The Guardian’s Village Idiot Declares Another Career Ruined

I understand that congratulations are in order to John C. Wright. It has been brought to my attention that the Guardian’s Village Idiot, Damien Walter, has declared that John has ruined his career because of dangerous wrongthink.

Village Idiot

 

As I can personally attest to, that is worth moving up at least one rung on the Alphabetical List of Author Success https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/07/24/the-official-alphabetical-list-of-author-success/

Because nobody is quite as capable at prognosticating on the state of an author’s career as a talentless mope, whose total fiction portfolio consists of a handful of short stories with mediocre reviews and nonexistent sales, who can’t unwrap his angst against the patriarchy long enough to finish the novel the British government gave him a grant to write.

So, Damien, you declared John’s career ruined, but at least he isn’t on Book Welfare. Project much?

How long have you been working on that magnum opus of yours? It was two or three years ago you declared in your silly little newspaper that I had irreparably damaged my career due to all my imaginary homophobic statements your crowd sourced witch hunt never managed to find. Yet I’ve been collecting semiannual six figure royalty checks ever since. That has to suck for you.

If any of my regular readers would like to support John C. Wright in further ruining his career, here is an Amazon link to his latest book. Sure, he might not have the flourishing, dynamic career of the Guardian’s Village Idiot, and I’ve not read it yet, but the woman on the cover is super hot. Which I’m sure offends the hell out of SJWs somehow.

Iron Chamber of Memory
by John C. Wright
(Kindle)
IronChamber

So congratulations, John! Irreparably damaging your career is awesome.

 

It is kind of funny though, how they keep saying there is no political bias in publishing, while simultaneously declaring careers ruined because of people having the wrong politics.

If you are curious just how lopsided this industry is, check out this link that divides professions by political persuasion. http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/  Go down to the details, hit Expand All, and then check out Publishing, and specifically Book Publishing. I don’t know about their methodology, but basically in this Manhattan based industry the number of republicans is so small that it is statistically insignificant. But there is like totally no bias in this completely paved island echo chamber, and SJW pundits would never try to cow authors into falling in line with accepted group think with muttered threats against their careers! That’s crazy talk.

In related news I’ve not posted much about the Sad Puppies campaign this year, mostly because I’m retired from fighting Puppy Related Sadness. Kate volunteered to lead the charge this year, and it looks to me like she is doing a fine job. Of course, she didn’t do any of the things the Puppy Kickers feigned outrage over last time, and surprise, they’re still outraged. The Puppy noms were all collected in the open, transparent as could be, and the list of suggested works was bigger than the number of slots. (Despite me repeatedly telling everybody to not put Son of the Black Sword on there, it still made the list. Seriously, save your nomination for somebody who hasn’t vowed to turn them down.)

However, the Puppy Kickers are still coming up with new ways to be butt hurt over Wrongfans participating, because let’s face it, the truth is they’re a bunch of petty bullies who only care about rewarding cliques with the right politics, and their friends.

I wasn’t going to write anything about SP, but it has come to my attention that a new narrative has arisen amongst the mushy headed dope punditry of fandom, because they are always scrambling for something to get their collective panties in a bunch over. This time it is that Brad and I are cowards—and are probably misogynistic women haters too—because we abandoned poor female Kate to their mighty wrath.

Well, you’ll have to forgive Brad’s cowardice, because he has been deployed by the US Army to the Middle East for the last year, supporting missions against terrorists, but that’s nothing compared to the courage it takes to have a good fandom slapfight. (And really? Scared of what? There are only so many ways you guys can send out a press release alleging that somebody is a racist).

And you’ll have to forgive me too, because I thought I had made my point in 2014 that the system was biased, and I was done. Only Brad asked me to come back to help in 2015, so I did, and after the CHORFs proved my point for me far better than I ever could—wooden assholes and No Awarding the most deserving editor in the business—I said at the end of that I was done.

Why am I out? Mostly because it was a giant time suck, and I’ve got stuff to do. Unlike most of my detractors, I actually write books for a living. I wrote a novella worth of posts on SP in public, and another one worth of emails on the topic behind the scenes. Then there is the joy of spending an hour on the phone with reporters, so that they can quote one sentence from you, and then quote paragraphs from some dolt who knows jack about the topic but belongs to the right clique.

Honestly, in the time I spent on Sad Puppies, I probably could have gotten another book out the door. Plus in 2016 I’ve got my European research trip, I have a new business venture I’ve not talked about at all, I bought a big chunk of property, and mountain fortress compounds don’t build themselves. All that’s in addition to the three novels that are coming out this year, the short fiction collection I have to put together, and the MHI anthology I have to edit.

So I could either try to prove again the point that I’ve already proven, or I can get paid more. Hmmm…. Tough call.
I told Kate back in 2015 that I wasn’t going to be involved this year. So I can’t really have abandoned her if she knew I was never going to show up to begin with. Besides, Puppy Kickers, as far as abandoning the poor helpless women folk, Kate is tougher than all your men put together. So you dipsticks are just going to have to find a better narrative.

My European Book Signings
Win an autographed copy of Son of the Black Sword

190 thoughts on “The Guardian’s Village Idiot Declares Another Career Ruined”

  1. Yeah, little Damien claimed the previous people who ran the Puppies are cowards. Which I guess means you and Brad.

    However, he has an… interesting reaction to being tagged in tweets:
    http://archive.is/cZ72k

    I initially agreed (in my usual smartassed way) to this demand, but you know what? That’s now in the dust. I will tag him or quote him any way I feel like and if he’s going to get all pissy, there’s a block button he can use or he can go whinge to MiniTrust.

  2. “Besides, Puppy Kickers, as far as abandoning the poor helpless women folk, Kate is tougher than all your men put together. So you dipsticks are just going to have to find a better narrative.”

    Best line in the whole piece.

  3. Personal result from last year’s Hugo shenanigans: I bought the entire Dresden Files, and figured out that the nitwits who’ve been giving the awards out for the last two decades are a bunch of hypocrites who think that style is the single most important element of fiction.

    Also, I get to laugh at Damien Walter every three months or so. Yay.

    1. I’m only sad that Larry didn’t Fisk Walter today, but I understand that he has to be slaving away to provide us more top-notch entertainment!

      Besides, I bet Wendell will need a smoking jacket to wear, scotch to drink, and a cat to stroke while in conference with the ILOH about plans to further disrupt rracial and economic equality.

      Smoking jackets ain’t cheap, I hear.

      1. “I understand that he has to be slaving away to provide us more top-notch entertainment!”

        Objection! Reading Larry Fisking Walter IS top-notch entertainment. It’s better than the scene in Serenity where the crew opens the door to see River standing on top of a pile of Reaver corpses.

        1. Objection to the objection! Larry, scurrilous D List author he is, does not GET PAID for his excellent fiskings. Books written pay real money to buy tanks and volcano fortresses and things that go boom and “research” trips to Europe…

          1. What, you’re saying that just because Larry is an author means that he needs to prioritize the writing that makes him money? That’s crazy talk! I’ve learned from award-winning writers that authors create solely to encourage social justice, and any consideration of things as vulgar as making money is unworthy of a True Artist.

            (Though I have to imagine that a book called “The Collected Fiskings of Larry Correia” would sell pretty well. Admittedly, there might be copyright issues with the Fisked work, but I’d reserve my copy on Amazon as soon as it came out)!

          2. Huh…that was supposed to be a reply to Zsuzsa on “the collected fiskings of Larry Correia” …WordPress delenda est!

          3. Speaking of tanks, I hear there is a Gen-yew-wine Sherman for sale. Larry *may* already be interested.

          4. I think he’s selling it himself because they didn’t offer enough on it for the trade-in.

          5. Larry’s shoulders are waaay too broad to fit through the hatch of a Sherman. If he didn’t vaseline his nipples, he’d lose them.

            Them WWII tankers were small.

      1. Not just a mountain fortress compound though as he basically owns the entire valley minus the twon itself. Until Correia makes A list he can only dream of the Kildar compound

  4. I voted in the Hugos last year, and am doing nominations this year. (Of course, I must not be a Sad Puppy because some of my nominations are not on Kate Paulk’s list) I’m not expecting things to improve this year, and to be honest I don’t really care. I’m pretty much done with the Hugos at this point. Let them have their silly award decided by hundreds of votes. I’ll vote with my wallet and have fun reading instead.

    1. Hundreds? Until last year it was decided by dozens. At best. And those were the more heavily-voted categories.

      1. No,

        The popular categories typically do get hundreds of votes. The least popular categories have been decided by a couple dozen in the past, but with luck, Puppy efforts will push that number over 50.

  5. Damien has to make stupid noises on twitter because the Grauniad apparently hired a Ros person to take over his village idiot clickbait column. This Ros persons says its better for an author to starve than go indy

    BTW I’d be happy to provide assistance for your European research trip if you’re planning on going to places I know about.

  6. Well said, and bought John’s latest book. And Kate will be fine. It will be interesting to see how the CHORFS try to tear her down…

    1. “It will be interesting to see how the CHORFS try to tear her down…”

      Hasn’t been so far. They’re just making shit up at this point.

      1. “Don’t you think it would be hypocritical of me to let my work get a boost from a group I spent such much time decrying last year?” – Cat Valente

        Glyer’s Pathological Liars keep asking you for that quote. So give it to them.

        1. Why would I bother providing proof? Last time I provided acres of proof for an argument they called me a liar anyway. You know I’m not, and I know I’m not, that’s good enough.

          But thanks for the help. I appreciate it. 🙂

      2. My favorite so far is accusing her and Sarah Hoyt of running a “male supremacist group.”

        If the PKs brains were anti-matter, the explosion wouldn’t blow a gnat’s nose.

  7. Kate’s decision to asterisk the dissenting nominees is brilliant. The best part is that they can’t complain about it, because asterisks aren’t offensive, doncha know?

  8. I have to admit it is tempting to volunteer to run the next one, just for all the free press! I think it’s safe to say that people have realized that the puppy authors are the ones who know how to write the good stuff.

    1. Someone (or someones) need to run the next one. Perseverance isn’t particularly exciting, but anything worth doing is worth the inevitable slog. And at least no one has to slog alone and no one has to slog forever. I hope you do consider it.

  9. I find it interesting that these folks cannot let anything go. They must keep pharmaceutical companies manufacturing anti-anxiety meds in business.

    1. They can’t. Their entire affirmative action/diversity movement is based on a lie about the history of SFF they will not let go of. You take that away, and it’s addiction to racial/sexual defamation that lie is based on, and this entire intersectional radical feminist cult in SFF dries up and disappears without a trace. They have hung every single asset they own on their irrational suspicions of any move a white straight male makes in a culture where they are a majority demographic. They will sing about “disadvantaged groups,” “structural inequality” and the “marginalized” to their graves.

  10. Damien never seems to learn, o well. Maybe someday I will be so successful as to warrant his declaring my career ruined. Got to get my butt sat down and some good writing finished for that to happen. 🙂

    1. “You’re not here for the hunting, are you?”

      Damien probably gets far more clicks out of a Larry fisk than months’ worth of his usual drivel.

  11. Last Year: OMG, SAD PUPPIES IS SO SEXIST, IT’S ONLY MEN RUNNING SAD PUPPIES.

    This Year: OMG, SAD PUPPIES IS SO SEXIST, IT’S ONLY WOMEN RUNNING SAD PUPPIES.

    Everything is sexist. No matter what happens: sexism.

    1. Yep- they want you to play Lucyball while they move the goalpost.
      I also love the part where previously, they condemn us for ideological lockstep by only nominating white, conservative men; now they condemn us for nominating non conservative, non-white, and “other” authors “against their will”.

      1. Oh yea. I’d forgotten about the temper tantrum because we’re recommending books they like to read.

        Last Year: THE SAD PUPPIES ARE ILLITERATE HACKS BECAUSE THEY DON’T LIKE THE BOOKS WE LIKE.

        This Year: HOW DARE THE SAD PUPPIES LIKE THE BOOKS WE LIKE WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION.

        1. Apparently we included those books because it’s our new strategy to use them for “legitimacy”.

          No, really.

          1. I suggest that we own up to it: “Yes, we are reading, liking, and recommending the works of various SJW-appeasing writers solely in order to destroy their livelihoods by increasing their sales to the wrong sort of readers.” Seriously, do they think this sort of action on their part can possibly accrue to their benefit?

  12. John’s Golden Age series is the finest piece of literature extant today.

    Someday, someone will probably write something better, that’s the great thing about sci-fi, but so far I have not seen anything close.

    Somewhither was by far the best book written this year. Seveneves will probably win, and I’m as big a NS fan as anyone but come on, we’re all going to die in two years but we’re still observing the atmospheric test ban treaty instead of increasing our lifting capacity 100x? That was too hard to swallow.

  13. Oh. and thank God you haven’t fallen for Trump’s ridiculous con, and neither has Utah. Once again, the Mormons are doing America proud.

  14. Why not just rename the Hugos the “Tiptree-LAMBDA-Allies Award”? That would bring home the fact most of the world’s population of genetic colonialist misfits are de facto ineligible and they’d stop knocking on the wrong door in the hopes of being thrown a bone.

    The term “genderblindness” is so dripping with irony it needs flying buttresses and an army of blind bee-keepers to keep it afloat.

    “Only one award went to a white male…” – Miss Genderblindness, 2014, SFWA member

    “Not a single white man won an award tonight.” – Mr. Raceblindness, 2014, SFWA member

    “If your first reaction to the idea of only reading non-white authors is ‘ARGH DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE’ …stop. Think.” – Mr. SocJus, 2014, SFWA member

    “It is no coincidence my book review column features no white males.” – Mr. Anti-Racism, 2015, SFWA member

    Ummm… we already knew it was no coincidence, Mr. Anti-Racism. Burning crosses aren’t the result of spontaneous combustion. Gee, I wonder how you’ll decide to vote in the Hugos? There’s so much to think about. There’s non-whites and racists, and women and misogynists and gays and homophobes. However do you keep that all straight in your amazing brains?

  15. Her nickname, after all, is Kate the Impaler. Somehow I suspect she’ll come out on top without even scuffing her shoes.

    1. Over at Vile, she’s “the Impala”. I don’t think that’s quite as insulting as they seem to think it is. 😉

  16. I notice how the initial response was cautiously positive . . . and within three days it had degenerated into comparisons to ISIS and Stormfront.

    It didn’t immediately degenerate. I guess that’s progress, of a sort.

    1. Yeah, it’s quite amusing. I remember last year Fozzy Bear (or whatever that person’s name is) was giving NYT-bestsellig Larry advice on how to increase his readership, when her most popular book has a sales rank of 45 million (or something like that).

      You literally could not make up a parody of these people that is more ridiculous than their own statements.

  17. Interesting political breakdown list in that link in there.
    Novelists: 82 Socialists/Communists to 18 Republicans

      1. When it comes to non-indie books, almost everything I buy comes from Baen, strange coincidence that. Black Library is the only other publisher whose author’s I regularly patronize these days, but I’m not sure what you would classify Black Library as. Since it’s a an operation strictly focused around their gaming, I’m not sure it’s really indie, and it’s one of the big publishing houses.

  18. I just ruined John’s career by one more sales. I already have a few of his books, have to move those to the reading short list.

  19. >The Guardian’s Village Idiot Declares Another Career Ruined

    This implies they have only one. I’d argue their entire staff consists of village idiots.

    1. Don’t be so close-minded. I believe they also have some city idiots, a couple of suburban neighborhood idiots, a whole stable full of cosmopolitan internationalist idiots…

  20. The state of John’s career, by his own account: 2 books accepted for publication by Tor, 2 being published by Castalia House, and 5 more under contract. This, apparently, is a ‘ruined career’.

    1. But … but … Damien has published a 62-page book … er … pamphlet and has a Grauniad column. Therefore we must bow to his expertise on this matter.

  21. “I understand that congratulations are in order to John C. Wright.”

    Must be a day ending in “y” 🙂

  22. In a few short years the Hugos, like the Nebulas, have become a symbol of striking literary failure. As a perfect reflection of that, the dynamic duo of Tor will be the Guest of Honors at the next WorldCon. My understanding of what an good editor does is to feel the pulse of their own literary community, act as a talent scout and, finding that talent, cultivate it and a relationship with the writer. Having let so many mega-blockbuster genre writers slip through their fingers in their own backyard as it were, Tor has routinely shown they don’t even understand their own genre. They are not only grossly out of touch with it, but willing to be actively hostile to their own customers in favor of some bizarre social justice agenda. That is the very definition of an obsession. Why Tor hasn’t done a wholesale housecleaning is beyond me to understand, seeing as how tens of millions of dollars in sales have been lost forever as a result of sheer incompetence. Harry Potter, Bela and Katniss all found greener pastures and enormous bank accounts.

    The old core of SFF has become little more than a welfare agency and affirmative action program where virtue-signaling is a net profit for goofy moonlighting housewives and daring Carnival Cruise adventurers who in the old days would be considered redneck conformists in Bill Cosby sweaters. Best to let this vine strangle itself on the strictures of its own weird combination of arrogance, pathological dishonesty, mental illness and naive bleeding hearts who need smelling salts followed by a confession of their own racism when a Latino delivery guy speaks English without an accent. You cannot rescue or persuade people that dumb, let alone the people hopped up on anti-psychotic medications. They see a white male conspiracy of an SFF chapter of Freemasons or something which dates back to 100 years ago. Let ’em have it. Just make sure you keep ’em out of the new digs.

    1. “In a few short years the Hugos, like the Nebulas, have become a symbol of striking literary failure.”

      James, please. The Hugos and Nebulas have been a ‘symbol of striking literary failure’ for ages. Since the mid 1980’s at the very least.

      These days it has gone far beyond that, now they’re a full-blown hate group.

      1. I would say this: if you took the non-fiction writings of the 30 people bounced out of the Hugo nominations last year (some of whom are in the Long List anthology) by the Rabid Puppies and redacted the race and sex of the people they so obsessively go after, there is no doubt in my mind they would qualify as a hate group. But they skate away because it is open season on whites, men and heterosexuals. Sad Puppies is a reaction to that anti-white, anti-male feminist movement which has existed in force in SFF since 2009. People against the Puppies simply will not acknowledge that fact.

        And now, after Ann Leckie wins accolades for her mediocre novel slim on talent but big with the feminist genderblind pronoun solution to solve the oppression of heterosexuality, John Scalzi yesterday doubles down on signal-boosting the insane queer theory pronoun solution to the fake “performative” nature of heterosexuality men invented to control and oppress the more biologically natural “fact” that, were it not for those men in pre-history, there would be far more homosexuals, particularly lesbians.

        These so-called “feminists,” especially those associated with academia, Tweet and blog that theory every single day in America, and it is foundational to gender studies text books. How prehistoric men accomplished this across five continents and with cultures that didn’t know of the existence of each other, including the entire new world up to 1492, is never explained.

        What Scalzi and Leckie are doing is the very definition of mainstreaming insanity. A tiny handful of mentally ill sociopaths come up with this idea a half-century ago and today it comes out the other end as social justice. If you give your little girl a G.I. Joe doll for x-mas and don’t call her “her,” she’ll want to drive a fork lift. Ummmm… not quite. However, that 12 yr. old might demand hormone therapy or challenge the gender binary with the help of anti-psychotic meds her adult-induced confusion needs to maintain that fiction while living in a real world which acknowledges no such fantasies. This is what society is doing to our children. When you see a massive fuck like Chuck Wendig begging Disney for more lesbians in his Star Wars novel, that is also the result of gay feminists success at mainstreaming their insanity under those magic SocJus words: “diversity” and “feminism.” Unfortunately for these morons, if they would actually read these “feminists” in colleges today, they make it quite clear feminism is “queer.”

  23. I’m leaving this little info dump because it tears out the foundations of the entire SocJus movement in SF:

    In 1955, of the top 40 magazines in America by circulation, the combined sales of magazines aimed at women (16 titles) was about 56 million per issue.

    From that same top 40, the combined sales per issue of magazines aimed at men (8 titles) was about 13.7 million per issue.

    The other 16 titles were general interest. The leaders there and also leading overall was Reader’s Digest at 10.2 million and Life at 5.7. The top 5 women’s individual titles ranged from 4.1 to 4.8 million. Three of those were founded 1870 to 1883.

    I have no combined sales per issue of SF magazines from that year, but I would be surprised if they reached 500,000. Virtually all SF in America 1912-60 was originally first published in magazine form prior to any publication as a book.

    Women were not only out there but their reading tastes were being actively catered and marketed to, as you would expect of any business motivated by profit. There’s your patriarchy, misogyny and “marginalization”; it never occurred. Women read plenty, they just didn’t care for SF. In short, when Ursula Le Guin claimed in 1975 that old school SF pulps were examples of “male elitism,” she was full of shit. All of these feminists are full of shit on this issue. Women’s tastes and purse strings dominated American magazines, and that was true right back to WW I and beyond. The only thing which kept women out of SF compared to men was women.

      1. I’ll tell you what: you start throwing those stats around the internet and convention panels and you’ll tear the guts out of this sociopathic affirmative action movement.

        “sci-fi and fantasy have always been a very white, very straight, very heteronormative, male political project. A very colonial project… . By not publishing black authors, by not publishing books about black people, that’s become the message by default. Whiteness being the default has been the message.” – Daniel Jose Older

        That’s the creepy racist who helped lead the charge to get Lovecraft’s statue put out to pasture. Idiots like him must think ad agencies and sales figures are a “colonial project.” SFF magazines weren’t in the business of NOT publishing people. If SFF reflected the cultural demographic which enjoys basketball, SFF would be 80% black – end of story.

        1. I always go with the “external reality check” myself. They hate it. Ask them, “If what you say is true, wouldn’t we expect to see X?” Which of course we don’t see. The favorite being “If guns cause crime, why is there more crime where there are less guns?”

          None of this makes any difference of course, they rage on regardless. Mental illness and a vested interest in the thing being argued is a powerful double whammy.

          1. And in related news, the Secret Service has put the kibosh on those wanting to carry at the Republican National Convention. Bunches of red… staters, had signed position to allow themselves the self defense gun of choice. The only signature that counted however, was the one that signed Title 18 United States Code Sections 3056 and 1752.

            Secret Service told ABC…

            “Only authorized law enforcement personnel working in conjunction with the Secret Service for a particular event may carry a firearm inside of the protected site. The Secret Service works closely with our local law enforcement partners in each state to ensure a safe environment for our protectees and the public. Individuals determined to be carrying firearms will not be allowed past a predetermined outer perimeter checkpoint, regardless of whether they possess a ticket to the event.”

  24. I find Steve Davidson’s fact-free ranting at Vile quite amusing:

    “steve davidson on March 23, 2016 at 5:34 am said:

    @Jim Henley: not that they would have listened anyway, but immediately upon the announcement of SPIV, it was suggested to Paulk et al that they take a break, let things settle out, work with the community to craft a true recommendation list that would serve the legitimate purpose of bringing attention to (presumed by them) over-looked works/creators and drop the us-vs-them, we’re a separate group from fandom rhetoric.
    This was done by many. It was a prescription that reflected fannish tradition and one that might have made the puppy list a valuable and respected tool in years to come.
    They have chosen to ignore or reject every single one of those recommendations. They’ve got their detractors giving them the formula for success, but they can’t follow it because of the source, or, rather, because their own internal thinking does not allow for the possibility that others might actually be objecting to their methodology as opposed to their politics.
    I think they are irredeemable at this stage. We’ve tried cooperation, ridicule, humor,; we’ve tried ignoring them. We’ve pointed out how they can do their thing without offending the vast majority. None of it has had any effect (other than to ratchet up the heat).
    If their beliefs and demands were, at source, based on something real, we’d have found a way to accommodate it by now. It’s obvious that they’ll only be satisfied by the Hugo Awards being determined only by their selections, followed by at least a year of popularizing their victory on the web. They will never be satisfied with only being a part of the process; they have to be the process.
    Since this will never happen….”

    1. Davidson is a wretch who has never created a thing of worth, who merely filed paperwork on a defunct brand to gain relevance.

    2. And when he says “being a part of the process” he clearly means “shutup and do as your told by your betters.” Yeah, no.

      And frankly, I’ll only be satisfied when the Hugos are recognized as the laughable awards that are passed around from friend to friend within an increasingly small circle of nearly-scenescent, self-important “fannish” nebbishes.

      1. “I’ll only be satisfied when the Hugos are recognized as the laughable awards that are passed around from friend to friend within an increasingly small circle of nearly-scenescent, self-important “fannish” nebbishes.”

        Good news: that’s pretty much now.

    3. That is totally outrageous. Don’t they understand that there is a huge group of people involved?

      1. No. They see “all of us” vs. either some vague “them” or specific individuals. Numbers don’t enter into it.

    4. Notice how their narrative always depends on the idea the Puppies movement came out of nowhere. They just ignore the sudden 2009 onset of this cult of feminist witchhunting which to this day preaches daily racial incitement and incitement to hate men based on lies about the history of SFF. Who created us vs. them? Did I do that when the culture shifted under my feet from a genre motivated by art, profit and fun to a welfare operation of insane post-structuralist feminist queer theory about “disadvantaged groups” and oppressive gender binaries?

      They have used these lies to launch a weird segregated diversity/affirmative action crusade which is as crazy as black men doing that in hockey or white men in basketball. The only thing at work there or keeping men out of romance fiction is the cultural interests of Americans, a thing which is random and unpredictable. Do we need more golf fans in America? Why? Towards what purpose? Do golf fans say America hates them and excludes them from lucrative TV contracts? Who are these mental cases?

      How are we irredeemable? Is it my imagination the author of one of the most honored SF novels in history claimed white men more often than not like to beat on non-whites, women and gays? Is it my imagination the worst short story in SF history was given a Hugo nom and Nebula win because some ditzy radical feminist set her imaginary Foucauldian dinosaur to wreak revenge on those white men?

      We’ve gone over this to exhaustion. You cannot debate people who ignore their own words or nebulous concepts like “marginalized groups” or “structural racism.” What the hell does that even mean? How does one disprove that? Davidson’s site is emblematic of what this cult has done to the Nebulas and Hugos: the masthead “Amazing” is still there but behind the sign is an empty shell.

      Contrary to what a crazy feminist claimed while having a psychotic breakdown on Twitter over pre-crime fat jokes, there never was a “white dude parade” in SF. Golf fans buy Golf Digest, a thing too complex for paranoids to figure out. If you insist on more Eskimos in golf and launch a crusade, you’ll destroy that too, and then you can have the “Eskimos Destroy Golf Tournament” sponsored by Patreon and Kickstarters and censor non-Eskimo golfers in your “Judith Butler’s Guide to Two-Spirits Eskimo Golf.”

    5. Davidson’s prescription is “Let us tell you what to do. Or else I will taunt you poorly some more.”

      Yeah, no sale.

      1. Based on your accurate observation, let’s translate Davidson’s jeremiad.

        “Sad Puppies was supposed to be a fluke! I’m freaking out over the fact that it’s not going away!”

        “SP nominees and supporters are a separate group from fandom whose opinions are illegitimate.”

        “The Puppy list is valued and respected by more people than I thought possible. This freaks me out even more!”

        “We have rejected all of SP’s calls for peace and reconciliation. Our default tactic of trying to shame and ostracize them isn’t working because we missed the little detail that you can’t outgroup people you’ve already expelled from the group.”

        “Worse, they’ve been successful despite our best efforts to slander, libel, and sabotage them. Not even calling in favors from our mainstream media friends to run carbon copy hatchet pieces put a dent in their morale!”

        “Epistemic closure won’t allow us to confront the proven political bias in the awards process and NY publishing as a whole. Instead we’ll keep insisting that the Sad Puppies movement, unlike any other in human history, came out of nowhere for no reason.”

        “We were treating with Sad Puppies in bad faith from the start. We never even considered cooperating with them, since genetic fallacy precludes us from deeming their grievances legitimate. Yet we can’t ignore them however hard we try, especially because they keep ridiculing us, and we can’t stand the affront to our hyperinflated collective ego. We’re perpetually offended just knowing that there are people–worse, a majority–who disagree with us. Nothing the Puppies could do, from baking us pie to bringing us flowers, would have any effect other than to ratchet up our irrational outrage.”

        “My knickers are in such a foamy twist right now that I’m going to contradict my own complaint that SP ignored the advice we allegedly offered to help resolve their problem by claiming that there was never any problem to begin with. But the bias is real, and thanks to Larry, Brad, Kate, et al., everyone knows it!”

        “I mean, look at that freaking political affiliation by profession chart up there! Did you even hear what Harper Voyager did to Nick Cole? My Kool-Aid’s running low. Someone get me a refill!”

        “We are vibrating with cognitive dissonance. The only cure is going back to determining the Hugos only by our selections, followed by a year-long Twitter/Tumblr victory lap. We have to be the process; not just part of the process. But it’s taking a herculean effort to keep from realizing that this will never happen again…

        1. If Hector Lavoe was a fossilized neckbeard driven into submission by radical lesbians, then Davidson would be the King of Salsa.

  25. Standing aside to let the Hugos by. I voted last year but I won’t even bother to nominate this year. Truth be told, I have only read 2 new books this year and that’s not enough to move me to vote for them. Jim Butcher and Andy Weir will do well enough without my vote since they already have my money.
    I love the asterisks. Poetic is what that is.

  26. I would like to thank you for having the respect for your fans to take your job seriously. I appreciate that I can count on you producing great books every year. I’ve stopped reading authors who don’t seem to respect the fact they do “owe” fans something for our loyalty. To have the audiobooks of MHI and if they were on tape they’d be worn out. Looking forward to the leather bound editions you mentioned a few days ago.

    1. What I always tell aspiring authors is never forget that we work for the fans. Never make the fans work for us.

  27. When’s the “Men Destroy Romance” Kickstarter coming out? Down with female elitism!

    Oh, wait. I don’t give a shit what millions of innocent women do who are harming no one.

    1. “…innocent women…” Hah! Three more trips to the bathroom together, and they’re taking over the world!

      (The above is a *joke*: disclaimer noted for the humor-impaired.)

    1. But a tiny walk-up flat in London is *much* better than owning a mountain fortress in Oowaw or whatever filthy colonial hole Larry lives in.

      And besides, if Larry was a real author he wouldn’t have to grub about like some common tradesman; the government would pay him for his services, like it does for real authors.

      1. Given London’s ridiculous London property prices at the moment, a walk-up flat in London probably costs as much as a mountain fortress in the US.

      2. Larry’s being less than candid with us about the new home. He actually managed to find the only extinct volcano in Utah and is looking at lair designs as we speak…

  28. Here’s the feminist reaction to the bad old days of Ozzie and Harriet when women’s magazines outsold mens’ 5 to 1:

    “Ahm not revyouing any wyhte men an ah got dis hyar Keekstarter calld ‘Wimmen Deestroy Syfy’ cuz grrl power is murginalazed like all geet owt. Men ar prix. Next cum ‘Kweers Deestroy Fantazy’ cuz cizhet skum are prix tu. Colored of peeple ar next on dis hyar leest and we got ‘PeeOhCee Deestroy Horror’ cuz whytes are prix an not all ghosts is whyte. Go fux selves whyte ciz skums doods.”

  29. OH! LOOK AT THE STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY OF MISOGYNY AND PATRIARCHY!

    “For most of its life as a Crowell-Collier magazine, Woman’s Home Companion was the editorial product of Gertrude Battles Lane, who joined its staff at $18 a week in 1903 and who was earning $52,000 a year and was a vice president and director of the company when she died in 1941. Miss Lane spent her last $10 to get from Boston, where she had been a stenographer for a publishing house and spare-time editor of a small magazine, to New York, where she found work as household editor of Woman’s Home Companion. In 1912, a half-dozen years after Knapp had taken over the magazine, she was promoted to editor. In the next twenty-nine years, she pushed Woman’s Home Companion to the top of the highly competitive field of women’s magazines where, during the decade before her death, it jockeyed with Curtis’ Ladies’ Home Journal for first position. Miss Lane served her readers the established women’s magazine fare: fiction by well-known authors, articles about food and fashion, articles giving practical assistance to the homemaker, articles with an element of do-goodism and uplift. She ran the high-priced stories of such authors as Edna Ferber, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Kathleen Norris. She established a Better Baby Bureau to stimulate interest in child health. She crusaded for packaged groceries. She paid $25,000 for the unpublished letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She set up a department to give advice to consumers. To keep her magazine in tune with readers’ interests, the company in 1935 organized a panel of two thousand readers who were queried on a variety of subjects each month.” – Theodore Peterson, Magazines of the 20th Century (1956)

    That’s actually a very common story in America, old or new. Third Wave Feminists are ignorant bald-faced liars. And I might say in passing that Gertrude Lane had more brains, gumption and get-go than the entire editorial staff of Tor Books and the censor-happy rainspout called TorCom combined.

    1. Assembling a lengthy volume of biographies of ‘Females Feminists Can’t Find, Understand, -or- Respect’ would seem printworthy to me.

      The entire idea of Abigail Adams as a Founding Father would cause panic attacks and a growth-business in ‘Safe Space Rentals’.

      1. Feminists find and unfind women in history as suits whatever they’re arguing at that particular moment. Listening to them, history is so flexible it has no meaning. They are addicted to the idea men purposefully devalued or excluded women from SFF; it is their precious, and thing they base all their whining on.

        But we know commercial media has run on demographics carefully analyzed by ad agencies and companies for a hundred years now. Such groups exist and they tend to be massively askew when it comes to particular hobbies and interests. The idea Latino males age 13-20 choosing not to read Golf Digest today can be used by a Latino generation which follows as “proof” Latinos were excluded from Golf Digest is too stupid to entertain. Yet that is in principle exactly what feminists argue about early 20th century SFF. They are batty liars.

  30. And some more “love” from Vile:

    “Aaron on March 23, 2016 at 7:56 pm said:

    Referring to me as a “Puppy Kicker” says more about you than it does about me.

    Everything one needs to know about why people don’t want to be associated with the Pups is right there in that sentence. There isn’t a secret cabal that will glower if people don’t disassociate from the Pups fast enough. Finn makes clear (although he does so inadvertently) in his own post why people don’t want to be associated with the Pups: They are almost all assholes. Finn is an asshole. Correia is too. Torgersen is an asshole. Hoyt, Green, Paulk, wright – all assholes. They’ve shown this repeatedly, through dozens of blog posts, tweets, and other declarations attacking their supposed enemies and generally saying incredibly stupid, bigoted, and vicious things.

    On the other hand, the “Puppy-Kickers” they complain about spend very little time talking about them. Valente mentioned the Pups once between April of 2015 and this past week. Scalzi mentioned them almost not at all. I don’t think either of the Nielsen Hayden’s have said anything publicly about the Pups in months. And so on. All of this “Puppy-Kicking” that guys like Finn are complaining about seems to be mostly conjured up in their own minds.

    And I suspect they know this. And I suspect that’s what really stings for them. They know that but for the Puppy campaigns, most people would not only not give them a second thought, most people wouldn’t even give them a first. Without the Puppy campaign Finn, Green, and Paulk are non-entities. Torgersen, Wright, and Hoyt are fringe players at best. Correia is a minor leaguer. Without the Puppy campaign, they are a collection of rookie-ball and single A players that no one cares about.”

    I notice how he picks Valente as an example, and not, say, most of the File 770 regulars, himself included.

    As to Larry being a minor leaguer . . . 😀

    1. “Aaron on March 23, 2016 at 7:56 pm said:

      Referring to me as a “Puppy Kicker” says more about you than it does about me.

      Judging from the part quoted after that, it says the person who called poor Aaron a “Puppy Kicker” is rather observant.

      1. That dude is a straight up liar. He and a couple others artificially started Alistair Reynolds’ career in 2000 with his first novel. That way they could claim Reynold’s career as “proof” the Puppies were wrong, since it fits in with some imaginary Puppy timeline they made up of when things went to hell. The problem is that Reynolds’ career starts 10 years before that. He made his rep on his short stories. No one says the careers of C.L. Moore or Ray Bradbury begins with their first novels. The other problem is that if their timeline is accurate, where were the Puppies in 2005? The reason is obvious: there wasn’t a lowing herd of jackass feminists launching shaming witchhunts on every straight white man in their path.

        I don’t know what’s in the water at File 101 but they are some seriously broken motherfuckers. Reynolds’ brand new “fans” don’t know jack shit about his work. If I could do a keyword search of File 101’s site the last year, I’d wager money politicized mediocre writers like Elizabeth Bear, N.K. Jemisin and Kameron Hurley are mentioned 10 times more than Reynolds. If true, that’s proof these very morons do what they claim they do not: ignore politically neutral SF, even when it is far better. If I read only the commenters at File 101, I wouldn’t even know a great writer like Peter Hamilton existed. They have no interest in fun for fun’s sake, genre for the sake of genre. They want to bitch and moan so they can read shit SFF with mommy two-daddies on PoC island fighting the white empire of heteronormativity. File 101 is Pfizer profit model.

        Exactly how does one explain 7 Hugo noms for Cat Valente compared to Reynolds? Easy. Reynolds doesn’t bitch about Tolkien being a racist or have ha-ha ironic PoC Snow White stories built of Clarion Workshop adjectives. Put some lesbians in your stories, Reynolds, and start bitching about white men. That’s award-winning work. Scalzi’s career was built on the mighty shoulders of K. Tempest Bradford and N.K. Jemisin. There’s your career model to success. And don’t forget the correct pronouns, Reynolds.

        1. “Scalzi’s career was built on the mighty shoulders of K. Tempest Bradford and N.K. Jemisin.”

          Much as I hate to say it, you’re being unfair to Scalzi, here.
          His career was built on Heinlein and Roddenberry fanfic.

      2. It says they were paying a modicum of attention and come to the obvious conclusion that Aaron Pound is a doofus? 😀

    2. Hey MHN, now it’s your turn!

      Apply the CHORF Projection Filter to the irrational screed above. Extra points if you ID the emotional panic button that triggered it.

    3. Kip Drordy (aka: Aaron Pound) continues to be a font of projection. Larry is “minor league” eh? I’m a fringe player? Kip needs to tell one of his teeth-gnashing Pravda 770 associates — who is an editor at Wikipedia — to go erase me from the list of notables at the Analog magazine article. A list that also includes Vernor Vinge, Kevin J. Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Orson Scott Card, and so many more. If that’s being a fringe player, I’m certainly in august “fringe” company. No worries, though. Kip has his echo chamber. As long as Pravda 770 regurgitates his opinions back to him, he never has to recognize reality. Very much a Baghdad Bob thing. 😉

      1. Hey, I’ve already demonstrated that I’m merely a D List author. Never claimed to be more. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go oversee the construction of my half mile driveway. 🙂

    4. I wrote up a handy Alphabetical List of Success just for morons like Aaron. I’m proudly on the D List! 😀

  31. Well now. I guess I’m going to have to further damage Wright’s writing career. Off to Amazon I go!

  32. I was wondering why ol’ Demian’s tweets are now protected. Alas, I’ll have to do without his pearls of wisdom for the present. Maybe with protected tweets he’ll actually finish that novel the UK government paid him to write?

    1. “Maybe with protected tweets he’ll actually finish that novel the UK government paid him to write?”

      Any decade now . . .

        1. It’s also tough having to constantly go back and re-edit one’s work every time you find out we have always been at war with Eastasia.

          1. That is an issue, especially when you’re writing a fashionable victim narrative. See the recent flaps over “The Vagina Monologues.” It was a fashionable victim narrative, then the victimization in question went out of fashion (you’re only writing about women with vaginas? TRANSPHOBIC!), and now it’s heresy.

            Really, Damien’s strategy of “Just never finish the thing” seems like it might be the right one for this sort of thing.

    2. Hm. On the #SadPuppies hashtag someone’s been tweeting images of sad puppies with Damien tagged. I’m guessing he hasn’t figured out how to mute or block people. Too complex for him.

      1. He’s manage to block me, even though I’ve never had a single negative interaction with him on Twitter. I just assumed he was using Arthur Chu’s ridiculous blocklist

  33. I wish my career could be as “ruined” as yours! As Tevye says of riches: “May God smite me with it, and may I never recover.”

  34. Well, this needs to be documented so that outsiders involved in the Hugo process have an idea of what at least a signigicant, vocal selection of Worldcon members want and think regarding the awards. Cross-posted to Mad Genius Club. From the comments of the File770 Pixel Scroll dated 3/22/16:

    ——-

    ***On the Subject of What the Hugos Mean***

    Andrew M:
    The Hugos represent a particular community – literary convention fandom – which is only a subset of the wider community of people who are in any way actively fannish, which is itself a subset of the yet wider community of people who read/watch and enjoy science fiction.

    JJ:
    Worldcon members, who own the Hugo Awards, have set them up to be the way they are for several very specific reasons — including that the awards are intended to represent the preferences of Worldcon members. And the Hugos have achieved enormous prestige that way.

    JJ:
    I’m sorry, Lee, but I totally disagree with you here. The Hugo Awards are a convention award. They are Worldcon’s convention award. They are intended to represent the preferences of Worldcon members, not just anyone who has “a fairly heavy interest in book-SF”.

    JJ:
    . . . your argument seems to me to be only a variant of the Puppy argument: that the Hugo Awards should be something all SFF fans get to nominate and vote on, and therefore the ability to do that should be extremely inexpensive or free.
    The Hugo Awards were never intended to be that. And I don’t see that changing them to be that will do anything other than turning them into the GoodReads Readers’ Choice Awards — nice for an author, I’m sure, but not particularly meaningful or distinguishing of special quality.

    Ray:
    The Hugos are the awards given by Worldcon members to the things they like. If Worldcon members and the wider public have different tastes, that is not a problem for the awards.

    ——–

    ***On the Subject of Worldcon Being Such a Small Voter Pool***

    Aaron:
    The thing is, this is not a problem. The Hugo Awards have achieved the prominence they have because of the structure they have, not despite it. The Nebula Awards say they honor the best stories of the year, and they are decided by an even smaller group. Somehow, people still see them as prestigious. Prestige and validity for awards has nothing to do with how many people participate, or what the rules for participation are.

    JJ:
    Well, if the small numbers of Worldcon members is such a problem, then how did the Hugos come to be known for recognizing outstanding works? Clearly a great many people who are not Worldcon members have felt that to be the case; how is it “pretentious” to recognize the well-established fact that many, many thousands of people who are not Worldcon members, including librarians and bookstore owners and managers, agree with that assessment?

    And why would “such a tiny number of people” care whether others agree with what they consider to be the best SciFi works for a given year? The Hugo Awards exist to please Worldcon members, not anyone else.

    . . . the Hugos have always been intended to represent the preferences of Worldcon members and not “the greater whole” of people who read SFF. Why is this a problem? Why should Worldcon change this?

    ——–

    ***On The Subject of Hugo Incestuousness***
    (i.e., the same people getting awarded repeatedly)

    Sean:
    The fact that a small group of people vote on the Hugos each year has also made them incestuous as well, with the same TV shows, authors, editors, and fans showing up on ballots year after year. Does that increase or decrease the prestige?

    (Responses to Sean)

    Robert Reynolds:
    Pretty much from their inception, the group voting has been small and there have been names appearing regularly on the ballot. If that quality had a negative effect on the award’s prestige, it would have never built up the reputation it has built.

    Mike Glyer:
    But be fair — if the Hugo electorate grew by an order of magnitude do you think it LESS likely that Game of Thrones and Doctor Who episodes are going to get nominated?

    Aaron:
    It certainly hasn’t reduced their prestige, since that’s the way the awards have been since their inception. Once again, you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.

    ——–

    ***On the Subject of Hugo Relevance***

    Darren Garrison:
    I want to say, as a philosophical point, that it is okay if the Hugos (and WorldCon) fade away.
    . . .
    Thousands of people today enjoy participating in WorldCon. If, as those members age out and die, they aren’t replaced and the Hugos and WorldCon dies out with them through attrition, that is okay, too.

    Johan P:
    That is a good point. And I’d like to add: Changing to survive brings you into the grandfather’s axe paradox: If all parts of the axe have been replaced since my grandfather owned it, is it still my grandfather’s axe? If Worldcon changes beyond recognition, is it still Worldcon that’s being kept alive?

    ——–

    ***On the Unwritten Rules***

    Standback:
    I’m 100% behind the idea that Hugo, and its nature, being better-known. But, I think it needs to be understood that its nature is complex.

    The Hugo is obviously not a juried award, but it’s not your standard popular award either. It’s a particular blend between the two, which has evolved over time, and it’s part of what makes the Hugos unique (and prestigious). Camestros described this well, saying the Hugos “work more like a juried vote, but with a very large jury.” To some extent, what those $40 are for are to say, “I want to be part of the jury for this one.”

    You have a sense of how a judge on a juried award should be doing his job – he should read lots and lots, he should learn the rules and intricacies of the awards, he should understand the spirit of the award he’s judging, what qualities the award is trying to recognize (or, if not “understand,” have a strong view of, which is not too far off from that of the rest of the jury and the readership).

    Similarly, I think that Hugos and Worldcon enthusiasts have a strong sense of what they “expect” from Hugo nominators and voters. It’s not a juried award, and those expectations aren’t anywhere near as high as they would be for a “real” award judge. But it’s also very, very far from positing an ideal of “everybody with an opinion should vote.” As you say, what we want is participants who care. And what we want is participants who understand the system, who care – not about one particular author, but about what the Hugos are and what they’re trying to do.

    . . .

    This, I think, is part of what us Filers are saying when we say you’re trying to fix something that doesn’t need fixing. We’d like greater participation, sure. But it needs to be participation of the right kind. That’s a delicate balance to achieve – and hey, look, we’ve pretty much already achieved it.

    1. That’s funny. Because when I started this a few years ago nobody said that the Hugos belonged to just the little happy family of WorldCon. They represented the BEST IN THE WHOLE WORLD. When people like me showed up and said, hey, we’re part of the world too, the freak out started. It wasn’t until after I pointed out that was very much not the case, that they changed the narrative.

      You want to see the evolution of that? Read my letters back and forth with GRRM where he even starts out admitting that the Hugos were always portrayed as representing All of Fandom. He was the first big timer to actually come out and admit it actually wasn’t.

      That was a really long post to say that the “Filers” like their cliquish little inbred group the way it is, with guys like Glyer getting 50 Hugo noms for running a second rate news aggregation site, and don’t want barbaric Wrongfan messing with their stuff with their horrible, awful Wrongfun.

  35. Thing about the Pravda 770 crew (and Damien Walter) is they don’t understand how this really works. You don’t “prove” somebody is irrelevant by chattering nastily about them in a semi-regular fashion. You literally forget about them, and don’t bring them up, or talk about them, even in passing. Not a week goes by that Pravda 770 hasn’t been bashing Sad Puppies, going on 13 months. Steve Davidson is obsessed with Sad Puppies. Mewling jock-sniffers like Aaron Pound are also obsessed with Sad Puppies. They don’t think Sad Puppies doesn’t matter. Sad Puppies matters so much to them, we drive Steve and Aaron (and many others) to hate-filled, rantable distraction. Sad Puppies is so deep beneath their collective skin, we’re practically tattooed. I am sure Steve, Aaron, etc., will be cussing us to their graves. Meanwhile, Steve, Aaron, Damien Walter, etc., desperately seek relevance, in a field where producing entertaining things has a thousand times the impact of merely sneering and kvetching on a blog.

    1. It occurred to me that the Sad Puppies ongoing destruction of the Hugos (this is, after all, what’s happening) should only be the first step. Here’s what I posted on Sarah Hoyt’s blog:

      “I think it’s important for us to acknowledge the fear of those [authors] still beholden (at least in their minds) to the lords and ladies of establishment publishing. But acknowledging that fear doesn’t mean we should become enablers of that fear. If anything, we need to perform interventions, to help them to overcome the fear. And that’s what the Puppy movement should be about. Revealing the Hugos as the fundamentally unimportant and degraded awards that they have become should be just the first step in freeing good authors to write whatever they want to write, and to get it into the hands of their readers without having to kowtow to some SJW mean girls (yes, the guys in that camp can be mean girls too).”

      The more good authors we can peel away from the NYC establishment publishers to go indy, the better.

      1. This is the first time in history the SFWA, Hugos and a publisher – Tor – have been actively hate by fans. This is the first time in history a publishing associate – TorCom – as well as KKK-like ‘zines like Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Uncanny have shown either an active disdain or even outright hatred of large swaths of fandom. There has never been anything even remotely like this in the history of the genre, and you can thank this anti-white, man-phobic queer feminism for it. It is the most paranoid, hateful and dishonest culture of people I have ever seen in a pop culture movement, and they are all on the same ideological page, sharing the same weird buzzwords like parrots. Why are we surprised these sick freaks are giving each other awards in their phony made-up war between the “marginalized” and “white cis dudes.”

        And it’s worth mentioning again how many of these award nominees are free. In fact they’re having a hard time even giving that adjective-laden conformist shit away. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if they had some sort of a union to protect their writers and the integrity of their awards which fought back against ideological welfare programs?

        In the mid-’50s Astounding Science Fiction rejected 95% of stories submitted to them, and that was low for a national magazine industry which probably averaged 98-99%. TorCom doesn’t even take submissions any more. Why do you think that is? They have a preselected ideological stable of writers they are more than happy to subsidize, just like the YA feminist shitpot known as Book Smugglers. Do you think it’s a coincidence this ideology sneers at the word “meritocracy”? Why do think anyone is this world would publish short fiction by Sunil Patel, an SFWA member at Lightspeed who won’t review white men? He gets published because he won’t review white men. Astounding had a favored stable of go-to writers as well, but they could write. They got paid and you paid to read them. That profit model doesn’t work in affirmative action “I’m a genderqueer”-land.

      2. “Sad Puppies ongoing destruction of the Hugos (this is, after all, what’s happening)”

        I don’t agree with you on that point, because the Hugos were already destroying themselves. SPI and II were just pointing that out, and SPIII was an attempt to save them. Despite the fact that I voted in SPIII, I really don’t think that they are worth saving. Let the worthless charade fade into ever more deserved obscurity with the rest of ‘mainstream’ sf&f publishing and fandom, and the “mean girls” take care of themselves.

        1. The Hugos are already dead. *Cue Fist of the North Star meme*

          The three camps are only voting on which way they want the remaining years to be spent on doing. The kickers want to make sure that when they die no one will remember the thing at all, the Sads want the last remaining years to be spent with a wider selection of material, and the Rabids want to get it over with and bring it to its natural end point.

          At least the last two are willing to get it over with.

  36. Probably the most single amazing thing about this whole story is the millions of words that have been written back and forth over several years about an equally amazing bald-faced lie: that people, especially women, were excluded from SF as if it was some Jim Crow to keep out non-whites and gay folks.

    Nothing even remotely like that occurred, and yet it is taken as faith by social justice crusaders as actual history and has been used to power their entire movement. The people most angry about the history of SF are the people who know the least about it. This all really started when bitter feminists like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ began to propagate that lie in the early ’70s. Russ went on to write her “How To Suppress Women’s Writing,” although she was professionally published in SF while still in college. N.K. Jemisin and other moronic feminists picked up that dead horse a few years ago and started whining about careers “strangled at birth,” even though Jemisin had 4 Nebula noms at the time she said that, and now has 5.

    These people are ignorant liars. They lie when they wake up and they lie as they fall asleep. Pathological lying and fantasies they made up out of their heads aside, the people who invented micro aggressions, gendered slurs and trigger warnings have the nerve to call us the perpetually aggrieved. When you’re that far gone, you’re really gone.

    If you ever want to make a gender feminist angry, talk about nothing more than due process, equal protection and free speech; nothing else. Then watch the screaming start.

    1. I was wondering who the N.K. Jemisin that keeps getting mentioned is. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, where the cover pictures of a couple of her books looks familiar but the descriptions don’t even ring the slightest bell. More an more, I see books from the big publishers that utterly fail to make an impression on me at the bookstore. I look at them and just get a meh feeling about them and forget them again. I guess she must be one of the slew of Nebula/Hugo nominated/winning authors that have books that didn’t even make enough of an impression for me to remember it as something I have no interest in.

      In the past 10-15 years, It’s reached the point where if a book says Hugo/Nebula winner, I don’t even look past that point because I’ve been so underwhelmed and bored by every one I’ve read. It would different if the books, at least, had something that would get me pissed off, but they’ve so bland they don’t do more than bore me to sleep. To me, that is the worst kind of book. I sometimes read books I find offensive just because I’m curious what the author is trying to push, but a boring book serves no purpose outside winning a Nebula or Hugo.

      1. If there’s a person more viciously anti-white in SFF than Jemisin, I don’t know who it would be. She’s made a career of it. Her prose is brutally bad. If she were a white male with her level of talent, she would be self-pubbing. She is a product of the welfare-affirmative action movement in SFF.

      2. “In the past 10-15 years, It’s reached the point where if a book says Hugo/Nebula winner, I don’t even look past that point because I’ve been so underwhelmed and bored by every one I’ve read.”

        At the moment, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is my ‘work’ book (I tend to read two novels at a time, one at home and one during breaks at work), and I’m about 80 pages in. It’s so unbelievably tedious that I found myself reading one of those stupid celebrity gossip mags full of reality TV stars I’ve never heard of instead. I almost never deliberately give up on books, but as soon as I’ve chosen something else to replace it The Windup Girl is going on the charity pile. I should have saw that coming, but I let all the ‘next William Gibson’ quotes on the cover sway me. Maybe I’m remembering Gibson with nostalgia goggles, but he isn’t mind-numbingly boring, is he? Anyway, I should have remembered: Hugos and Nebulas (and, to be fair, literary awards in general) are warning signs, not recommendations. I can’t even say the politics offended me, because they were *exactly* what I expected them to be.

        1. Unfortunately Gibson’s later stuff was.

          I can’t fault him too much for it. I’ve encountered a lot of writers whose early work *rocked*, and then they settled down into a later career of “meh.”

          It’s like they have something bottled up inside, and once they write it out, they’re empty.

          But at least Gibson *has* some decent stuff to point to; that’s more than most of his detractors can muster.

          1. I never read a Gibson book more recent than Virtual Light, so I didn’t know the quality declined. At which point did he start going downhill?

        2. It’s got one neat idea in it, the use of clockwork to store energy. Which they have to do because of “armwave.” The brutal rape scene in the bar where the windup girl works sticks in my head and I read the book when it came out. That is some trash you really don’t need in your brain. And then it all ends with some eco nonsense I can barely remember but made me mad when I read it. Give it up now. Save yourself from the mental rape.

          nick

          1. I already gave up, when I go back to work next week I’ll be reading Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance. I only stuck with Windup Girl as long as I did because I didn’t want to drop the book before the title character even showed up. That, and I was waiting for him to write something which would make the technological state of his world make sense, but life is too short.

          2. I was never as impressed by The Dying Earth as some people were; I like almost all of Vance’s stuff, but I’d rate his best work as the Tschai series, then the Demon Princes.

            Vance’s offbeat sense of humor manifests in most of his work, but if you’re not in tune with that I imagine he’d seem a bit dry and wordy.

  37. The source of this divide in SFF and also the Puppies is this feminist “diversity” scam based on the fake idea whites, men and heterosexuals have somehow schemed to keep SFF to themselves. In 100 years of SFF, no such mechanism of exclusion has ever existed. The sole determinant of the demographic shape of SFF has been and will continue to be the reading tastes of the American public. That is a pie-chart which shapes itself and which no one can socially engineer.

    The Hugos is infested with perpetrators of this scam, whether from naivete or race and sex-hatred. Of the 30 people nudged out of the Hugo noms last year by the Puppies, 100% of them are passionate supporters of Third Wave Feminism, most of them viciously so when it comes to their obsessive screeds about the straight white male. That’s a pretty stunning indictment of the Hugos and example of how the Puppies knocked those freaks for a loop. Without the Puppies, they would’ve been all set to once again celebrate their phony war to undo the misogynist, transphobic, anti-homosexual Jim Crow straight white colonialist racist males have created in SFF rather than anything even remotely resembling good work.

    Was that a win? You bet your ass it was. Those 30 were knocked off the 2015 list forever, done in by their own stupid hyper-politicization of the awards. Predictably, they didn’t like it when it was directed at them. So they erased what lists they could, pretended only we were on steroids and asterisked the year of the feminist that never was. Tough fucking break. 2015 was a wonderful year in which the affirmative action movement was stopped dead in its tracks and the welfare checks never arrived.

    The diversity darling of an SF novel which won, The Three Body Problem, had enough American stereotypes of Tron and cigarette smoking detectives to have been written by any straight white male in the ’80s. The lesson there is that Norwegian blues music is not good because it is Norwegian blues music in and of itself. When it’s good, it’s because it’s good. The short attention spans of bored racial and sexual narcissistic intersectionalists has nothing to do with good SFF.

    The funny irony is the more we leave the Hugos alone, the more social justice crusaders will finalize the complete destruction of that award, to be set alongside the laughing stock of gender pronouns, man-hatred, heterophobia and anti-white racism that is now the Nebulas.

    1. Wow. What a dumb quote, but I suppose it makes sense coming from somebody who has accomplished absolutely nothing of note.

    2. Yeah, Walter. When you’re old you’ll always remember and cherish that time you didn’t climb Agung Volcano, learn Indonesian or get off the disability dole. The good ol’ days of ennui and wi-fi hotspots for Twitter. Plus there’s the naps.

    3. To be fair, the high point of Brit SF was ‘your plastic pal that’s fun to BE with,’ not ‘to DO with,’ so Damien might actually have a valid if derivative point, at least within the bound of his provincial little islet.

  38. “Bonnie McDaniel on March 27, 2016 at 11:04 am said:
    when we’re all sitting around the SJW salon, sipping our herbal tea, we can casually dig out a copy of our latest bit of virtue-signalling fodder for the other SJWs to note as they casually judge us and our reading choices as we all discuss ways of taking down the successful MilSF writers.

    “According to Resident Privileged Penis Hysteric James May, we’re all worshipping the Secret Radical Lesbian Feminist Cabal that has taken over the SFF world (and by implication, the wider world) in the past three years”

    *

    This is coming from a woman who recently reviewed “Bitch Planet” and “Lumberjanes” on her site. She has written about her open admiration for Roxanne Gay, a black, morbidly obese intersectional lesbian feminist only other intersectional gay feminists know about. Among her gay feminist preferred blog links is Feministing, one of the more insane intersectional lesbian feminist sites out there which has a recent post about Judith Butler, the queen of queer theory. Never forget how boldly these people will lie right to your face. They are pathological liars.

    *

    “rob_matic on March 27, 2016 at 11:21 am said:

    “I think he [me] is possibly the most wide-ranging Puppy representative – he shows up everywhere – and to be honest his long screeds about the Lesbian Menace in SFF don’t do the Puppy cause any favours”

    *

    Well, it certainly doesn’t do the Lesbian Menace of social justice cretins any favors when I unmask their moronic devotion to a anti-white lesbian supremacist ideology using facts, statistics, quotes and research into the foundational texts of their madhatter cult. Do they really think they’re gonna fool anyone by pretending the white cishetero patriarchy comes from fucking Abe Lincoln or something? Is this week’s post by Scalzi about gender pronouns from Plato or Aristotle? Is it a coincidence a lesbian and former women and gender studies is prez of the SFWA? Their entire social justice cult is one 7 year-long screed against straight white men, a group they talk about like anti-Semites talk about Jews as often as they pretend their cult doesn’t even exist.

  39. Hi Larry. First time reading, first time posting.

    So, I’ve crawled out of the “eskarthi-dor” that I’ve been hiding in for several years, and I’m now updated on the debacle that fandom has become. I was involved in Chicago fandom from the late 80s to 2008. I got into it because I wanted to be part of a community that reveled in the things that I also enjoyed. I got out because I became tired of ugly fannish politics souring those very things that I loved, not to mention the other issues surrounding being an African American SF/Fantasy fan.

    I accept part of the blame for this because I, like other fans, did see this coming and rather than standing and fighting like many of my particular group did, this time, I chose to do a walk-away from fandom and let it solve its own problems…not evening imagining that it would get as bad as this.

    Larry, before I go any further, first and foremost, I am genuinely sorry that you had to endure all of the “wrong-think-doubleplusungood-SJW-bullshit” fandom has seemed to embrace. One of the first things that I did when I exited my self-imposed exile (yeah, I pretty much cut myself off from almost all things fannish and genre-related for my own peace of mind) was to find something good to read out of the modern stuff that I had denied myself for so long. A lot of your stuff came up on my radar and I was not disappointed.

    Then I saw the various SJW attacks against you. People who I thought were “smarter than that” told me that I should not support your work because of “buzzword, bullshit-buzzword, ‘You’re a black guy and you should understand and agree with all of this, meme-think-buzzword, buzzword, et al, et nauseam….” None of those reasons listed for me to not read your stuff even approached saying that your stories were not good or that you couldn’t write. This was after I had read “Monster Hunter International,” and had started raving about it to my friends. So, I looked up all of “the horrible things” that you had allegedly written for myself.

    As a former martial artist, I saw nothing wrong with women’s self-defense (especially since I have assisted in teaching more than a few classes myself). As a veteran, I’m quite the firearms enthusiast. And then I stepped on the proverbial “banana peel” and fell screaming down into “SJW-hell.” The “puppies” stuff alone, gave me mental indigestion for days.

    And that led me to where I am right now…on your blog. With me wearing that particular look on my face that only comes from discovering that you weren’t watching where you walked and subsequently stepped on a hot, steaming, dog turd, while wearing your $100.00 Vibram Five Fingers KSOs. These SJWs are systematically taking a royal piss on everything that made fandom such a wonderful thing. I don’t give a damn about a writer’s politics, not to mention, their ethnicity, race, sex (OEM, after-market, or otherwise contrived), sexual preference, or any other designation. I just want them to tell stories that I like and write those stories well. But apparently, that’s too much too ask for in our “politically/socially correct” day and age.

    So, to close…Larry, I enjoy your writing, Please keep doing so. Don’t let these bastards win.

    And if you need another gun in the trench, hit me up…I got your back.

    1. Thanks. That is much appreciated.

      And welcome. You’ll find here and over on my FB page a whole bunch of fans who are opinionated, love to argue and debate about everything, but they aren’t going to try to hurt anybody’s career over disagreements. They get that entertainment is about fun rather than preaching.

      1. Now, now, the poor little Jonnie needs to get in his virtue signaling drive by troll attempt as a way to quench the massive amount of liberal guilt & angst that most white male SJW’s possess.
        Because little Jonnie feels Oh So Guilty about his upper middle class Bourgeoisie lifestyle, but isn’t exactly going to sell all he has and join the Peace Corp. He may whinge and lecture about the Evils of Cis-Male White Privilege, but isn’t going to turn down a promotion in favor of a minority candidate. He wants to Save the Earth, but can only be arsed to sort out the trash into the recycling maybe every other month. He knows he should volunteer at the local shelter or youth program, but will probably get to it next week. He things taxes should be higher on the Rich, but snags every exemption he can get.
        So, this is his weak tea, weak kneed way of pretending he’s Doing Something.
        Sad, really.

    1. Uh…I’m an African American semi-liberal and I find a lot of what’s going on with all of the SJW counter-culture to be more of a hindrance toward equality than anything to date. There’s nothing wrong with diversity but it has to come naturally. You can’t shame or scare (the countless personal attacks that are a common tactic within the SJW playbook) people into following your viewpoint.

      In fact, the SJWs are becoming that which they claim to loathe…how ironic is that? Or do I have to bring up the latest example of “cry-bullying;” the physical assault on the San Francisco State University campus of a white male student by an African American woman simply because she objected to his wearing dreadlocks. (To sum it up, the woman began berating the man over issues of “cultural appropriation” and it ended with her grabbing, pulling, and shoving him before he walked away and then her subsequent attack against the person who filmed the encounter). Social and physical incidents like this are happening all over the country, targeting white males and it’s no better now than it was when it was happening to African Americans 50+ years ago.

      You don’t like a person’s politics…that’s your choice. Vote the way that you want. You don’t like a person’s social views? Then don’t associate with them…again, it’s your choice. But to attack a person economically, physically, and socially over those items is to piss on what America stands for and to ignore the struggles of the people who fought for equality decades ago. There are countless examples in history where people have forced others to adhere to their viewpoint…we can easily see how that worked out for those societies.

      In the end, this particular issue on this thread is nothing more than a discussion about an attempt to attack and damage a person’s livelihood over alleged social politics. What does it say about you as a human being that you would defend such abhorrent behavior? Aren’t these kind of things that alleged progressives are supposed to fight against?

  40. The irony here is that it is the exaggerated, poorly researched or even hysterical lies of people like Walter and other feminists which has shown how perfectly justified the Puppy movement was. Don’t be surprised how much those supporting feminism want to obsess over and draw Puppies into useless talk about “slates” rather than talk about what caused those “slates” in the first place. The reason for that is that’s where feminists get killed every time. We have unpacked these feminist grievances and lies one by one and shown them to be nothing more than an empty front for an ideology which hates whites and men and has a laughable phobia of normal human sexuality. It is not hundreds of millions of ethnic Europeans, half the people on Earth or 97% of the population which are “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobes” and “neo-Nazis” but the tiny lunatic fringe in SFF which is a racist, misandrist and heterophobic analogy to anti-Semitism.

    1. And right on cue File 101 collates its own Hugo noms for us. To no one’s surprise, it’s the same approximately 80% feminist shithole the Hugos themselves have recently reflected. There’s no need for a slate in a congregation, or even individual names. As long as its ideology is featured, the names are interchangeable and rotate from year to year. And it’s always the same names: Dillon, Jemisin, Leckie, Wong, Strange Horizons, Meadows, de Bodard…

      It’s like a merry-go-round where virtue-signaling trumps art. Wave the little red book and you’re in. Talent and creativity get vacuumed up and pumped out to sea. The hilarity is File 101 has even created its own mini-Hall of Fame of virtue-signalers: Glyer, Erin, Vernon, Nicoll. That is not art but feminist nepotism where the historically evil straight white male must pay for early 20th century women choosing to not read or write SFF. These people may not know who Monique Wittig or Gayle Rubin are but they bleat their writings like intersectional parrots. That is exactly how “consciousness raising” and mainstreaming operate.

    1. That moron needs to grow a pair of balls and pretend to man-up.

      Oh wait, maybe, he already had them cut off to fulfill his fantasy of being a real non-white female lesbian instead of an LGBT wannabe non-white female the lesbians wouldn’t touch because he still had his atrophied man-parts.

    1. It’s got to be able to get better than this. I looked at Bee Sriduangkaew’s Twitter page and was forcibly struck by the realization that receiving hate from her could conceivably be a badge of honor (unless perhaps it’s hate for failing to be a sufficiently authentic practitioner of those arts which for centuries were considered deserving of being rewarded by stoning).

    2. Yeah… That’s totally what’s killing Damien’s fiction writing career (and not the part where he’d actually have to like write something first).

  41. A little late perhaps, but Damien Walter pisses off even female science fiction writers like Eleanor Arnason:
    http://www.womeninsciencefiction.com/?p=357

    “What Are We, Chopped Liver?

    The English paper The Guardian has a columnist who covers science fiction and fantasy. It’s good, I guess, to get that kind of attention from a major newspaper. But the columnist, Damien Walter, has a limited knowledge of the field. Recently, he did a column with a headline that said, “2014: The Year that Science Fiction Woke Up to Diversity.” The column goes on to argue that last year was when SF finally discovered women and people of color (PoC) and produced books about gender issues.

    My response was fury. My personal knowledge of SF goes back to the 1950s. Even then, there were women in the field: Leigh Bracket, C. L. Moore, Shirley Jackson, Judith Merrill, Zenna Henderson, Katherine MacLean. That’s off the top of my head.”

    And:

    “If we see this as a sudden explosion, then we are ignoring the writers who did work in the past and whose work may be ignored now, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of “SF was all male and white until yesterday.”

    1. I’ve pointed it out before, but I don’t think Damien actually has read very many books. He is woefully ignorant about the history of the genre, and when he does talk about books it mostly sounds like a Wiki synopsis.

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