Sad Puppies maligned in the Guardian and New Yorker. It must be the voting deadline week!

I’m not going to bother to link to click bait. (seriously, googled my name for the last 24 hours to find the New Yorker article I’d been told about, and it barely made the first page, which is a pretty good indicator of how popular the New Yorker actually is)

It is more of the same old tired narrative. The Guardian interviewed N.K. Jemisin, where of course the Sad Puppies campaign was all about white men motivated by their white maleness. And the New Yorker interviewed Samuel Delany, where somehow they can interview an actual NAMBLA supporter and yet the most controversial thing talked about is me and Sad Puppies.

Since I’m really busy, here is the entirety of my Fisking of the pertinent bits, the New Yorker is in italics, and my super in depth response is in bold.

On the phone recently, I suggested to Delany that Asimov’s poor attempt at humor—which, whatever its intent, also served as a reminder, as Delany notes in “Racism and Science Fiction,” that his racial identity would forever be in the minds of his white peers, no matter the occasion—foreshadowed a more recent controversy, centered on a different set of sci-fi awards. In January, 2013, the novelist Larry Correia explained on his Web site how fans, by joining the World Science Fiction Society, could help nominate him for a Hugo Award, something that would, he wrote, “make literati snob’s [sic] heads explode.” Correia contrasted the “unabashed pulp action” of his books with “heavy handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears.” In a follow-up post, citing an old SPCA commercial about animal abuse, he used the tag “Sad Puppies”; what he later called “the Sad Puppies Hugo stacking campaign” has grown to become a real force in deciding who gets nominated for the Hugo Awards. The ensuing controversy has been described, by Jeet Heer in the New Republic, as “a cultural war over diversity,” since the Sad Puppies, in their pushback against perceived liberals and experimental writers, seem to favor the work of white men.

 

Diversity my ass. Last years winners were like a dozen white liberals and one Asian liberal and they hailed that as a huge win for diversity. 

 

Delany said he was dismayed by all this, but not surprised. “The context changes,” he told me, “but the rhetoric remains the same.”

 

Well, that’s a stupid conclusion. 

 

In the contemporary science-fiction scene, Delany’s race and sexuality do not set him apart as starkly as they once did. I suggested to him that it was particularly disappointing to see the kind of division represented by the Sad Puppies movement within a culture where marginalized people have often found acceptance. Delany countered that the current Hugo debacle has nothing to do with science fiction at all. “It’s socio-economic,” he said. In 1967, as the only black writer among the Nebula nominees, he didn’t represent the same kind of threat. But Delany believes that, as women and people of color start to have “economic heft,” there is a fear that what is “normal” will cease to enjoy the same position of power. “There are a lot of black women writers, and some of them are gay, and they are writing about their own historical moment, and the result is that white male writers find themselves wondering if this is a reverse kind of racism. But when it gets to fifty per cent,” he said, then “we can talk about that.” It has nothing to do with science fiction, he reiterated. “It has to do with the rest of society where science fiction exists.”

 

Really, nobody cares.

SJWs are the only people who seem to care what color an author is. Everybody else just wants to be entertained rather than beaten over the head with the cause of the day. If our secret goal was to keep publishing white and male we sure sucked at it.

Great. Micro Fisking complete. Sure, the Sad Puppy related parts of these are filled with nonsense and I could do a whole giant Fisk, but I’m tired of repeating myself. Now I’ve got to get back to work, because “economic heft” has nothing to do with winning snooty awards, and everything to do with producing work that people want to give you money for.

Fisking the Guardian's Latest Sad Puppy Article of the Week
Behind the scenes look at Special Project N

94 thoughts on “Sad Puppies maligned in the Guardian and New Yorker. It must be the voting deadline week!”

    1. However, in POSITIVE news, the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter shipped today. So I’ll just strap on my Portable Cheetah Butt and zip right past the blatherings on the Noo Porker and el Gruniad. . .

  1. “SJW’s always lie.” The New Yorker is an SJW publication.

    Quel surprise at the obvious lies in the article.

  2. Just when I think that the New Yorker couldn’t be LESS relevant, they pull crap like this. My expectations weren’t low enough!

  3. You have to love all the establishment media outlets who’ve been vigorously punching down at Sad Puppies all year long: Salon, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, etc. Because the left-wing media always sticks up for the little guy! Yup, Yupper. Yuppity yup yup.

    1. But the Sad Puppies are White males (except for the ones who aren’t but we don’t acknowledge those exist), and every good SJW knows that attacking White males is always “punching up.”

      (As a side note, can I just say how much I hate this idea of “directional punching”? It’s no more than an excuse for why those who dish out abuse shouldn’t have to take it in return.)

      1. A statement about “punching up” is a statement of personal superiority. It is only possible to make that statement if one is looking DOWN.

        If a person is not looking down on others… the punching is not directional. It’s just *punching*.

      2. Remember, in the cultural Marxist worldview, you are either oppressor or oppressed, and the moral authority to define right/wrong, up/down, etc., etc. belongs to, and only to, the oppressed.

  4. Funny, they want to talk about Delaney’s sexuality, but can’t be bothered to mention the five thousand pound elephant in the room.

  5. Almost forgot to mention, I already voted and the SJWs would’ve hated every click. They can suck it! 😀

    1. Nope all the Sad Puppies wanted you to do was vote for what you read and enjoyed. Did you do that?

      1. LOL, everything that I enjoyed reading is something they look down their noses on and hate. Nice try, though. 😀

        1. @Dave W. Pretty much, though I’m still trying to get through the novellas and Novellettes before tomorrow midnight, been voting as I go so at least part of my ballot will be filled out. MUST READ FASTER. I doubt they’d be happy with my analysis of the contenders any more than the votes that resulted from that analysis.

  6. The gall of this article pisses me the fuck off. Lord knows I don’t agree with Larry on a whole host of things, but your feelings of being treated like a pariah are totally and completely justified. What the fuck else are you supposed to feel? The idea that a child rape apologist is higher up on the moral high ground than a guy who wants to change gun laws is fucking insane. And over the last couple of weeks everyone seems to praising this guy to heaven?

    http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-conversation-with-samuel-r-delany.html

    One of the counselors I went to for help with my own abuse had also worked with offenders and I can tell you this: their outlook is the same as what Delany is giving in that article. I’m explicitly not saying he hurt anyone but the outlook is the exact fucking same. “No, kids really want this. It’s not harmful. I know because I have a special way of knowing what kids want. I’m giving extra rights to kids, you’re the one taking the, away.”

    I know that no one cares about male rape because it’s something no one wants to think about and it doesn’t give anyone a heroic chubby to imagine helping a male rape victim, but fuck this guy. I’m sure growing up gay and black wasn’t a walk in the park but you don’t get to turn around and advocate hurting defenseless people. You don’t get to do that. It’s not okay. Being a really good writer doesn’t make it okay. Nothing makes it okay.

    Can you even imagine for a second what would happen if he said this about female rape victims? The hypocrisy of this is insane. I don’t like unhelpful people who hover around tragedy to get a hero’s high off someone’s suffering but at least they’re a goddamn deterrent to this shit.

      1. That’s a completely healthy reaction. It’s hard stuff to look at and think about in its entirety. It makes me feel bad to talk about it, though less than it used to. It takes a lot of unpleasant work to be able to discuss it without it overshadowing your whole day or week. What I can’t stand is when the people who advocate against this shit keep overlooking it because of politics.

    1. “I know that no one cares about male rape because it’s something no one wants to think about and it doesn’t give anyone a heroic chubby to imagine helping a male rape victim”

      From some of the attitudes I’ve been exposed to over recent years, I suspect that it goes well beyond “not caring” and well into “gets them off”, with a healthy dose of “revenge/shoe’s on the other foot” for spice.

      1. Now that I’m less angry, I’d hope that isn’t true and I doubt it is for very many people (SFF seems to have a lot of individuals with mental health opportunities, so I’m sure there’s one or two who feel that way) as much as I think politics is a contributing reason people are choosing not to think about it. In my experience, when things like this happen, people burn every expendable calorie in every available neuron to not notice it because 1. it makes them feel sick to their stomach and 2. it’s a lot easier to keep on living your life if you can say “I didn’t know.”

        I’m probably out of place here in that I don’t care much about the Hugos but I’m just constantly stupefied by this because it’s so blatant and obvious and in-line with what people are talking about… why doesn’t anyone ever bring it up? Because of a statue of a rocketship?

    2. I made it through about a third of the interview at that link before I had to stop.

      At least I no longer need to worry that I’m taking Delany out of context and judging him by one remark he made in a speech twenty years ago. He really does believe that adult men should be having sex with really young boys.

  7. It fascinates me how they can talk ABOUT Sad Puppies without actually talking TO any Sad Puppies. Journalism is dead.

    1. They don’t need to do journalism. They already know all the facts. Just like Rolling Stone.

    2. I was telling Sarah Hoyt (last night) that of the four different left-wing journalists who actually contacted me, about Sad Puppies, so far as I know none of them took my suggestion to contact and talk to Sarah. My conclusion is that a strong female Puppy personality is not convenient to the narrative those reporters had in mind. Journalism has always been a little yellow around the edges. But these days they don’t even try to hide the bias. It’s yellow all the way through.

      1. Nothing so far has topped the Tea Party story where the media zoomed in to show someone in a blue shirt that brought his (AR-15, I think) to a rally…. but carefully kept zoomed in on the shirt, lest they reveal he was a black man happily attending and happily welcomed at a Tea Party rally.

        But you see a whole lot of it, overall.

  8. Jeet Heer is a nobody reviewer from the plains of Saskatchewan who’s made a name by being one of the first to savage Larry as a Real SF Journalist. Follow the money.

  9. Yep. Until about 30 seconds ago, I didn’t know Delany was black, nor did I care. It’s really pretty irrelevant, compared to the support for NAMBLA. Blah, blah, “not the color of their skin but the content of their character”, what? Oh, nevermind, whoever it was that said that sounds like some kid of total racist. [/sarc weight=’heavy’]

    1. If we’re judging content of character, the dude thinks little boys should be sexually active with adult men, so I’m going out on a limb and saying that’s a negative.

      1. Gay feminists routinely state children have a right to their own sexual “agency,” and that includes the right to decide their own gender, as last year’s Hugo nominee Foz Meadows (who has a baby) recently ranted about. I’m shuddering. Child protective services can’t protect from that. Core SFF has become nothing more than radical lesbian ideology central.

      2. “Judge me by my character?! I’ll be run out of town on a rail!!!” -probably why certain people use their skin color to excuse their actions.

        😉

      3. Yep. That’s pretty much where I was going with that. i.e.: “He’s scum, but it has fuck all to do with his skin pigmentation.”

    2. Yep, my response on reading he was black was “Wait, Delany’s black?” I think I heard it at some point before as well, but I completely forgot about it in comparison to the whole [at least supporting men who] rape children.

  10. I have followed every one of Larry’s posts–when did he EVER call it a ” stacking campaign”?

    1. I checked. I did use the term once facetiously three years ago. Yeah, if only I’d realized then that every flippant remark I’d ever made would come under great scrutiny from the national news media. 🙂

    2. 1st sentence in the post linked to ‘the Sad Puppies Hugo stacking campaign’.

      votes have been cast in each category I was able to read or view, sadly that’s fewer than I’d like in some and more in others. Although, this being my first time voting, more than one category had me asking, “there’s a category for that?…Why?”

      1. There’s a category for that because the people who show up at the Business Meeting like to give each other awards.

        On another subject: how do you turn on WordPress’s new, improved automatic identifier for comment posting? Their help file tells me to click on things that don’t appear to be in the page? Anybody whose actually done it recently that can help?

  11. I clicked through the “the Sad Puppies Hugo stacking campaign” link, and saw that it was about SP1 back in 2013. But the interesting thing there is that the Hugo voters beat your expectations in several categories: yes, they went for Redshirts in Best Novel, but Sanderson won Best Novella for “The Emperor’s Soul” (as we agree he should have), Seanan McGuire was beaten out for Best Novelette (by what I thought was the best of a rather weak field), and Stan Schmidt finally got his Hugo.

    1. It was interesting they picked a link from the campaign 3 years ago, when I was being completely facetious about the whole thing and it hadn’t actually made much impact yet.

      1. In all fairness, I’d say that’s one of the few forgivable things that journalists have done here. If you want to know about Sad Puppies, it’s pretty reasonable to go to the initial posts describing it to understand what the whole thing is about. If you knew nothing about the whole situation, it wouldn’t be obvious to you that things have changed immensely between SP1 and SP3. (Of course, it would have been better if they had just tried to call you.)

        1. Well, yes, but it gets tipped back into deliberately dishonest innuendo to omit mentioning that Larry recused himself this year.

  12. Weird that someone who as recently as, um, LAST YEAR stated that he believes a seven year old can have a consensual sexual relationship with an adult is being lauded and looked up to as a paragon of virtue and wisdom.

    1. And he had his first sexual experience at age six, and was sexually active since age nine.

    2. I knew he was gay given the whole fan of men-raping-boys thing (which to the best of my knowledge he has never actually denied or admitted to himself).

  13. My Two Cents’ Worth (You get what you pay for): I buy 2 dozen or so books each and every month (yes, I read like a dragonfly munches mosquitoes; the only reason I’m not buried under books is that a lot of them are ebooks these days, though certainly not all). Except for a VERY few authors I happen to have seen photographs of, I have no idea what color their skin is or what sex they are. I don’t care, either. I’m only interested in the quality and entertainment or scholarly value of the work.

  14. Reading Delany’s perverse rationalizations and the Morlocks’ justifications for their repeated libel shows similar levels of self-delusion at work.

  15. The genre has rejected the sexually confused Matriarchy, postcolonial gaze, cultural appropriation and black privilege of Delany and Jemisin.

    As we say in Norway – tough titty.

    #OnlyMyLifeMatters

  16. I honestly didn’t know Samuel Delany wasn’t wa white male. I don’t think I’ve ever cared what the author looked like, what race he was or anything else. if I liked his writing, I read it.

  17. Apparently there are a significant number of new Hugo voters this year. No matter your view of SP, this is good.

    1. My fantasy is that all of these new voters are actually puppets of the Chinese government who are registering just to vote for The Three-Body Problem, but I admit to having an overly-ironic sense of humor.

  18. Write more books, Larry! These gibbering moonbats can screech and preen to each other and hand out “prestigious” awards to one another all day. I guess you will have to make due with all the giant piles of money you get each time a new novel of yours lifts from my wallet.

    I vote with my pocket book, and make no apologies if I don’t like someones preachy crap.

      1. I simply treated it like any other year I’ve voted. Its the anti- side that wants me to make an exception to that this year.

  19. Just finished my 1st draft of the ballot. No Award has to go in as the bottom pick, or better to leave it unpicked?

    1. I left it unpicked, always, based on my understanding of how the voting works (which could be wrong, someone please correct me!).

      I *think* that no award is treated just like another candidate, so if two groups of people rank basically opposite, but with no award in the middle, then no award is even more likely to win and I would rather not see that happen.

    2. I think they let you make a partial ballots. I’m getting to the point where I’m going to have to not give some categories a vote because I haven’t gotten to the material. I’m *not* using “No Award” unless I read/review every entry in the category and find all of them so annoying that *none* of them get a vote.

      (If I simply don’t like any in a category, I’m simply leaving it blank. The nominees will have to work together to get a “No Award” from me. *evil grin*)

    3. Depends. If you want some works to win, leave the stuff you deem undeserving blank (partial ballots are allowed).
      Only use No Award at all if you want to burn the Hugos down.

    4. Thanks for the explanations, guys. I thought No Award was for stuff that sucked so badly you would rather see nothing win than it, and there were three works in that category for me (one of them actually was a Puppy suggestion…I’m sorry, but it stunk), but you all make good points that selecting it at all makes it more likely to win, which isn’t what I want. I’ll go back and unselect it.

      For the stuff I didn’t like, though, is leaving it blank good enough to register not liking it? It’s supposed to be the least disliked item that wins, right? I left things I hadn’t read blank, which I thought was better than giving them a 5.

    5. I THINK (I’m not certain, so if there’s someone who knows the rules, please chime in.) that there are some weird rules involving No Award, so you should only use it if you think something should go BELOW it on your ballot.

      1. My understanding is that two simple vote patterns can be:

        A: 1) Skin Game, 2) 3-Body Problem (3-6 Blank)
        Would mean: I think Skin Game should win; if it loses then 3-Body; after that I don’t care who wins

        Whereas B: 1) Skin Game, 2) 3-Body problem, 3) No Award
        Would mean that I’d rather see nobody win than anything other than what I nominated.

        There are two ways for No Award to have effect: either a) if No Award beats a title in the category outright (via the preference ballot tabulation), or b) if No award is ranked higher than the nominee on at least half the ballots (so theoretically, if everyone lists No Award second, it could get dropped initially in the count but still disqualify everything).

        You can No Award for any reason you like, but be very aware of what it means. If you just have read two and hadn’t read the others, fairer to choose option A. Note that if you have a situation where you read 3/5, and felt compelled to No Award one of the three, you’d have to list the other two above No Award if you didn’t want to count against them; not listed automatically counts below No Award *if* you explicitly vote No Award.

  20. Delany has one thing right – none of this is about SFF. This is about racial animus being pushed under an umbrella of “social justice.” The fact you find such a thing within SFF says more about weird obsessions and racial narcissism than the history of SFF. Delany’s goofball formula where the more non-whites enter SFF the more whites feel threatened is the same nonsensical fraud the entire cult has been selling from day one in order the raise their own profiles and justify their own bigotry. We’ve shown again and again that social justice crusaders are notoriously short on quotes and long on innuendoes and lies about the history of SFF. There has never been a concerted push back against any demographic within SFF. What there has been are people telling social justice types who sell unnecessary racial incitement and incitement to hate men to fuck off and find some other scapegoat. I’m not a whipping post for the delusions of Saladin Ahmed and Jemisin or the naive ramblings of a J. Scalzi or J. Hines who have decided to take up the cause of gay feminism because they have lived in provincial caves all their lives and know nothing about how the real world works.

    For example, one little known story is that amateur to professional basketball teams have existed around the world for a century and more. In Brazil, they never said “basketball is, alas, dominated by American blacks.” No one talked about globally “underrepresented” or “marginalized” voices in basketball. There was no need to socially engineer anything; the sport became popular on its own merits on a grass roots level, not by squawking and complaining about the dominance of blacks and America. The same thing happened with soccer as it spread from England to S. America. That’s how culture works. No one controls it and it’s not a conspiracy. People either buy and write SFF overseas or they don’t. If America dominates a scene they created, so what? Tough shit. A dominant talent pool isn’t the same thing as exclusion. The only thing “excluding” the U. K. from winning the World Cup of soccer they helped promote is their own talent, not racist Brazilians and Anglophone hating Italians, or cultural appropriation.

    Considering how interested SJWs say they are in global culture, they are morbidly naive about how it works and what’s been going on around the world.

    1. You’ve just illustrated why “cultural appropriation” is sheerest bullshit. If it weren’t, the SJW should be screaming about how S.American basketball is “appropriating” USAian culture. Geese, ganders…

    1. SF hasn’t been hijacked by a “conspiracy” but by a consensus of dunces arriving to put out a fire that never took place using the eccentric method of racial incitement and imagining all of human civilization for the last 7 thousand years is sexually broken.

      What I like about lard cans like Roberts is he makes up quotes out of his head about SP and then quotes other lard cans who’ve made stuff up out of their heads. The short version is The Guardian got screwed out of another $25.

  21. Not surprising. SJWs (and the media) are dominated by thinking that Arnold Kling described as “folk Marxism”: http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/01/folk-beliefs-have-consequences.html

    Most aren’t even aware of it, because it is the water in which they swim.

    I, on the other hand, have no trouble admitting that I am a “folk Lockean”, but then (1) I’m aware that is my underlying belief system, and (2) I can marshal coherent arguments, with examples, in favor of my beliefs. I don’t simply think that they are a description of observable reality. SJWs seem to think their beliefs do.

  22. I found the New Yorker article. I read the New Yorker article. I almost barfed all over my keyboard at the descritpiton of Delany’s most recent book. THAT is what they are putting forth as the “best and most avante garde” in science-fiction these days?

    Seriously?

    And the article doesn’t even question it…

    BTW, anyone else notice that New Yorker doesn’t allow Commenting on it’s articles?

    1. “If you doubt me, research “age of consent” “Twinks,” “ageism” and the writings of the NUMEROUS authors on the Left who believe that early sexuality is somehow “beneficial” for children.

      What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial, and the sure knowledge (don’t think for a second that they DON’T know) that the only way to produce another homosexual is to provide a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be “ruined” by attraction to a girl.

      Naturally my perspective is very uncomfortable to the liberal people I was raised with: I am “allowed” to be a victim of molestation by both parents, and “allowed” to be a victim of rather hideous violence. I am, incredibly, NOT ALLOWED to blame their homosexuality for their absolute willingness to accept all sex at all times between all people.”

  23. “Delany notes in “Racism and Science Fiction,” that his racial identity would forever be in the minds of his white peers, no matter the occasion.”

    I’m not gonna speculate about if this is true or not, but it is very clear that Delany and other writers like him are very aware of their own racial identity and the racial identity of their white peers.

    The whole reason why so many fantasy and science fiction novels written these days deals with multiculturalism is because the writers are obsessed about race.

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/27/nk-jemisin-interview-fantasy-science-fiction-writing-racism-sexism

    GUardian: “Jemisin’s celebrated fantasy novels are about multicultural, complex worlds that stand out in a field that has been traditionally dominated by white men”

    Is that a crime? But why do these celebrated novels stand out? Is it because they are about multicultural and complex worlds? Because there are white male fantasy writers who writes about these things too.

    Jemisin: “I don’t really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded.”

    Jemisin: “It’s human nature that we come in our own flavours,” fantasy author NK Jemisin tells the Guardian, “and it doesn’t make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story, unless you’re doing something extremely small – a locked room-style story. But very few fantasy worlds ever do that. In fact, epic fantasy should not do that.”

    But some fantasy novels do take place in a specific area and specific time. In a pre-industrial setting, it is only natural that the population in these areas are all the same ethnicity, no matter if they are white or black or everything in between. Multicultural settings in this context only works in juvenile fiction.

    And please, don’t say that “epic fantasy should not do that”. Telling other what a genre should and should not be about is an attempt to restrict it, not liberate it.
    If you are white and have grown up in a western nation, it is only natural that you write about what you feel conntected to, even if there are exceptions. Just as it is natural that someone who lives in other societies and is of other ethnic origin to write about what they themselves feels most cofortable with. Or if you want to write about dozens of races, feel free to do so, but don’t tell others what to do and not.

    In society in general, there was less equality between the genders in the old days than it is today. And yet how often did those females who write horror, fantasy and sci-fi back then complained about literary discriminations in interviews or in their stories? It gives the impression that the more liberated you get, the more you complain. Luckily it is not like that for most people, but it is those who whine the loudest you hear most often.
    But what so many dislike is not their race, gender or orientation, it’s their attitude, behavior and what they claim in interviews.

    The idea of making a pre-indistrial society a multicultural melting pot in the same degree we see in our modern world (to make it reflect the real world, even if fantasy is often used to escape the real world for some time), would have some logical consequnces. Unless we are talking about not only different races, but various species so different from humans that they can not produce fertile offspring with one another, which would take away much of the whole point about the multiethnic setting, the population will sooner or later mix and the racial differences gradually cease to exist.

    Therefore it is only two possible scenarios:

    1. The country/society has just recently become multicultural, and therefore the new situation gives birth to a lot of resistance in the original population. Or several races discover a new continent or huge island simultaneously and they all want to it for themselves.

    2. It has been a multicultural society for a long but, but the races does not mix because of a segregation politics that has been kept alive during several generations and maintained with an iron fist.

    In both examples, the muticultural elements can not be ignored if you want to justify the setting. Because what would be the reason to invent an etnhical and cultural melting pot for your story, or introduce us to some sort of ethnical dysoptia were all races are allowed to coexist but not mix, if it is not an essential part of the plot?

    If you want to write fantasy with any of these racial concepts, were ethnical conflicts plays a major role, it makes sense to introduce them.

    But what if you want to add some diversity to the genre itself, instead of just the characters and people population the stories, and write a story that focus on another kind of conflict? How much sense would it then make to outline a society of the kind Jemisin prefer to use in her writings? It would be like introducing a large population of malevolent dragons terrorizing the villages in your story, for no particular reason other than “every fantasy must have dragons”, and then completely excluding the dragons from the major plot.

    Of course that wouldn’t work. You would have to write about how it would really be in an old pre-industrial society; a society dominated by a specific ethnicity with occasional visitors and representatives for other races. But not a melting pot with dozens of cultures and races living side by side. Unless, as already mentioned, we are talking about humanoid species instead of races, too different to mix genetically.

    Obviously it wouldn’t prevent you from introducing various races and cultures. All you have to do is to make your world large enough, located in different regions and continents. Which is exactly what writers of all races and genders do. But cramming it all into the same limited time and place does not add credibility to your world, even if it’s fantasy.

    It’s all a matter of how big your fantasy world is, where it takes place and what you want to write about. Which is a decision that should not be dictated by writers who thinks all fantasy should be about cultural and racial diversity.

  24. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars

    Seeing how media and writers are using a fan award as a tool for their own PC-agenda is sad.

    “The virtual absence of non-white writing in the field was paralleled by the near invisibility of women writers. For many decades, the most successful female writers had to cloak their identity with initials, ambiguous names, or pseudonyms (C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, James Tiptree, Jr.).”
    ***

    Maybe some of them assumed that they had to pretend to be guys to be popular. Just as J.K. Rowling did. And did the reveal that she was a female result in a decline in the Harry Potter sales? And despite what is claimed, the gender identity of at least some of the female writers, even if writing under a name that could be both male and female, was well known amongst the readers almost from the start. It’s not like the magazines tried to keep it a big and dirty secret.

    “Even the women writers who didn’t disguise themselves as men adopted a male point of view in order to get their fiction published. “Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a Paris Review interview. “The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.”
    ***

    I would like to see some evidence on such a claim, that in order to be published they had to adopt a male point of view. Considering the majority of the stories were written by males, the writing style would be naturally be dominated by males. But does that mean the publishers and editors were not open to any other style? If have never heard about anyone being rejected for that reason. Nobody forced Ursula K. Le Guin to adopt the same writing style and the “male rules” they claim existed back then. She was the one who decided to “write like a man” because she believed she had to, but did she ever challenge that assumption. I also find it weird that (unnamed) female writers who refused to follow those rules were “too revolutionary” to be heard about. It’s a pretty cheap argument. If writers in the genre were truly revolutionary and broke all the rules, shouldn’t that on the contrary attract some attention instead of avoiding it? Or maybe she and others never heard about them back then, and have never heard about them since, is because they never existed. On the other hand, if they did exist, it would be interesting to hear some names.

    1. It goes both ways too. Dean Koontz wrote as Leigh Nichols because it could be mistaken for a male or female name, before he got famous as himself.

      1. Seems like they all have their own reasons to protect their real gender when writing under various pseudonyms. James Tiptree, Jr. says she did it so she could be more anonymous amongst the other science fiction writers.

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