I haven’t done a Fisking in a while! But to be fair I haven’t infuriated the internet this much in several months. My crime? I dedicated the sixth and final book (which comes out February) of my epic fantasy series to George RR Martin.
The original article will be in italics and my responses will be in bold.
Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book
Story by Dan Selcke
• 23h • 3 min read
Yeah, 3 minutes to read, 10 minutes for me to point out all the bullshit in it.
George R.R. Martin is the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, which was adapted for TV as Game of Thrones.
Which made George one of the wealthiest and most famous writers in human history, but we’ll get back to that part.
Only the producers behind Game of Thrones had to finish the story before Martin finished the source material; he released the last book in his series, A Dance With Dragons, way back in 2011. Fans have been waiting for the sixth book, The Winds of Winter, for over a decade at this point.
That’s a nice way of saying that babies who were born when the last book came out are now learning to drive.
And Martin will still have at least one more book to write, A Dream of Spring, after that.
And this will still totally happen, provided he lives to be a hundred and forty years old.
Martin’s exceedingly slow writing pace with Winds has become legendary among fans, with some wondering if he’ll ever finish the book.
“Some wondering” is doing some profoundly heavy lifting in that sentence. As I discovered this week after kicking the GRRM Simp Hornet’s Nest on Twitter, normal readers have all given up on the series ever being finished, and the only people who hold out hope have cartoon avatars, their entire personality is based on a TV show, and their screen name is Daemon Tagyaren Daenerys Uterus or something like that.
Fantasy author Larry Correia — who is publishing the sixth and final book in his own epic fantasy series, Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, in February — has noticed.
Well, it is kind of hard not to notice after watching George’s lazy hubris burn a significant part of the epic fantasy market so badly that those customers have given up trying new series until they are done. Thus fucking over an entire generation of new authors, because if nobody will try their first books, they can’t afford to finish the series. Guys like George are fine. He’s got his. Guys like me were fine because we were already established, but don’t kid yourself, George (and a few notable others) fucked over a whole bunch of careers.
I go into detail about that in this link. It is a real fucking problem. If you want to know the real reason I dunk on George, it is this here-
He’s included a dig at Martin on the dedication page of his new book, Heart of the Mountain. “To George R.R. Martin,” Correia writes. “See? It’s not that hard.”
Is this a playful jab or a petty insult?
Trolling, mostly.
It’s probably closer to the latter, seeing as how Martin and Correia have locked horns before.
And now we get into the biased bullshit section of the article. Because of the Brandolini Principle it is going to take me an order of magnitude more effort to refute their bullshit than it took this writer to create it.
Their last public clash involves the Hugo Awards, which are handed out every year to honor the best in science fiction and fantasy fiction.
That’s the problem right there, they’d stopped being about “honoring the best”. I’m the guy who made it public that those awards were really about politically like-minded assholes giving awards to their connected buddies, while excluding every author who wasn’t part of their clique. (and best part, as we shall see, George RR Martin ADMITTED I WAS RIGHT)
Martin has been attending the Hugos since the 1970s, while Correia got involved in the 2010s.
George was nominated for the Campbell Award for best new writer around when I was born. I was nominated for the exact same Campbell Award for best new writer thirty something years later, which was when I saw that entire system was rigged bullshit catering to the tastes of angsty old hippies who had a complete fucking come apart when George Bush got elected.
To make a very long story short,
I like how this totally unbiased reporter links to Wired for a political topic. Never change, progs. Never change.
Correia was involved with a faction of Hugo voters called the Sad Puppies, who thought that too many awards were going to authors who wrote about social issues.
“Social issues” is code for lefty message fiction written by proper Manhattan approved authors. You know, the usual Dying Polar Bears, Everybody Rapes a Robot, bossy preachy claptrap which chased most normal readers out of reading sci-fi.
They conspired to manipulate the voting process and push the authors didn’t like off the ballots.
Ha! By “conspired” they mean I—in public—put up a bunch of blog posts (with a cartoon manatee as my spokesman) to get conservative and libertarian fans involved, and by “manipulate” they mean I did the exact same thing proper approved liberal authors had been doing forever and asked my fans to go vote. And by push them off the ballots, that means we got on and they didn’t, because more of my fans voted than theirs did. HOW NEFARIOUS. DEMOCRACY IS THREATENED! Someone call Liz Cheney!
A smaller faction known as the Rabid Puppies did much the same thing, only with a lot more overt racism, homophobia and sexism.
The difference was my people (SP) didn’t want to destroy it, we just wanted a fair shake at these awards that were claiming to be about picking “the best” (we called ourselves the Sad Puppies, because it was a joke on the whole Sarah McLachlan commercial for animal shelters that showed sad dogs in the rain while singing In The Arms of an Angel, and how boring liberal message fic was the leading cause of puppy related sadness).
The Rabids came along the next year after the Hugo libs treated those conservative fans I brought in like shit and told us our kind weren’t welcome. We (SP) tried to save the awards. They (RP) said fuck it, it deserves to burn down. Asshole reporters have loved confusing the two on purpose ever since.
Also, that whole racism/homophobia/sexism angle was utter fucking bullshit the WorldCon libs launched at Sad Puppies as soon as my people got on the ballot. Bigotry had fuck all to do with what I did. We were just trying to get a bunch of good writers who normally got shunned a chance.
How much is that whole racism/sexism thing a blatant fucking lie? The year before I got involved the winners were 14 white liberals and 1 Asian liberal and these vapid fucks hailed that as “a huge win for diversity”. Then I got outsiders on the ballot, they freaked out and there was an organized news blitz about how I was a racist hate monger trying to keep women and minorities out of publishing. (By nominating a bunch of women and minorities for an award? Huh?)
For example check this Entertainment Weekly article out, including the best fucking retraction ever (which I got after I lawyered up and said I was going to sue them for defamation)
https://ew.com/article/2015/04/06/hugo-award-nominations-sad-puppies/
That’s right. It turns out that my nominees were actually far more diverse than usual. Racially, sexually, religiously, and most of all politically (GASP!). I even got surprised a few of them were gay because I never asked. I didn’t give a shit what boxes anybody checked, I was just nominating good writers and editors who’d always previously been shunned because they didn’t sit at the high school mean girls table.
This scam where libs accuse everybody who disagrees with them of racism/sexism until we go away was relatively new and exciting back then. Sad Puppies was an early battle in the culture war, but now everybody has caught on to their grift. We hit Peak Woke a couple years back, America said no more, and election day put that casket in the ground. Nobody believes these dorks anymore.
It was a strange scandal that resulted in a lot of the big Hugo Awards going to “No Winnter” in 2015.
No WinnTer? Nice job, professional media outlet MSN. What actually happened is after I got a bunch of outsiders nominated, two thousand new voters suddenly materialized from the ether to No Award every category. Because if they couldn’t have it, then nobody will.
These fuckers, in the name of “diversity” blocked a Jewish single mom, who was one of the most respected editors in the history of science fiction, who got the most nominating votes for the editor category in the history of the awards, who had been involved in their cons and their precious fandom for THIRTY YEARS, and they kicked her to the curb like trash because when she FINALLY got nominated, it was by right wingers (previous to this the same few white male liberal editors from one Manhattan publishing house took turns getting the award every year, as is proper and good).
And then at the ceremony, they handed out wooden assholes to all my nominees (keep in mind, I’m the political one, not those writers or editors). And (alleged) serial rapist Neil Gaiman got up on stage and said “fuck the Sad Puppies.” That’s how vile and insular these assholes are.*
So no. There’s nothing “petty” about my insults.
*on that bit, it is crazy that of my loudest detractors during all that, proud “Male Feminists” who kept screaming how Sad Puppies was misogynist (even though half of us were female), like a dozen of them have since been revealed to be some kind of pervert or sexual predator? What an odd coincidence.
Martin has been involved with the Hugos for a long time and was not a fan of what the Sad and Rabid Puppies were doing.
At the convention George Martin spent a bunch of money and threw a banquet celebrating my nominees who had dropped out due to his side’s career threats and peer pressure. He’s classy like that.
He and Correia wrote back and forth about their perspectives on the matter, much of which is preserved online, like on Martin’s blog. Their exchanges are very wordy, but it basically breaks down to Correia claiming that he felt shut out of the cool kids’ club at the Hugo Awards and was thus justified in ruining the awards for everyone, while Martin argued back that he was behaving like a bitter angry loser desperate to feel like a victim despite his work being on The New York Times Best Seller list.
That is truly the dumbest fucking take ever.
That’s my paraphrase, of course.
And you should be proud that it is that fucking dumb, because that takes some effort. You reached for the stars, and the stars looked down and said “wow, that is fucking dumb.”
But the point is that these two had a little internet feud back in the day,
Actually no. That little internet feud came out in my favor so much it was either the Boston Globe or the New York Times which tried to cover for George’s bloviating ass by labeling him “George Martin, son of a humble longshoreman” even though he was like the richest author in the world at the time, while I was “Bestselling author, Larry Correia” even though I was a relative nobody. How come I didn’t get to be Larry Correia, son of a humble Portuguese dairy farmer?
Ironically, that isn’t the first time I’ve been the heavy for “punching down” against a liberal billionaire in a fight. Probably won’t be the last.
Here’s links to our whole exchange, but the most important thing about it, which all these lying ass dorks always manage to leave out, all that stuff I alleged about authors getting excluded because of the wrong politics? Saint George ADMITTED I WAS RIGHT. In his lecturing, sea lioning, and hurumphing, on accident, George helped me prove my point more than anyone else.
These are super long, and looking back it is hilarious how polite I tried to be back then. Ten years later my thin veneer of civility got ground off entirely by these pricks, and I’m way past giving a fuck about fake nice.
and
https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/14/george-r-r-martin-responds/
But the important thing here is that George screwed up and admitted what I was saying was true. They’d always claimed that the Hugos were for the best of all fandom, but George was the first big shot to admit that was a lie, and it was actually their precious special little thing that belonged to them only.
which might explain why Correia decided to taunt Martin on the dedication page for his new book rather than, I don’t know, thank his family or something.
Can I just note how incredibly fucking stupid that bit is? Why didn’t I dedicate this book to family or something? Well, because I’ve written 28 other books before this, I’ve dedicated lots of books to close family and friends already and (unlike George) I’ve got more books coming. This book got dedicated to him because it is the final book in a 6 book epic fantasy series, which I STARTED after his last book came out, and I’m sorry, that’s just funny.
Clearly the argument still bugs him.
That’s backwards actually. That argument with George proved that I was right. (and the Hugos have since tried extra hard to prove me right ever since, by going super crazy woke, leaning even harder into the identity politics, and eventually ending up as a bootlicking censorship tool for the government of Communist China). What bugs me about George is that first bit about how his laziness fucked over a generation of new authors, not when he inadvertently proved my point.
Anyway, The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior begins by introducing us to Ashok Vadal, who is charged with enforcing the brutal law of Correia’s fantasy world.
One funny note on my main character’s name, when the 70 IQ simp brigade (and I swear every one of these was named after a GoT character, their entire profile was GoT shit, and they all had Palestinian flags after their name, like they’d come off some cookie cutter assembly line for clichés) rolled into Twitter to bark at me, one dork sneered “Ashok Vadal, what kind of stupid name is that?” and somebody responded “It’s Hindi, racist” and the first dork promptly deleted his tweet.
I’m sorry, internet randos are so dumb it’s hilarious. Having a bunch of broke Gen Z kids who named themselves Jamie Tyrion Hufflepuff defend the lazy mega rich boomer who wrote half a series about pseudo-Englishmen by calling the little guy Gen Xer—with a complete series where all the characters are Indian—a racist has been a hoot.
The first book in the series, Son of the Black Sword, came out in 2015. Nine years later, it wraps up with Heart of the Mountain. Obviously, Correia’s series isn’t anywhere near as well-known as Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire,
No shit, sherlock. HBO gave him the greatest marketing campaign in the history of books. George made like a billion dollars. But the thing about George’s entire career, and this is common knowledge in the publishing business, he only works when he’s hungry. And HBO made it so he’ll never be hungry again.
so taunting Martin in the dedication page, petty though it is, may be good for exposure. We’ll see if all press is good press when Heart of the Mountain drops on February 4.
Maybe. We’ll see. Honestly I’d still have done it either way, because it made me and my friends laugh, but the important thing as the son of a humble Portuguese dairy farmer, that lack of work ethic offends me.
As for when The Winds of Winter might come out, who knows?
I’m guessing that will be sometime after the publisher pays James S.A. Corey to finish it.
At least a bunch of chapters are already available to read: To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.
From that accurate quality reporting, I’d rather get a colonoscopy.
This article was originally published on winteriscoming.com as Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book.
And not even proof read, because MSN is as lazy as George R.R. Martin.
