knew it.
I had no idea C.S. Friedman is a woman until right now. I loved the Coldfire books, except maybe the ending. The first book in the trilogy is on my nightstand waiting patiently for me to read it again, actually. Weird how it didn’t matter.
Robin Hobb is a writer I really enjoy that I didn’t know was female until after the first trilogy I read. Weird how I read the rest of her books.
I’m sure there are plenty of good authors I’d be surprised to learn about their ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation, only I don’t care what it is as long as they keep writing good books.
For years, I thought Robin Hobb was a man and S.M. Stirling was a woman. Didn’t stop me from reading either one. Nor did I know Cherryh was a lesbian, Tracy Hickman was Mormon, Steven Barnes was black. And oddly, none of their writing is better or worse because of any of that.
I knew she was a woman, but had no idea she was a lesbian until I read the wikipedia entry on her (because I wanted to know if she was of Russian descent. She doesn’t seem to be–so I suppose that would make Rusalka and Goblin Mirror, what, cultural appropriation? Pffft.)
Now that I do know…I don’t care! She writes some of the best aliens there are, and her fantasy is pretty damn good too. I never picked up her books on account of gender or orientation, I picked them up because Michael Whelan does awesome book covers. (And then the blurb got me to buy them.)
Precisely my point. She keeps writing, I keep buying.
So she’s a commie too? Oh, lord.
@James May – Nothing in the Wikipedia article I read (nor her books) suggested that Cherryh had any communist leanings. Where did you get “she’s a commie” from? You appear to be mistaken.
C J Cherryh is a lesbian? Oh no, how will my fragile cismale heteropatriarchal identity cope with this crushing news?
Very easily, it turns out.
C.J. Cherryh is a talented writer who tells exciting, involving stories and has the ability to write about a wide variety of characters and viewpoints that are nothing like her.
You know, like an author of fiction is supposed to do. 🙂
Why in the world do the Tempests of the world want books where everyone and everything looks, thinks, talks, and acts exactly like them? That’s not reading. That’s masturbation. 😛
Masturbation is rape.
I think.
Damn, it’s really hard to keep all this shit straight.
T.L. Knighton — I believe masturbation would be considered “self-rape.” Unless you’re transgendered female. Then I think it’s considered male patriarchial oppression (if your male side oppresses your female one).
Or something – I can’t keep these genders straight.
Luckily, the easy thing to remember is that if you’re a white dude, you suck.
So enjoy that, Jim Hines. You’re in the boat with us, whether you like it or not.
You ever notice that pasty white Hines is the first guy to swoop in and “mansplain” what these crazy SJWs are *really* saying?
Like End Binary Gender Lady:
“I want to end binary gender!”
“Holy shit! She wants to end binary gender? What a nutball.”
“No, no, you horrible bigot. That’s not what she meant. She just wants people to see beyond such things and expand their minds and reading choices to be better people. Nobody wants to end binary gender.”
“No, I really want to end binary gender!”
“Shhh… I’m a soothing white man, trying to explain what you really meant to this horrible libertarian so you don’t make us look bad.”
Or this one:
“Don’t read books by white men!”
“Holy shit. She doesn’t want you to read books by white men?”
“No, no, you hateful bigots. That’s not what she meant. She just wants you to expand your horizons and try authors from other cultures.”
“I HATE WHITE PEOPLE!!!!”
I’m such a terrible bigot, the way I quote people, and use their actual words. Good thing we’ve got the White Knight to come in and explain away the crazy.
And saying not to read white men isn’t the same as burning books? Well, no shit. I didn’t say it was burning books. It was saying not to read somebody based upon their race and sex, and I pointed out that is stupidly racist.
Plus, you had the audacity to point out that it’s incredibly difficult to tell who is what these days. You apparently missed that the way this is supposed to work is that you’re supposed to go to approved sources for “suggested reading” lists that are put together by the right people.
Silly, cisgendered heteronormative fascist…thinking people should figure out what to read themselves, Tsk, tsk.
Hahaha. LC shifts perspectives in the way good SF writers do. SJW’s lack that ability. That’s where the gulf between us comes in. We see right and wrong. SJWs see race and gender. That’s it. For example, anyone who’s read MacFarlane and knows how much she’s into the Judith Butler “performative” thing knows she does in fact want to end the binary gender. She has a post on her site that imagines a world without men. The funny thing there is SJWs imagine we think of worlds without blacks and gays. They base that on principled expressions of old SF that concentrated on larger human failings and successes and so ripped out obvious cultural markers and defaulted to generic humans. To SJWs that translates into KKK. They’re that stupid.
C. J. Cherryh is a lesbian? You know, this would be so much easier if there was a checklist. That’s nothing though, compared to the upset of finding out that her name was “Cherry” and the impossible to figure out how to pronounce in order to gush about her books to all my friends thus making my life as a fan difficult “h” at the end was *made up*… now *that* was annoying. (Understandable, all told, but annoying.)
Once I realized David Cherry was her brother (after she praised him for his work on the covers for some editions of the CHANUR novels), I’ll admit to vast relief on finally knowing how to pronounce her name. 🙂
I had a boss once (he was a complete jerk, but anywho) that upon finding out one of his employees was a lesbian, when on to remark that he’d finally found common ground to connect with her on – they both liked chicks. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was told that she sprayed beer across the bar and nearly fell off the bar stool laughing so hard.
I knew she was a woman, though I didn’t find out for a few years after I started to read her books. I didn’t know she was a lesbian until last year. And I’ve been reading her stuff since the mid-1980s. Truth is, it never occurred to me to even speculate on her orientation or gender.
The librarian at my local library was a SF fan and recommended her books. I read them and discovered I just liked her books and now own at least 3/4ths of her sci-fi and much of her fantasy.
See? I think this is what Larry is talking about. 🙂
Known C.J. Cherryh since joining a writers’ group shortly after her first book was published in 1977. Carolyn is not a lesbian. Her marriage to Jane Fancher is a ‘writing partnership,’ she told me, and not a physical relationship. They are good friends, roommates, and edit each other’s work. Whatever makes them happy is fine with me.
The funny thing is I partitioned off some of my reading to read every iconic radical feminist from Simone de Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin to Charlotte Bunch. What I learned is they are virtually all insane lesbians. Then the racial addendum called intersectionalism came along about 25 years ago and has really gained steam in the last 4 years. So I read Rebecca Walker, bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw too. I learned they may not be racists but they sure as hell don’t like white men.
ATTENTION WRITERS:
Are you looking for more Social Justice brownie points? Have you been told your diverse cast of characters isn’t diverse enough? Worry no more! For the low, low monthly price of $—— you can join the Disadvantaged Minority of the Month Club. Our monthly newsletter will offer tips on including these disadvantaged minorities in your fiction without falling afoul of tokenism, cultural appropriation, or other crimethink. (In the interests of fairness, straight white cisgender males are not eligible for membership.)
…
Excerpts from last month’s issue:
A reader writes: “It’s incredibly difficult to say whether a character is asexual if they don’t explicitly define as asexual, for the simple reason that it is much easier to make an argument for the presence of attraction as opposed to the absence of attraction.”
Editor’s reply: “I want there to be more explicitly asexual characters.”
So, the characters go around announcing how uninterested in sex they are? Sounds . . . pointless.
Do Golden Age skiffy heroes count, if they were more interested in assembling a proper circuit from vacuum tubes to create a proper sine-wave signal to feed into the story’s MacGuffin?
Wanting asexual characters is just more Heinlein-hate.
You know, I’ve been reading a web serial where one of the characters does just that. It was a little annoying because it did feel like the author was pounding out some checklist. On the other hand, it also kind of worked because the character in question is a super inventor and (I believe) Issac Newton was asexual and quite proud of it.
Since it’s serial fiction, I don’t know what will come of the character’s disinterest in sex. Hopefully something. It seems like the author might be trying to set up some conflict because there’s another character that’s attracted to the sexless protagonist.
But, anyway, yeah. “Just announcing it” is one approach some authors take, and it’s quite possibly an example of how this sort of thing hurts an amateur writer.
… and how are we supposed to know that an AUTHOR is asexual? Seriously … that’s the sort of personal detail that very few writers would bother to mention on their bio pages, unless they were absolutely TROLLING for idiots like Bradford to put them on reading lists.
I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year
—-
Yeah, I won’t be doing that.
How dreary these people lives must be! All I care is that my book be entertaining.
I challenge you to stop reading K Tempest Bradford for a year. 😉
Well, I’ve managed for 41 years. I think I can manage for a little longer.
Hardly a challenge.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
I just figured out what I’m giving up for Lent….
Hey, I’ve won that challenge for half a century now! I’ve NEVER read anything by K. Tempest Bradford!
“Why I’m Not Watching Any Hollywood Movies Made By Jews For One Year” – by KKK Dude-Broad.
Reblogged this on The Worlds of Tarien Cole and commented:
You know what, I don’t even say people like K Tempest Bradford are allowed to be fans. Even though by her definition, I’m everything that’s wrong with sci-fi. Mind you, she grew up with infinitely more money, went to an elite university, and was able to mooch off rich friends when she discovered her degree program was pointless. While I served in the Navy 8 years to finance my own Masters degree, did 2 years of my life LITERALLY underwater in service to this ‘individual’s’ right to slag me off. And still work paycheck-to-paycheck with my wife. Like my parents did before me. And their parents.
Which one of us was ‘privileged’? Oh wait, me. Because ‘patriarchy.’ What. A. Joke. Why is it always people with every benefit in life telling the majority of working class families that THEY need to check their privilege. Sanctimonious doublespeak.
Why is it always people with every benefit in life telling the majority of working class families that THEY need to check their privilege.
Because the cure for ‘privilege’ is for the government to give masses of goodies to the non-‘privileged’ groups. And the goodies will go to those who are rich, educated, well-connected, and therefore know how to work the system. A creature like Bradford has no intention of, for instance, making black people in the inner cities better off. That would take away one of her self-proclaimed victim categories and reduce the number of things she can pretend to be oppressed for. The last thing she wants is for any help to go to people who are genuinely hurting.
Indeed. What’s more, it would take away a voting block from the Progressive Coalition. (Such as it coalesces around anything.) And they can’t have THAT. People thinking for themselves? *gasp*
Paging Miss Bradford: Cthulhu called and wants his insane chaos backs.
I am torn between being offended at the hypocrisy and amused by the total lack of self awareness Ms. Bradford demonstrated. I am a lifelong addict of the printed word, and can’t think of a single instance where an author’s gender/race/sexuality negatively impacted my decision to read something. In fact, I am always looking for grist for the mill, and the most sincere compliments I can pay a writer are rereading their work (sometimes multiple times) or buying their new work in hardback because I just can’t wait to read it. I’ll read a phonebook before I do without.
I suppose that I’ll re-read some of those stories about strong, intelligent, empowered women (Friday Jones, Maureen Smith, Hazel Stone, et al) or trans-women(Andrew Libby Long, Joan Smith) created by that militant, white, cis-gender libertarian R.A.H. four or five decades ago to get my social justice dose today… (yes, that old white man that wrote about transgender folks before the word existed)
I am very, very sorry but I can’t accept this challenge.
Because in my country we rarely see photos of authors on books I even don’t know how most of them look like. I don’t know (and care) about their gender, color, sexual orientation, social background or their opinions on politics, global warming, lesbian humpbacks or forced migration of lemmings oppressed for their darker fur.
I’m just reading books and judging them by words on their pages.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh KKKthulhu WisCon wgah’nagl fhtagn.
‘In His House at WisCon Dead-from-the-neck-up feminists wait dreaming, yet the neckbeardless shall rise and their cis-het-less kingdom shall cover the Earth.’
Um… are you a Cthuloid writer? I wonder how many of those Princess Tempest Teacup reads? Maybe you should suggest yourself.
he prefers the term “trans-mythos”.
I’m a Person of Tentacles myself. 😉
Dude! You’re really big in Japan.
I’m big in France, look to be doing okay in Germany, am a rock star in the Czech Republic, and fingers crossed to see how it goes in China pretty soon. 🙂
Larry’s big everywhere except possibly Brobdingag. 😉
Actually, you’re big.
I mean, I’m short, you’re…not. 😛
Everything’s big in Japan. It’s that gravitation warlock trans-flux thingy plus hideous mutations.
Japan: Nuked too much, or not enough?
he prefers the term “trans-mythos”.
Ok, that one got a real bark of laughter outta me in the office, glad my door was closed! Though my dog looked at me funny.
Back in 1942, I faced a conundrum.
I write short fiction, and I wanted to get better at writing it. To do that I had to write, write, and write some more. But just as important was reading, reading, and reading a lot more. And I tried. But every time I thought about delving into one of the many science fiction and fantasy magazines at my disposal, or even reading compilations of the “best” stories that had been nominated for and/or won awards, my brain resisted.
Because every time I tried to get through a magazine, I would come across stories that I didn’t enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I quit the issue. Go through enough of that, and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.
Then I thought: What if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by Aryans. I would especially stop reading stories by Jews.
Cutting that one demographic out of my reading list greatly improved my enjoyment of reading short stories. That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than I did previously.
Limiting myself in this way also made me aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues where only Jews or women made an appearance.
And pretty soon I didn’t even bother looking at those magazines when I went on my monthly search. When I ran out of known-to-me magazines, I went on the hunt and discovered several that published new-to-me writers and also a surprising number of magazines dedicated to Aryan voices.
I ended that year with a new understanding of what kind of fiction I enjoy most, what kind of writers are likely to write it, and how different the speculative fiction landscape looks when you adjust the parallax.
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could read only books by Aryan or only books by members of the white race. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by men only, books by only Europeans, books from the British Empire.
After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent superior physical specimens, or the extremely intelligent. Whichever focus you choose, it will change the way you read and the way you go about picking things to read.
When I settle in to read a magazine now, I read in order of stories I think I’ll like best. And if I do decide to read one author who appears to be an Aryan, it’s usually because I trust the editor and the magazine. My reading sessions are filled with much less stress these days.
A. Hitler
Member SFWA
Author, “The Lord of the Swastika”
That paper-hanging son of a bitch is hanging out at Xojane now.
Hee hee … like the reference. Among the funny things about it is that if he’d done that, he would have missed quite a lot of good science fiction, including EVERYTHING by Isaac Asimov, who was writing the Robot stories and was about to write the Foundation trilogy.
I laugh at the idea a really smart guy like Asimov who was a Jew writing in New York in the early ’40s imagined a Foundation future without ethnic groups because he was a white cis-het supremacist, which is what SJWs assert. He’d certainly experienced quotas trying to get into college and I’m pretty sure he knew about WW II cuz newspapers. SJWs are incredibly stupid people.
Ultimately (in one of the Foundation and Empire novels he wrote later) Asimov had an enclave of Jews living on Trantor. Which meant that the religion had endured for some twenty thousand years, outlasting even the memory of the Earth’s historicity and location.
Well, that’s news. To this day I was thinking that longest survived Diaspora described was in Chapterhouse: Dune.
Had a couple of encounters on the information superhighway with Tempest. Pretty much wrote her off as a nutter. Then someone actually pointed me to some of her websites and posts. Good lord… Makes you wonder how she can possibly enjoy anything since she’s always seeing life through such distorted and ugly lenses.
Okay, maybe I’m having an off day, but….
I actually feel bad for Tempest. Really, I mean it. In mid fisking, it hit me. This woman is totally joyless. It kind of made me sad to think about just how poisoned and twisted she has become. I guess that if you have no joy, no happiness, and no fun she feels forced to make as many people as miserable as she is in order to not be so alone in that dark, dank, and vile void that is her life.
I’ve never “check boxed” a single writer of any of the thousands of books I’ve read. Its either a good story where I look for more or “Meh…” shrug shoulders and ignore.
The saddest thing about Tempest is that she deserves every last bit of the mocking, has nobody to blame but herself, and will never, ever acknowledge that.
I agree: Bradford is a more mobile version of Clamps. She is to be pitied as a profoundly broken human being.
I check box writers all the time. I have a form printed on note cards that I fill out for every book I read.
Did I enjoy it? Do I still trust the writer? How was the pacing? Theme? Ideas? Craft? Did it have enough explosions? Would I read it again?
I refuse to read writers with the wrong boxes checked.
Seriously, I’m not organized enough or quite interested enough in record keeping to do this.
The simplest way to never read a book by someone of a particular demographic is never to read.
I read stuff on FFN. Being certain of writer demographic information there is simply unfeasible.
What a hateful bigot she is, a downright horrible human.
What this latest attack on Neil Gaiman along with the one from last week do is illustrate the level of self serving psychotic group mentality these pepople put forth. It easily illustrates that even as a liberal, social justice oriented writer eventually you will come under attack from these people.
Gaiman is your typical liberal poster boy. He’s pretty much a SJW, he goes to Africa with femminist icon Tori Amos to help the poor, writes liberal soft fantasy/scifi. Growing up he was the darling of every sjw type. You could not go to a goth club, Hot Topic, gamer crowd without seeing Sandman stuff. Every single alternative lifestyle type individual I grew up loved his stuff, including myself.
What did he do to piss off the militant wing? Simple, he got married to an opinionated strong woman. All the Gaiman hate started when he married Amanda Palmer(a femminst herself). If you look at his attackers, Tempest, and the other one they are calorie priveledged womyn who lost their dark haired, gothy, writer, dreamboy to a straight woman who has no problem expressing her sexuality and being proud of being a wife. It’s pure and simple jelous rage.
Correct. As soon as he married Palmer, despite her bleeding-heart liberal, the SJW types went full moon crazy. This has nothing to do with his writing and everything to do with the most petty, base and hateful human emotions.
Unless things are changed or I terribly misunderstood their own words, Amanda Palmer is bisexual or polyamorus and the two share an open marriage. That said, I have seen a great deal of nastiness directed her way by his fans, so I don’t doubt that the sentiment still applies.
I don’t keep up with them now as their political flavored posts went above my saturation level and I never counted myself a “superfan” of either, though I enjoy their work and even drew fan art of them once. Neil himself personally thanked me for it minutes later… before I even had time to work up the courage to contact him about it. Those who seem close enough to touch and willing to make the first move must attract a lot of fans who go rabid when the pretty illusion in their head is tarnished.
Part of the issue is that Palmer apparently shared a screenshot of a men’s website. Possibly boorish, possibly trolling. Don’t know, don’t care. Either way, she shared it.
Unsurprisingly, some of the women who say it wanted to shoot the men who run the site. Others called for castration. (It’s worth noting that NONE of the articles on the screenshot called for violence in any way, shape, or form).
Palmer, to her credit, said no. She believe the best way to handle it was to “smother” the guys with love.
And apparently, some thing the calls for murder and grievous assault on people was “reactive” violence, and that she’s against that.
Tell you what, princesses. You want to know the difference? You come here and try to castrate me, and I’ll illustrate exactly what reactive violence is.
They’re dwarfs attacking a giant for his very stature. And what’s driving them crazy is that the giant knows it, and doesn’t care.
I love how she tosses out that stat about more men being reviewed than women authors. What were the stats that year for submissions by male authors as opposed to female? Completely out of context, that statistic is meaningless.
These people are so insane. They demand equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity because they’ve been taught their whole lives that all they have to do to get the trophy is show up. When it turns out there’s actual work involved, effort, talent, skill, they demand the trophy anyway. And when they don’t get it they go completely bugnuts insane and claim that it’s all some conspiracy to keep them down. Tempest Honey, you’re the only one keeping you down. Sit down and write a story that people, real, regular people, will find entertaining. Believe it or not, most people in this country still respect a good work ethic. Most people in this country still respect honesty. Stop browbeating them with your dishonest rhetoric, put in the effort to really entertain them, and you won’t have to shriek about ‘privileged’ people getting a larger slice of the pie than you. You won’t have to try and convince people to stop reading those others in order to get them to read you.
They look at the outcome and automatically assume that it’s because of unequal opportunity, but they never really look at it. They’d much rather complain about how oppressed they are than to realize that they may actually be living on the easy setting these days.
Man, I guess I should stop doing research on American Military and Foreign Policy history. Because much of the writing on that topic that’s worth a damn was written by CIS white men.
Or, I could just go buy the next Honor Harrington that I haven’t read and continue with that. Because this person is insane.
The RAGE QUIT thing just sticks with me. I can only think of one book I ever read that I even came close to rage quitting. I can’t recall the name of it but the main character trusted his minor children with his older estranged son. After steam had previously threatens their well being. And continued to the display mental and emotional instability he left the younger children with his son and it blew my mind.I can only assume that the author had no children no experience with childcare. And I’ve never gone back to the book. Though I did take a moment to give it a one star on Amazon.
Now, see, there you go judging a book by … the book. Badthink, comrade!
Tempest must not be aware of the existence of Kindle. Virtually none of their books come with author photos, and quite a few don’t have bios. So how am I supposed to know the important facts about the Kindle authors?
I agree with Larry. I think Tempest is trying to guilt people out of buying Gaiman in hopes they’ll buy somebody else, her, perhaps. I don’t think her approach will work, but I could be wrong.
Her and Hurley and other members of the self-proclaimed les-posse are bitter that Gaiman showed up Seanan McGuire, one of their own.
Yeah, but so have a lot of other writers.
Larry Neil Gaiman Dr. Seuss Various people working at Hallmark The list goes on.
Larry, I knew you couldn’t resist this. Now get back to work.
Actually, I love your site, but I know you don’t get paid for it, and I know Purina Manatee Chow doesn’t come cheap.
I’m pretty sure Wendell does better on Manatee Science Diet. Because science!
Wendell lives on a strict diet of clubbed baby seals and liberal tears. But only if the club is made of old-growth Amazon trees harvested by indigenous pygme hot-babe vampiric nibblers, and served on a dining set stolen from various non-vegan restaurants.
Its actually pretty healthy.
When I was a kid first discovering the joys of sf and fantasy, I was so oblivious of authors that I didn’t even notice who wrote what, let alone the identity politics of the authors — I just read what I loved. Eventually I did start to take note, but there are still some books I’d love to re-read, but I can’t seem to track down because title and author quite completely zoomed past me, like the one about a young man helping build a space station. It wasn’t one of the Heinlein juveniles, and doesn’t seem to be one of Silverberg’s either (Silverberg’s _The Lost Race_ was my first chapter book, which my dad read to me one chapter a night before bedtime), but I remember to this day the incident where they were having trouble with the life-support systems and were sedating everybody who couldn’t offer some kind of suggestion for ways to deal with it. The protagonist figured out that if they put silver paint on one part of an atmosphere loop, it’d freeze the carbon dioxide and buy them enough time to get a more permanent fix together.
The closest thing I can think of is one of George O. Smith’s “Venus Equilateral” short stories, where an officious new manager had ordered the destruction of what he felt was entirely too much greenery aboard a space station without realizing that it was an integral part of the air recyling system. The station engineers rigged up a system to freeze the CO2 out of the air until they could get replacement plants from Earth.
The stories are more than half a century old, from the old Campbellian vacuum-tube tech days, but they’re wryly humorous and quite readable despite their age. Even if it wasn’t one of Smith’s stories you remembered, you might want to find an old copy of “The Complete Venus Equilateral”, which had them all collected.
Heh! Just bought a copy!
I love Amazon.
“Venus Equilateral” taught me what an Engineer should be!
You know what, now that I think about it she’s right. But, I challenge her to keep it real and go all the way. She should forgo everything created by evil hethero cis people of European descent. I suggest she starts with the internet, electricity, and the English language sparing us from her drivel.
Nah- she should start by giving up English, that most white and imperial of languages. Let Mz. Bradford explore the wonderful possibilities of going all Bantu in her daily life.
I’m wondering, and will never find out, and please don’t think I’m defending anything this fruit loop said/wrote/will say/write.
Maybe to her, the New York Times, is a right wing paper??
I’ll not be one researching her either. Just was a thought.
The t-shirt with Dr. Who is frak’n hilarious though.
To quote Larry,
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
It’s quite possible. I read once that Pelosi’s district thinks she’s conservative. And quite a few libs seem to think that the press is conservative (but not as conservative as Fox!), and hard on Obama.
Honestly, she might. With her psychotic streak, the New York Times may well be too right wing for her.
Doesn’t make it so, however.
Well, to be completely fair, a few of the Doctor’s companions have been non-white, both on TV and in the media spinoffs.
…and Romana was a Time Lord, and Kameleon was a robot, so they weren’t evan all human.
Turlough and Adric were also not human, though you had to look pretty human to manage as a companion.
Except for K-9.
Personally, what I think would be interesting and different would be an actual child, or an elderly person — would have to be spry of course.
Drat. I entirely forgot about K-9!
Mary: Big Finish Productions (which has been producing audio dramas using the cast and characters of Doctor Who for over 15 years) introduced my all time favorite Companion, Evelyn Smythe back in the year 2000. An elderly history teacher who helps the Sixth Doctor to mellow out. 🙂
(And, thanks to Moffat, the audio dramas are now totally canon. It warms the cockles of my geekish heart.)
There have always been plenty of child companions (children other than Susan, that is!) in the UK Doctor Who comics and annuals aimed at kids.
@junior: I’ve seen claims that people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others were “right wing” or “conservative”… O_o;;
I believe that there was a Cold War-era joke that went something like this:
Q: Why is Stalin a hero to the Poles?
A: Because he killed more communists than anybody.
Say what you will about Uncle Joe, he would have wasted no time putting the Social Justice Warriors to work doing something useful, such as mining uranium somewhere above the Arctic Circle.
This one was a jaw dropper to me. For real.
Oh yes. One SJW I know called the USSR “State capitalism.”
Never mind that that’s where communism always ends up…
“right wing” means “opposes them.” They’re still shilling Uncle Joe’s line that National SOCIALISM is right-wing.
“Right wing”, much like Fascism in Orwell’s day, has come to mean simply, “Something undesirable.”
Although if they’re calling Stalin right-wing, I guess that means they’re acknowledging him as a bad guy. That’s progress of a sort…
Everyone – except for Russians remembering when the rest of the world feared the USSR – admits these days that Stalin was a bad guy. The trick now is that they claim he twisted Lenin’s communism into a cult of personality dominated by himself. That way they segregate the bad stuff onto Stalin, and keep the supposed good stuff with Lenin and communism.
…and (what a coincidence) the people the SJWs hate are claimed to be just like Stalin!
How convenient! O_o;
oh well, americans. /facepalm
telling us about bad Stalin having TSA all around their backs
Actually, the Doctor isn’t HUMAN.
So who’s this Cargosquid asshole?
Having seen more than a couple of these screeds pop up recently, is there a literati version of Journolist or GamesJournoPros?
Wouldn’t need them in this case. Journolist-type groups are primarily so that you can ensure all of the members roll out with similar stories at the same time. When you’re writing for a periodical, this is important. If you aren’t in lockstep with everyone else, then you might end up waiting a week or a month before you can get an article out parroting what everyone else is saying. If your sole form of advocacy is via blogs, then you can write whatever you want, whenever you want. The fact that you posted an article 15 minutes ago doesn’t keep you from publishing another one.
She’s probably part of one or more communities that discuss what is “wrong” with Western society. But they don’t need to coordinate like the members of Journolist did.
Here is my pledge. I will not read a book by anyone who uses the term “cis” in a non-joking way. I’m excited about the coming expansion of my mind.
When writing about ancient Rome, I will use the term ‘Cisalpine Gaul’ in a non-joking way. I hope you’ll make an exception for that.
Are you going to talking about how much better Transalpine Gaul is? Without making a good case for it?
🙂
Are you going to talking about how much better Transalpine Gaul is?
Only in the French edition.
Memo to self: See if I can come up with a good idea for a serious chemistry short.
There actually is cis-lunar space.
Which means this side of the moon, and trans-lunar space is the other side.
What about geneticists who need to talk about “cis-regulatory elements”?
I don’t want to be That Guy here.
But she looks like a darker version of the albino from the Princess Bride.
Again, what did the albino do to you?
He didn’t tell me how to get into the six fingered man’s hidden lair.
That’s hardly sufficient reason to compare him to she-beast there.
An uglier, stupider, and much more abrasive version of Andre the Giant’s character…
https://twitter.com/jimchines/status/569941756063715328
Because you’re the people who claim a photo of white people is racism you fucking moron. If that’s the case with an accidental demographic, what would it be if I actually called for more reading of white men, which is exactly what you jerk-offs say we do anyway, and without a stick of proof to back it up?
SJWs are incredibly dense. They have no principles whatsoever. That literally have no means of comparing one thing to another. And Hines has done about as much to destroy the viability of his own genre than anyone.
Seriously, he’s right that “I challenge you to read non-white, non-male, non-straight” is not the same as “Book Burning!” (which I haven’t seen anyone saying), but… “not allowed to read men” is *exactly* what the challenge was, right? Or didn’t he read the article? I mean, it’s right there in the title FFS….
He’s assuming a radical feminist stance: that straight white men don’t read gay, non-white, women because they hate women, gays and blacks. He has absolutely no proof of such a thing – that is group libel. How in the hell do these morons account for a thing like the National Hockey League? Why do I even have to bring this up to an adult?
Second, he needs to address that to people who he can prove are actually doing what he asserts, not tens of millions of people.
Third: even an all-male all-white book display gets these people riled. How does that does that compare with actually saying “we’re going to have an all-male, all-white book display for a year because radical intersectional feminist ideology represents all black gay women.
My eyes are bleeding at the stupidity on display. This is breathtaking, it really is. How many more thousands of words must I present for people to understand this core group acts no differently from a KKK? They’re not in any kind of struggle. Book displays – reviews? Are you kidding me? Gendered misogynist english? These people are nuts.
Someone else already said it but I’ll say it again… telling people not to read white male authors for a year is pretty much… telling people not to read white male authors for a year.
Which just happens to be you, Jim Hines. White male author. You’re the problem. How do you sleep?
Because he knows no one will really do this? Or at least not people who love books, because if the next Jim Butcher comes out I am reading it. Period.
This kind of challenge would only work on people who don’t actually read a lot or at least don’t get really interested in books.
Hines ain’t Butcher. This is important.
Heh. That’s true enough!
She has been credentialed, but she missed an education along the way. That’s the biggest problem with these Intersectionalist SJW types (including Sarkesian of Gamergate fame): they spout the terms as markers of Goodthink. They refuse to believe that they are projecting the same nonsense they criticize so heavily, because….Goodthink!
I might want to read her books, but I cannot see any indication that they would be entertaining reads. Why would I want to read a book that isn’t even appealing to me, and is likely instead to attack everything I hold of value?
It never ceases to amaze me how utterly…adolescent…the Left truly is.
“RAGEQUIT?” In all caps, yet?
Did this person ever grow up or is she emotionally stuck at age twelve?
The all caps was actually Larry correcting her misspelling – “(anybody who ever played Call of Duty knows that word is spelled all caps)”; in the original article it was “rage-quit”.
Your point still stands… book/magazine & rage-quitting… to me, that would have to be one *REALLY* bad book (I can only think of one time in my life that it happened to me, and it really was immaturity on my part [I think I was 12ish]: when I re-read the same book as a senior in high-school I didn’t have anything close to the same reaction). The impression I get from her in this article makes me think she just has an unbelievable hair-trigger.
There’s the classic “book meets wall” meme. I’m sure everyone has had a “wow, this is really really dumb” experiences while reading. But rage? I don’t think that I’ve ever managed to get *enraged* while reading a stupid, wall meeting, book.
Of course not. It’s too easy to stop before getting to the point of rage.
Honestly, I don’t think she RAGEQUIT a damn thing. I think she read something she didn’t like, got miffed, and calls it rage. You’d think someone who claims to be a writer wouldn’t be so cavalier with words.
She’s obviously spent a couple decades boycotting ingredient labels, exercise and disciplined, rigorous, principled thought. I wonder how aware she is Xojane puts her out there precisely because she is a clown that will invite anger. It’s like a freak show at the carnival.
I did, one time, go into a full-blown book-meets-wall rage. It was an ostensibly non-fiction thing called “Black, Red, and Deadly.” BRD purported to be a study of mixed-race black/Amerinds in the old west, which I picked up because it sounded like interesting historical info and possible character research fodder. What I found when I started reading was pages and pages of racist intersectionalist claptrap that even the writer admitted he hadn’t done much actual research for. I’ve encountered hundreds of badly-written books, but that’s the only one I’ve ever actually tossed in a trash can rather than donate it to the FOL or trade it in at a local bookstore for something better.
I have BOREDOMQUIT many times, but can’t recall ever having RAGEQUIT.
I was probably hate reading by the time I finished ‘The Handmaids Tale’ because it was so politically annoying.
I didn’t ragequit though. I think I’ve only ever boredomquit.
Try reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a non-fiction book about French Queer Theory. Sometime after you run out of toothpicks to keep your eyes open you’ll develop narcolepsy.
Usually books that bore me (typically because they’re filled with stale rehashed talking points) get unceremoniously set aside and forgotten. I only “ragequit” Zinn, the same way, and for the same reason I ragequit “Pearl Harbor”.
I couldn’t ragequit Zinn, I *had* to finish it, for a class
I’ve disgustquit a few books, mostly over hitting a big chunk of “Hurrdurr, Christians/Middle Americans r teh stooopid”. Sorry, I don’t pay money to be badmouthed by a cretin. The only book I’ve ever actually tossed, though, was the third book in a technothriller series I had liked, when the author had felt obliged to completely alter the main character’s personality in order to insert an embarrassingly badly written d/s sex scene. It was like biting into a hamburger and hitting a lugnut.
The funniest thing about that to me is that she’s using a *GASP!!!!!* gamer term. I thought that gamers are amongst the ostracized by third wave feminists now?
I don’t have a problem if someone wants to promote what they feel are underrepresented, but she takes it a step further and suggests that people essentially boycott straight, white, male authors and deprive them of their livelihood. How does she see herself? She doesn’t seem very effective at promoting her point of view.
Right. And it’s different, too, than saying, “I have a hard time finding books I like but this worked for me to find more authors that I like. So don’t give up on reading. Instead go out there and search a bit to find something new.”
I mean… that’s the main message of, “If you gave up on science fiction, try Baen.” Try something you haven’t tried.
The new publishing paradigm allows for truly fringe markets to grow.
Actually looked up her stuff.
A dozen stories in a dozen years. Some editorials and editing work.
Except for the editing, that’s Monster Nation’s last, what, eighteen or nineteen months?
Poor little oppressed rich girl.
Let’s take up a collection of f***s to give about her.
No. My f***s are too important to waste on her. Now, I don’t even have a spare sh*t I might consider donating.
I’d donate, but I don’t have any.
Funny, she would ostensibly read me because by the Fauxcahontas Standard, I’m not white, I’m disabled, and stuff…
There’s quite a few of us here who fall into the category of people she thinks folks should read…
…and we’re not the people she wants folks to read.
She’s about as helpful to minority authors as Clamps is as a pro-woman anti-stalking advocate. /sarcasm
Naturally we’re not the people she wants folks to read. We write fun things. I’d tick a number of her required boxes (Asian, female, non-Christian) but I’m more focused on writing fun stories than navel-gazing race/gender/sex/sexuality centric stuff.
Also, I fully intended Sparrowind as a family-target-audience book, so sexuality for it would really be out of place. I’m still selling copies, which is a pleasant surprise considering I’ve had no
…*sighs at WordPress*
…chance to even think about promoting my novelette or any other books.
Just how that goes.
And no, none of us are what she would want to read.or want anyone else to read, probably because our characters don’t identify with a single superficial aspect of their lives as a primary driver of it.
*tongue in cheek* A nonhuman protagonist would theoretically be appealing to them, right? Because they think of humanity as a plague. =3
Probably not, because if there’s not a message they approve of, they’ll just say the non-human is a proxy for “white”.
Remember that they know the real reason we wrote what we wrote. It comes of copious amounts of English lit training that demands you find symbolism in various works…even if the author didn’t put any in there.
Haven’t seen it mentioned here but Andre Norton was the very first science fiction writer I ever read and I couldn’t have been more than nine back in 1964. I had to look it up but it was the Witch World series.
I didn’t know she was a woman until I was probably in my late 20’s. I don’t know that I’ve read all her stuff but probably pretty close. The other female writer I followed was Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books.
I’m thinking I’m not unusual here. So, if white male heterosexual readers don’t like women writers how did they succeed except by writing very appealing stories?
Gotta take it back…it was Star Guard…Mechs and Archs and Spider-silk armor. That book was in our 3rd grade library. First of thousands of sci-fi and fantasy reads….
“In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths”
I’ll be happy to send K. Tempest Bradford a reading list of orthodox Jewish writers.
I know about Michael Burstein, but that’s it. Would you please send me this list?
*wickedgrin* Gaiman identifies as ethnically Jewish (though not culturally or in terms of faith), if I am not mistaken. Enough to be included in an anthology called People of the Book, a collection of stories by Jewish authors.
I’d recommend Louis Cha’s old Wuxia novels but there’s no diversity – only Chinese, cuz Chinese are racists. Well there are Manchus, but they’re just to beat on. Anyway, they look just like the Chinese cuz micro aggressions.
Don’t forget to spay and neuter your civilization and then burn it to the ground. If you catch any patriarchy trying to escape – smash.
Shared. Highly amusing, despite the fact that this creature really halfway flsis itself. All Larry had to do was draw a diagram with the arrows connecting the dots. Gobsmacking that people, ANY people, think this way.
You made Twitchy, again!
http://twitchy.com/2015/02/23/correia-fisks-no-straight-cis-white-male-author-reading-challenge/
Reblogged this on Knights of the Geek Realm and commented:
This is the one of the problems with people who think being White automatically makes you a racist. I love the fact that Larry will take the time and knock them down a peg.
I can just imagine, me being a West Virginia boy, that if I wrote a post like this, I’d automatically be told I was a racist redneck.
Wow… I posted a simple concept over there in that thread. I pointed out that maybe the best reading challenge is simply finding things to read that are entertaining and or/informative, and that this was probably good enough since that’s what actually mattered. A women comes along and says that my proposal was be fine so long as I didn’t want any books that were thought provoking, exposed me to new ideas, challenged my assumptions, or built a richer understanding of our diverse world.
I pointed out that I put no qualifiers on my list of any kind, none about gender or race, when it came to finding works by writers that were entertaining and/or informative. I pointed out that it was somewhat amusing that seeing “entertaining and or/informative” apparently automatically translated to both “white male” and to being the opposite of being able to be thought provoking, exposing me to new ideas, challenging my assumptions, or building a richer understanding of our diverse world.
So now I’m some mean guy “punishing” poor Tempest. That’s one hell of a definition of punishing someone.
If you are incapable of being ‘thought provoking, exposing [others] to new ideas, challenging assumptions, or building a richer understanding of our diverse world’ and also being entertaining? You probably shouldn’t be writing books. And I definately won’t be reading you.
I’m fairly disappointed that Gaiman is okay with being Bradford’s prop for that nonsense. Make up your mind, Neil!
Maybe he’s thinking… cool… I’ll sell more books.
Hmm…. could be. I hope it’s pure pragmatism like that and not that he actually agrees with that BS.
I’m thinking it’s more that Gaiman has more important things to do this week than actually read what she wrote, so he did a quick skim and thought “Try new authors? Cool!”
Instead of “Never read anyone who thinks differently than you? ..lame.”
He may have had a few vinos if you know what I mean. What the hell is a “posterbook”?
I think that might have to do with his stance of defending the freedom of icky speech. He doesn’t necessarily agree (or disagree, or maybe cares at all) but Tempest-in-Teacup has the freedom to say what she wants, which, if I recall, Gaiman is big on.
Besides the fact that him acting the bigger person makes Tempest look like the shrill, hysterical scold that she is, I figure that it’ll net him more sales.
Btw, somewhat off topic I noticed that Gaiman’s the face of Amazon’s ‘make an audiobook’ section of advertising. Interesting, ne?
The word “epic” is unfortunately overused these days.
But this post . . . Larry, I do think this is epic.
According to my Amazon/Audible stock inflation program, I read 60 books last year. Today, I learned that Terry Pratchet is a guy. This challenge sounds like a lot of work for no good benefit.
See, this is what makes the attacks on Lovecraft so utterly bizarre.
Lovecraft literally grew up in a third world country. 1920s America didn’t even have penicillin, let alone a modern health infrastructure. The average American made less money in real terms than the average welfare recipient today. Heck, the average American made less in real terms than the average citizen of most modern Middle Eastern countries. America also had levels of income inequality that put today’s to shame…and Lovecraft died in poverty of a medical condition that he could have received treatment for today.
Both of Lovecraft’s parents were institutionalized, and then died. He was frequently ill. He suffered from various forms of mental illness, and suffered a nervous breakdown as a teenager. He was a high school dropout. He spent five years isolated in his parents’ house. He scrabbled in New York — supporting a sick wife whose family business had failed — for less money than the average day laborer makes today.
K. Tempest Bradford and John C. Wright actually have much more in common with each other than either has with Lovecraft.
What’s amusing is that one of those two would be horrified at the comparison…
…and I don’t think it’s John C. Wright.
I would think that someone hassling Gaiman would have to be a good writer. So A quick Wikipedia check later, and I read “Until Forgiveness Comes”. Well, to say she’s no Gaiman is like saying a match isn’t the sun. It also fails the made-up words test: http://xkcd.com/483/
The ‘made-up words test’ is pretty much bollocks, though, isn’t it? I mean, you’re perfectly free to think that any book with made-up words in it is no good. As for me, I may be no slan, but at least I grok the concept of tanstaafl. So I will sit here while the elanor is in bloom, munching my lembas, and I’ll thank you not to stick me with a gom jabbar while I wait for the Kwisatz Haderach.
Shiny!
It’s like everything else – it can be done well, or it can be done badly. As a strict test, yes the ‘made-up words test’ is pretty much bollocks. As a loose guideline to take care & try to do it well (Lewis Carroll & Tolkien are given explicit passes in the xkcd alt-text – and IMO you don’t have to aspire to their level to earn a pass) or just to avoid the issue by keeping made-up words to a minimum, I think it’s reasonable advice. Definitely better than the ‘Bechdel test’.
Ah the Bechdel test. Interesting how largely useless it is, especially if you test it on things like Romance novels.
I hadn’t actually thought about it with regards to my current work, but on a lark I just checked.
My main character is female, and as it happens the second character that pops up is female, and they’re talking about a mining accident. So I guess I pass in chapter one. Yay?
Granted, that tells you basically nothing about my book, nor is it an indication of it being sexist or not, so how useful the test actually is is marginal. Especially since that second character is a one scene wonder, and beyond her being roughly the same age as the protagonist nothing about the character’s background matters. She could just have easily been male, but I gave her the original name I gave the MC as a little joke for myself.
Bechdel test is self falsifying, if you squint and use both ideological extremes in your analysis.
To be authentic women, the characters have to be feminist, bluntly and without any ambiguity. Meaning that it is possible that every dialogue might have feminist subject matter.
Feminism effectively is talking about a man.
I once noted that the first Captain America movie passes the Bechdel Test. Specifically, it’s the brief exchange of code words between Peggy and the old woman running the storefront hiding the SSR base where Steve gets the treatment.
Conversation that only includes women? Check! (Steve’s standing passively in the background throughout, but doesn’t say a word)
Men are not discussed at all during the conversation? Check!
Heck, 70’s jigglefest & MST 3K fodder “Angel’s Revenge” passes the Bechdel test.
“…the first Captain America movie passes the Bechdel Test. Specifically, it’s the brief exchange of code words between Peggy and the old woman running the storefront… Conversation that only includes women? Check! …Men are not discussed at all during the conversation? Check!”
True, but I’ve read versions of the test which require that both female characters have to be named, which disqualifies that exchange.
To be fair, I have also read versions of the test which allow the topic of conversation to be a man if the man in question is not discussed in a romantic or potentially romantic context, or if any relationship with the man is non-romantic. Two sisters talking about taking care of their senile father would pass the Bechdel Test in this context, as would a female detective and a female medical examiner discussing how to catch a male criminal (good news for Rizzoli & Isles fans).
So the plot furthering conversations between Faye, Jane, Whisper, Hammer, and Lady Origami in the Grimnoir novels pass this arbitrary Social Justice test. Yay! I’m sure they’ll retract all the horrible things they say about me now. 🙂
Show of hands of those who think Tempest will be reading Sarah Hoyt anytime soon?
But Sarah is straight, and libertarian, and thus disqualified.
Probably further disqualified by Tempest’s ilk for being not just a mother, but a mother of sons, and refusing to write ‘Portuguese stories.’
“Maureen O’Danu cargosquid • 6 hours ago
Correia is a fierce defender of the status quo. The status quo differentially awards white, cis, male folks for equivalent work in a variety of fields more than it awards people who are not one or more of white, cis, and male. That makes him a defender of racism, sexism, and homophobia. It doesn’t matter whether he has friends or family that are not white, or that he has genetic markers of a heritage other than white. “Racism” is not hatred of individuals, it is support of a system that differentially rewards and punishes based on perception of race.
I have not read his work, because his personal writings indicate that no possible future that he would write in fiction would be one where his view of me and mine, and the vast majority of people in the world who are not white, cis males is not distorted.”
___________________________________________
Had to post this gem of a comment.
The complete and utter fail at self awareness in both paragraphs is just absolutely stunning!
That last paragraph is ………. I have no words…..
And I thought that gun control bigots were stupid…….
Wow. So we’ve already seem them take “Story first, message later,” and turn it into “No protagonists that aren’t white straight guys.”
Now “Read stories you like regardless of the author’s background,” becomes “Defending racism, sexism, etc.”
Frak me.
Which means they can’t deal with what was actually said and lie about it.
It’s more – “Because the book doesn’t emphasize Owen’s race every ten pages or so, we’re going to assume he’s white.”
Those racists.
😛
And somehow they think that circular black pit of logic is insightful. How much you want to bet she’s a goofy feminist with mental health issues. The entire bunch seems to feel they are under siege with irrational suspicions of white straight men that show them in the worst possible light.
For people interested in SF, they don’t seem to understand that if you extrapolate out Bradford’s world into one where her attitudes control a nation, you have something like Rwanda, not America. Extrapolate out an America with John Scalzi’s in control.
Extrapolate out my America and it’s live and let live. SJWs are extremely aggressive racial and sexual bigots with constant in-your-face collusions to do what they think everyone is doing to them but can never show: institutionally discriminate against great groups of people based on nothing more than race and sex-hatred. And their version of SF looks like the empty work of almost 25 years of really bad Tiptree Award winners.
‘Don’t exclude anyone based on race, sexuality, or gender, read what you like.’ – ‘You’re a bigot!’ Classic.
Yeah, MHI books, with their multi-cultural, interesting, conflicted and diverse casts are just SO DANG DISTORTED.
As in, Larry prefers to assume the best of people not like him. Even the government flunkies eventually turn out to have some vestige of decency.
The only exceptions are…villainous straight white males. HMMM!
One of the biggest assholes in the books, Agent Franks, turns out to be pretty dang cool, so yeah.
Here’s the thing. If people believing in monsters means there are more monsters and hastens the day when the Dread Old Ones return and wipe out all of humanity (one of the premises under which the MCB operates) then they are right to do whatever it takes to keep that knowledge secret, including discrediting, intimidating, or even killing those who attempt to “spread the word”. And so, while I can disagree with their approach (including their tendency to use metaphorical nukes when hand grenades will do), I can at least understand it.
thewriterinblack: Oh, I quite agree. In fact, I felt it made them even better antagonists, because now I knew that their motives and ideals actually were something they were willing and able to do ANYTHING to achieve and defend.
As opposed to your typical Evil Cisgendered Heteronormative White Male With Privilege(tm) who in Very Important Message Fiction is the antagonist merely by existing.
….BORRRRRING. 😛 🙂
One of my favorite characters to play/write in X-Men games is Henry Gyrich, for that very reason. Come right down to it, the man is right — superhumans are dangerous, and a lot of them are irresponsible jackasses.
What’s more, Correia has the people in charge of the whole charade being specifically recruited to the task, which means they can select for people dedicated to it.
Most urban fantasy keeps up the Masquerade, such that all the non-humans are hidden for us, without any adequate reason given, and those in charge of enforcing it are those who happened to be born into the Masquerade, with the usual variations of character.
Not all urban fantasy. Indeed, I think L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero’s Daughter trilogy develops the “disaster if people believe in magic” theme even better, though partly that’s because it’s a different point of view on it.
Wow. That’s bug nuts.
So, Larry Correia is probably not racist, and hasn’t ever actually done anything racist, and doesn’t come from a regular white bread American culture anyway, and has a dad who is darker than Al Sharpton, but he is racist, because he argues with statist trust fund babies who are actual racists. Plus he believes in merit, hard work, and loves America. And those things are evil because we say so, and thus he is racist. So I won’t read his stuff, because it might expose me to bad think. Because racist.
Don’t forget, Larry, that despite how they won’t read your stuff because they don’t want to be exposed to BadThink, the whole purpose of Bradford’s screed is to allegedly get us to expose ourselves to challenging ideas.
Or something.
I tend to tune people out when they’re preaching at me unless I’m sitting in a pew on Sunday morning.
You also like guns. That makes you a criminal and mass murderer in waiting on top of it all. Isn’t it grand?
Basically, “anyone who disagrees with a member of a minority whom I agree with is a racist.” So the commenter is robbing the word “racist” of any objective meaning.
They’ve been doing that for years at this point.
When I’m told that there’s racism and then there’s racism, I know the term has no meaning any longer. To me, that’s the worst crime imaginable. Real evil exists, and one of the forms it takes is in the form of racism. The fact that the trivialize it to just to score political points.
Yeaaaaaaaaah apparently all those things make us racist and sexist now.
Or in my case, ‘slaves of the patriarchy’ or something equally strange.
The only thing that gives me hope is that creatures like the one who posted that bilge are unlikely to reproduce, unless somehow they can manage to fission. . . .
They figure they can reprogram a host body like any other virus… and they count on people sending their kids to public school to be reprogrammed.
As a child, I used to make the same type arguments and counter points to justify my position, but with much fewer words. Namely….
“Because I said so”
and
“Nuh Uh”
“And I thought that gun control bigots were stupid…….”
I’m sure that the overlap on that Venn Diagram approaches unity.
I find this particularly ironic, given how “Sad Puppies” is all about shaking up the status quo and literally trying to get awards to people who wouldn’t otherwise be nominated for them.
Reblogged this on faalon and commented:
This is one of the most thoughtful, relevant answers to SJW that I’ve read. It really does tear back the skin and reveal the ugly underneath of the SJW movement; that they’re a bunch of truly racist, self-flagellating “people” who need to show you how you’re having fun wrong.
Very entertaining read. This type of guilt fed behavior is a serious point of hilarity for me in this country. The social system we adhere to when it comes to being PC is so pussified that every sub culture needs its own name and college scholarship with a free toaster included. On a personal note, Mr. Correia, please keep pissing people off! Also, I started reading the Monster Hunter books because the cover was badass. Cheers!
Just the first few sections of that was enough for me to know that the fisked article was going to be stupid, and that I was going to agree with Larry, so I decided to stop reading, leave this comment, and then go buy Trigger Warning.
You’ve just seen why it’s comments off, ban and delete for SJWs when it comes to their idea of debate. They operate from a base assumption SFF and American itself is controlled by immoral white men who occupy the same target territory as Jews do for neo-Nazis.
SJWs don’t go after actual individuals who do actual immoral acts but great groupings of people as if they are whites in a Jim Crow county. SJWs always talk about a “system” but can never point to it. Sure, stipulating all whites are guilty of what the worst of them do is a “system” if you’re paranoid mind works like that.
It’s pretty obvious SJWs don’t understand the basis for law or have any use for it. Take Bradford’s racial hostility and encase it in institutions (which she clearly does – See: safer-space) and you’d have a return to Jim Crow, not a moving away from it, and all done on the most spurious of reasoning. Why wouldn’t it be since it’s all based on intersectional hatred of men and whites.
Jim Hines Tweets about “an article challenging readers to move beyond straight white male authors” as if that in and of itself is an explanation. Well, it certainly is if you believe diabolical Jews control Hollywood and look at everyone else as an underclass of Fremen living in caves while Jews steal the spice.
The worst of this is SF is supposed to be gifted with principles that provide a warning tool of self-criticism by allowing us to step outside ourselves and look back at danger in order to see it more clearly. This is what happens when a cult ignores “white” SF like “The Pedestrian” and indulges in literature that is the exact opposite: identity scapegoating. No wonder the worst SJWs don’t like the Golden Age: it’s anti-oppression.
Lordy, i’ve been dealing with a migraine since 10:30 Sunday night. I got it to back off so, in the interests of trying to see her POV, I tried to read the linked article. About halfway thru it, I felt my neck muscles tensing again as I read the same sentence for the third time, trying to make sense of it. Headache returning. No thank you.
One can only laugh at the con game SFF’s racist feminist ideology hides behind. SJWs stipulate white straight men have created an atmosphere in SFF hostile to the emergence of gay, non-white and women’s voices. The problem is they can’t actually present any proof of that. There is no trend of quotes in the SFF community that would speak to that.
The SJW Orwellian solution to that is to simply present the imagined prominence of straight white voices as a de facto racial conspiracy. They do that to not only account for an accidentally skewed demographic, but on the assumption it’s obvious straight white men are misogynist homophobic racists. When SJWs in SFF wanted to present proof of racism at the Oscars they did nothing more than point out the membership of the Academy was over 90% white, as if that in and of itself constituted an indictment, because white=racism. The truth is there is no such formal Jim Crow-like structures at the Academy. To find that you only have to visit SJW institutions. It is not I recommending and supporting a year-long racial and sexual boycott, but SJWs themselves.
Meanwhile I have quote after quote after quote from SFWA members ranging from their top officers to the rank and file membership that conclusively shows an atmosphere hostile to men, whites and heterosexuals is not only completely acceptable but considered a necessary purge to account for meaningless unquantifiable words like “underrepresented” and “diversity” which have no set parameters as to what would be “representative” or considered an actual goal. In fact it is simply sheer irrational hostility and empty paranoia mainstreamed from the psychosis that is radical intersectional feminism and passed off as “anti-oppression.” As always, if the SFWA is looking for a conspiracy of collusion to discriminate, they have no further than themselves and the endless racist sexist quotes of their membership to look at.
The truth is there is a range of magazines that state right out in their mission statements and calls for writers that they prefer non-whites, women and gays. Some state right out they both read and review according to either a casual or strict policy of no men and no whites. That includes Lightspeed, TorDotCom, Apex, The Book Smugglers, WisCon, Clarkesworld, The Carl Brandon Society and many other organizations I could name.
The fact this wrong-way KKK of social justice can’t figure out they are by far the worst formal institutional racists and sexists in SFF is mind-boggling. SJWs have formal hard boundaries that segregate anthologies, web sites physical spaces and awards into the actual Jim Crow-like structures they claim to be against. By contrast, their “reactionary” “right-wing nutjobs” have no such institutions – none. Not one of these truth-to-power SJWs have mentioned that no less than 3 current TorDotCom bloggers left sympathetic comments at Requires Hate, the most racist blog in SFF history. Milo at Breitbart has an upcoming expose of Requires Hate. I hope it includes the revelation that RH is almost certainly a white Englishwoman.
And she’s complaining on Twitter that (1) we are so stupid not to understand what her article is really about and (2) we refuse to engage her arguments. Holy sharks, these people have broken minds.
What I love is how they’re now spinning her stinking racism as “a challenge to read more.” That’s like saying offering to not serve blacks for a year is a challenge to serve more whites. When she referred to a white woman on Twitter as a “cracka ass cracka” was that a challenge for that woman to examine her privilege? There is no proof – none – that blacks are underrepresented in SF, no more so than Irish Dancing. The interest these morons have in SF in minimal to non-existent, as anyone who’s read the new Nebula-nominated anti-white barely fantasy “The Devil in America” knows. These people aren’t exactly making it a secret what they’re obsession is and it ain’t SF. And can any of these idiot SJWs point to any SFF literature like “The Devil in America” obsessed with taking down blacks, women and gays? Nope. But in SJW-land, it’s an actual sub-genre.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what she means by cis male, so I have no way to avoid it.
97% of the time it means the same thing as “male”.
I’m pretty sure it’s more than that. Just how many men have eunuchized themselves? I doubt it’s anywhere near 3% of the male population.
The first I don’t know how many times I used the term “cis male” my husband thought I was joking.
It is derived from transsexual.
Cis and trans are prefixes that have opposite meaning in Latin and the sciences.
The naive conversion would have been cissexual, which wasn’t used because it could’ve also been understood as an attack on homosexuals. So, terms like cisgendered, cismale, and cisfemale are used for people who are not transsexuals.
Does this ranting bint actually produce a product aside from screeds that have all the charm of a Guantanamo Torturer dragging her nails down a chalkboard?
Ooh! I forgot a funny assed story from a convention a few years back…
I was at Fandomfest 2011 (worst con ever, for the record) and I was sitting in a room party bullshitting with this really cool dude. Someone yells out “Holy shit, Maurice. I didn’t know you were black!”
The cool dude sitting across from me replies “Naming my son Malcolm X. Broaddus didn’t clue you in?”
Random guy: “Yeah, but…”
Me: “You’re Maurice Broaddus?”
Cool dude: “Yep.”
Me: “Holy shit, you’re black!”
Laughter all around. We kept drinking.
There’s a somewhat amusing story about Mike Pondsmith from a while back. Similar punchline, but very different situation.
Mike Pondsmith is the owner of R. Talsorian Games, which once upon a time was known for classic pencil and paper RPGs like Cyberpunk and Mekton (technically, it still is; but the company has had a rough couple of decades…). So a guy who was an R. Talsorian fan was attending a Con and noticed that Mike Pondsmith was listed on the program, and was supposed to be delivering an address on some game-related topic at a particular time and place at the Con. So the guy went to the room, took a seat in the audience, and listened politely. And then about ten or fifteen minutes in, he raised his hand to ask a question.
“Isn’t Mike Pondsmith black?”
He is.
And the white guy who’d been addressing the room and claiming to be him left in embarrassment.
Whoopsie. LOL
Ooooh, PWNED. Hard!
What happened to the fake?
Dunno what happened to the fake. The guy telling the story ended it with the fake leaving the room.
The real question, imo, is how the fake got there in the first place. They would have had to have known that the real Mike Pondsmith wasn’t going to show up. That would mean that either he somehow intercepted the invitation (including if the con sent it to him by mistake; I once read about a college student who “accepted” an invite to lecture in China that had been mistakenly sent to him instead of an Econ Prof with the same name), or the convention actually was in on the whole thing and included him in order to have another recognizable name on the guest list (possibly after the real Mike Pondsmith declined).
I recall a similar story in Dragon magazine from Kim Mohan.
I can’t say anything. Not being involved in fandom, I though Terry Pratchet was a lady until yesterday.
I thought Tracy Hickman was a woman for _years_.
You too?
Well, when I was younger, I thought that – other than Stephen King – only women were writers. I don’t know why. I was 8, give me a break.
Well, I didn’t go to that extreme.
I knew about Tom Clancy too. 😀
I’m a lot younger than you.
Oh, rub it in.
Yep, young young youngity young…
Has anyone told you to die in a fire today? 😛
Yes, actually. It’s a strange and recurring pattern.
Can’t imagine why?
Me neither. Strangest damn thing.
Well, if I figure anything out, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Appreciated. You can send it via Twitter- you old folks know what that is, right? The thing with the funny little bird?
*raises his middle finger in a gesture of friendship*
You mean like this little bird?
Yep! 😀
Awesome! 😀
Talk about thread drift…
I seem to be pretty good at it.
We took a perfectly good Sad Puppies post and turned it into the Second Great Cookie Monster thread, so anything can happen at Larry’s.
Yet somehow the SJWs think that I have any control over what you people do? 😀
Yeah, running a blog with us here makes cat herding look like a relaxing past time for fun and profit.
Oh, wait, profit is bad.
Damn, I keep slipping up on this shit. Oh well. 😀
They get all the blood off your walls, yet?
Nah. They just knocked down the walls.
It was easier.
Yeah, I can see that. They were — saturated.
Not to mention, do they sell spackle in tubs large enough for all those bullet holes?
There was more space than drywall.
Really isn’t any point, considering.
Didn’t you say you always wanted an open concept house?
Actually, no. No I didn’t.
But I did want skylights, so at least there’s that.
Huh. Must’ve been me.
I tried to wrangle the mortar team, but — Pomeranians are both excitable and stubborn. Sorry about the roofline.
And the carpet.
Nah, it’s cool.
Roofs are SOOOOOO overrated anyways.
Yesterday’s Order of the Stick seems appropriate.
Shopkeeper, “Our business is going broke.”
Heroes rush into shop. “Weapons, now!”
Shopkeeper, “sure I have…”
H, “Those!”
SK, “That’ll be…”
H, “Money!” Heroes toss a whole bag of gold at the Shopkeep.
Tough golem bursts into the shop (through the wall) “I will kill you!”
Heroes stab golem, fight goes back outside.
Shopkeeper, “We can afford to fix the wall.”
SK Wife, looks at bad, “We can afford to retire and move to the topics,”
SK, “Let’s do that one.”
I’d do it. 😀
In my defense, ah… hmm.. nope, got nothing.
hehehw
You know, we probably had more fun reading/writing the Second Great Cookie Monster Thread than a lot on her side has had reading/writing anything in recent years.
Too many people in the world have had funectomies.
This is true.
I, for one, had an absolute blast with that thread. 😀
That should be the follow up art to The Seal Tetsubo.
Cookie Monster flanked by the Penguins of Madagascar with a grizzled old mutt with an eye-patch, and some birds holding bombs menaced by a cat-shaped mecha.
Shadowdancer?
Can you make it so??
‘Twas a good day.
Indeed, ’twas.