I have to hand it to those goons who made up a slate of ‘conservative’ science fiction and slammed it into the Hugo nominations: I’d had this vague assumption that science fiction fans would be generally progressive and tolerant and even enthusiastic about different ideas. The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies have enlightened and disillusioned me.
Well, actually, it’s been the other side that has brought me awareness. While slapping down the misconceptions of the Vox Day ilk, I’ve been taught so much. For instance, Jeet Heer reveals the dark side of SF professionals. I did not know this about John Campbell; he had an interesting reason for rejecting Samuel Delany’s story, Nova.
John W. Campbell, the contentious and influential editor of Analog, claimed he enjoyed shaking up his audience with outrageous ideas, but Nova proved too much for him. According to Delany, Campbell called the author’s agent and said that while he liked the novel “he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Campbell’s contention that fans weren’t ready for a book like Nova was belied by the fact that it was shortlisted for a Hugo in 1969.
Campbell used his audience as cover for his own racism. In 1968, he penned an editorial endorsing the segregationist George Wallace for president. Earlier, he had published editorials arguing that slavery was a perfectly sensible system for pre-industrial societies, championing the racial theories of William Shockley and asserting, “One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.” Tellingly, among the few occasions that Campbell did allow fiction with black protagonists, it was in a series involving race war in Africa.
Wow. So I’ve been reading a genre that has in part filtered out a significant set of contributions? That’s good to know.
As for the Puppies, there have been some revelations emerging.
The Puppies are busily trying to delete things off the internet (we all know that’s virtually impossible to do, but the effort at a coverup tells us everything we need to know about you.) John C. Wright has apparently been trying to hide the evidence of his temper tantrum over a program showing two women holding hands.
You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.
Ooops. There’s another copy on the internet now.
Another thing the two Puppies have been up to that is transparently false is putting up a pretense that the Sad Puppies are moderates, and it’s those wicked Rabid Puppies that are the extremists. But all the evidence says that the two groups were coordinating every step of the way. There aren’t two Puppies, there’s one, playing two roles.
There’s an old strategy at play here, one used to force people to do or give you what you want. Sometimes called good cop/bad cop, it involves one person appearing to be reasonable while the other person makes the threats — even though both people are seeking the same or similar outcomes.
Basically, you let someone else be the heavy. You let that person threaten to destroy everything others love unless you get your way. That way you don’t have your fingerprints all over the nasty nasty bad stuff.
The Puppies claimed to have simply been crowd-sourcing their nominations — that their slate evolved from entirely democratic discussions on their blogs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be true at all: those comment threads are still available, and popular choices were ignored and the final slate included works that had never been mentioned.
In other words, of the 16 written fiction nominees on Torgerson’s slate, 11 – more than two-thirds – had not actually been nominated by anyone in the crowd-sourced discussion from which, we are told, the slate emerged.
Gosh. So if these nominees were not the product of any kind of democratic process, not even a process limited to a couple of right-wing blogs, where did those other titles come from?
Out of all the nominated works, nine of them come from the same micro-publisher, a Finland-based outfit known as Castalia House. The founder and sole proprietor of Castalia House, Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day), gets a 10th nomination for Best Editor.
That’s a lot of exposure for one tiny publishing house. Moreover, of those nine Castalia House nominations, one man—John C. Wright—got six of them this year, including three out of five of the nominations for Best Novella.
Cute. So what this really was was a ploy by two people, Theodore Beale and John C. Wright, with their obliging stalking horse Larry Correia, gaming the system for personal gain. So where are all those people who were so concerned about ethics in gaming journalism? Shouldn’t they be outraged by this violation of ethics in science fiction award nominations?
Charles Stross is a smart guy who is also conscious of the evil that lurks below, and he has an interesting hypothesis about Vox Day’s game here.
My guess: the Hugo awards are not remotely as diverse and interesting as the SFWAs Nebula Awards—an organization from which Vox Day became only the second person ever to be expelled. I believe he bears SFWA (and former SFWA President John Scalzi) no love, and the qualification for SFWA membership (which confers Nebula voting rights) is to have professionally published three short stories or a novel. Castalia House is a publishing entity with a short story anthology series. Is the real game plan "Hugos today: Nebulas tomorrow?"
You need to publish stories to qualify for voting for the Nebula award? No problem! Vox Day will professionally publish your crappy stories as long as they’re ideologically palatable, and he’ll get them nominated for a Hugo!
Asimov chronicled in his autobiographies Campbell’s leanings to the right (Asimov, of course, was very left). Campbell didn’t want any fiction that had other species or alien races that were superior to humans, for instance. Campbell was also involved in the early days of the ‘Dianetics’ movement and later on moved into other areas of pseudoscience.
Heinlein became notoriously conservative after he married his 3rd wife. Asimov compared it to left-leaning Reagan getting married to Nancy and his subsequent change in politics.
Stross reckons that Castalia House is part of a larger plan, too. There are plenty more SF book awards that Vox Day can shit upon. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/the-biggest-little-sf-publishe.html
It is like he doesn’t even stop to reflect on what he is doing and saying even as he ascribes his behaviour to other people. I wonder if his frantic scrabbling to delete these sorts of rants is a sign of some belated self awareness? Eh, probably not.
I have never been into reading the biographies/autobiographies of authors, so I often miss their political predilections. But Campbell is a perfect example of why those matter: I was oblivious to his bias, but as an influential editor, he was basically policing what I got to read, and my vision of the field was skewed by his bigotry.
That’s an interesting comparison. Were astrologers involved there too?
Unfortunately Asimov himself had clay feet. Specifically he had a bad habit of grabbing women’s rears.
I saw Asimov’s address at the 50th Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention (Philcon) in 1986 (I wish to FSM I could find the audio cassette I recorded at the show; I’d love to digitize it and put it on Youtube or something), and he talked about his early career and made specific mention of how, though he loved and respected Campbell, Campbell was quite the racist and anti-Semite.
One anecdote I specifically remember was Asimov saying how, as a boy, he wanted his first big story to be published in Campbell’s “Astounding”. But with Campbell’s anti-Semitism, he normally would reject a “foreign sounding” name like Isaac Asimov, on the basis that “readers wouldn’t accept it,” so some writers published there worked under pseudonyms. But, as it turned out, Asimov’s first story was published in another magazine (I forget the name). But this worked out for the best, because when Asimov did get his first story accepted for Astounding, he was able to convince Campbell to publish it under his own name because his name had already been used in that other magazine, and the world hadn’t ended (and that magazine hadn’t lost sales). So in hindsight he is glad he didn’t have his first story published in Astounding, because if he had, his works would have been written by some suitably Anglo-Saxon pen name, such as “Ian Ashford.”
So where are all those people who were so concerned about ethics in gaming journalism? Shouldn’t they be outraged by this violation of ethics in science fiction award nominations?
No, because this isn’t gaming journalism and that is their standard ‘out’ when it comes to addressing anything that is actually unethical… like their own behaviour. Naturally, this is never mentioned whenever it would be inconvenient, like when they want to browbeat people talking about something that displeases them.
Actually Gamergaters were actually recruited by the puppies to help stack the nominations.
Campbell also penned a long defense of the Kent State shootings.
Brett McCoy
I’m glad there’s a Woman to Blame™
We wouldn’t want to think that men are resonsible for their own thinking.
timgueguen
That’s not a “bad habit”. It’s fucking sexual assault. Yes, he was a serial sexual harasser.
Great article to which my reply is little more than a sigh. So many great authors have something unhealthy and twisted burning within that seems to fuel their craft. It’s a shame that Campbell’s vice only serves to stifle his own works in an era where good SF seems harder to come by than ever before.
Oh, I’m pretty sure a majority of science fiction fans are progressive and tolerant and openminded: something you should have learned by now is that openminded people, by and large, are more likely than average to be unassertive, demure, and slow to exact retribution; whereas the tiniest slight, real or imagined, suffice to put bigots on the path of war.
I wouldn’t venture to predict how this will play out, but it seems very possible that an overwhelming backlash could occur, to sweep the bogus nominations away (much like what occurred at the end of The Pritcher Mass.)
MacAllister Stone links to a very relevant editorial by Connie Willis.
Wright’s absolutely vicious screed against Terry Pratchett told me everything I need to know.
:spits:
caseloweraz:
Unfortunately, VD isn’t one to walk away, and he really appears to think this is an important battle (as well as a matter of personal pride). If he doesn’t get his way this year, expect further shenanigans next year, and the year after…
I really think this may be the end of the Hugos, at least as awards to be taken semi-seriously.
Caine
I did not read it to the end. The glorification of suffering, it’s disgusting.
My grandmother is dying. Slowly, painfully. And because her mind is mostly gone, she cannot voice her wishes and we cannot help her except of keeping her comfortable. Fuck those who wish more suffering on a dying person.
J. Michael Straczynski had an interesting take on the situation which basically boiled down to…
If the Hugos this year are legitimate, however much gamed, then hand them out and stop yelling.
If the Hugos this year are not legitimate, then don’t hand them out.
For those interested, the whole article is on his Facebook fan-page….
Caine @ 14;
Wright’s ranting manifesto for idiotic cruelty made for ugly reading. He really does seem cut from the same blood soaked cloth as Mother Teresa when it comes to notions of ‘mercy’.
I wills ay one thing for his inane and hateful witterings though; the parallel he draws between euthanasia and abortion;
Does at least serve one useful purpose – it makes very clear how closely related the mindset of anti-choicers and the pro-suffering anti-euthanasia brigade really are; both hold meaningless abstract values of the notional ‘sanctity’ of life higher than the bodily autonomy and quality of life of actual people, and both see suffering as noble and pursuant to some imagined divine will, at least just so long as that suffering isn’t their own.
————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 16;
It is sickening evil, and exactly what I have come to expect from the ‘religion of love’.
I am sorry to hear that, Giliell. Losing a loved one, especially in such a fashion as that, is a terrible thing. After my father underwent his final stroke, I had to watch him slowly fade over the course of weeks, seeing peices of the person he was lost forever, and could do nothing to stop it. It was the hardest, most painful experience of my life. If there is anything I can do, just let me know.
My sentiments exactly.
So this ST:DS9 episode was inspired by reality, then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Beyond_the_Stars
I never knew that (and I’m pretty sure I’ve never read the referenced story).
@Giliell, I’m so sorry, and I hope she is as comfortable as is possible under the circumstances.
I doubt VD thinks this is an “important battle”. VD’s entire job is demagoguery. As someone pointed out here a while ago, he has a long history of trying to pick public fights with popular liberal male bloggers – Bad Astronomer at one point, I think, and then of course Scalzi – and has variously tried to hook himself up to whatever shitbag movement du jour is trending, because that’s how he keeps his name in front of his base and the money coming in. He’ll have moved on from the Hugos next year to some other kerfluffle.
laurentweppe@12: IOW, Yeats was right that far:
You mean that John C Wright wrote the following and tried to disguise the fact?
Are you sure? Because I’m certain that John C Wright, being a man of principle, has said would never back down from the positions he has taken. Or am I thinking of another John C Wright?
Of course if John C Wright is trying to cover his tracks then perhaps he hopes people mentioning his vile screed will not repeat his name when posting to make it easy for search algorithms to find it.
David @ 17
Some of the yelling seems to be discussing how to register if one thinks the Hugos are legitimate (via No Award on the ballot), making sure folks know what’s going on so they can make the choice, and about changes to nomination processes that make it harder to do this again. (Given that Day seems to threaten that he’s going to keep doing this until he gets what he wants. Maybe someone should spray-paint a foam rocket silver for him?)
(I also wonder even if Day can keep this going — investing in a publishing house suggests he has a longer term interest — he still has to keep his followers from getting distracted.)
#14, caine
I wonder if he knew that early christians had no problem with suicide. Maybe he’s hoping that modern christians can sweep that sort of thing under the rug, like an embarassing blog post.
It’s not that the best lack conviction: it’s that the best often have a strong distaste towards ferity, and it takes a long time, and a lot of abuse to truly infuriate the dirty hippies (of course, when you finally drive them beyond the pale, you get people like Garibaldi, Jean Moulin, Mandela, Ghandi… people who clove the status quo and reshaped history when they decided to throw down the gauntlet… A lesson the bigots never learned)
Has Vox Day ever considered writing about a disgruntled and inadequate bigot who tries to game the system? Because I feel this might be one area he actually has some insight on and frankly, as well as being a pretty revolting human being, he’s also a truly awful writer and surrounded by truly awful writers and he needs a new angle.
Thanx neverjaunty and Gregory Greenwood
My sister’S doing her best to keep her out of pain
For future reference, FSTDT has been cataloging John C. Wright’s batshittery for years. The fact that he is trying to cover his tracks now is hilarious.
From the linked article:
Jeet Heer has written an excellent article in all other respects, but putting Sturgeon and Herbert in the “rule-based” basket is just plain wrong.
Wow. That FSTDT ref — I was boggled by his account of how he knows Jesus is God, but blown away by the discovery that John C. Wright is an ignorant creationist.
Gosh, John C. Wright sure is a pompous wanker — up there (maybe exceeding) Conrad Black and David Warren. “As a professional rhetorician myself….”. And a philosopher. And just general all-round renaissance man, I suppose. What is it with these Christian blow-hards and their writing style?
Yep, SF definitely has a right wing side. I see it in military SF. A few years back a local con made it its theme and I tell you, the right wing nuts came out in droves. In the local community I saw one person wore a “I’d rather be Waterboarding” t-shirt. Another said the C in NAACP stood for criminal. Who can forget about Orson Scott Card’s rants? SF gives people the chance to make their own worlds and we shouldn’t be surprised if some people create their own ideological paradise. Nothing’s wrong with that by itself. I’m writing a story about how religion winds up destroying Humankind and how secular aliens save us. But my story will never be published because it’s private. My will even has instructions to delete it in the even of my death.
Yep, behavior like what we see with the Hugos doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Gregory Greenwood:
QFT.
–
@31, Eamon Knight
you mean like this?
I actually bought one of John Wright’s books (because of an amazon recommendation) and enjoyed it as a fair basic space opera. After discovering, thanks to the hugo slate shenanigans and related commentary, that he’s a homophobic religious bigot as well as a gaming the hugo nominations, I won’t be finishing the series unless I stumble on his books used at a yard sale.
Campbell also allegedly pressured Heinlein into making “6th column” a bit more rabidly anti-Chinese than Heinlein originally wanted it to be. I mean, hey, what’s racist about having a magical weapon that only targets “pan asians” for eradication? Admittedly the book came out in 1949 — but that doesn’t excuse science fiction, which is supposed to be looking toward the future, and not our own navels.
he’ll get them nominated for a Hugo!
It’s not too late for someone to write a book called “No Award”
Ever heard of Wouter Basson? He was (or is: I think he’s still alive) a south african pro-apartheid doctor who tried to develop a biological weapon capable of killing Blacks while sparing Whites (in order to genocide south-african Blacks in case of a successful Black uprising: yes: at one point, South African elites had reached a level of stupidity equal to the Thrintun’s). Under his tutelage, numerous gruesome experiments were done using south-african Blacks as guinea pigs, but the final irony of it all was that the only thing his naziesque career managed to do was demonstrate beyond any doubt that Blacks and Whites are so identical on a biological level that any weapon that would be lethal to one group would be equally lethal to the other.
laurentweppe
Wow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wouter_Basson
Nice guy.
….
also
reference to ancient Larry Niven, for the win
First, I expected this to be about San Francisco. Oh well.
Second, this whole section just tickled my funny bone.
Condensed because who really needs to read that whole thing more than once?
[1] I’m confused. I thought the standard right-wing nutjob objection to lesbians is that they didn’t worship the phallic idol of sodomy. Or at least, they offended said idol by using silicone imitations (blasphemy!)
[2] Best unintentional pun I’ve seen in a long time. At least, I hope it was unintentional.
Finally, I have a ludicrous image in my head of Wright at, say, the Folsom Street Fair leaping left and right to smack dildos out of people’s hands, all the while screaming “WRIGHT SMASH!”
Wright at, say, the Folsom Street Fair leaping left and right to smack dildos out of people’s hands, all the while screaming “WRIGHT SMASH!”
He would never be so succinct.
Not quite. It’s for both looking into the future and into ourselves. SF is about our place in the universe and how we cope with it. Fundamentally it’s about the human condition. All the aliens, space-gods, zombies, alternate selves, etc are a reflection on us. For example the Star Trek episode “Let That be Your Last Battlefield” and not see what it says about racist beliefs in humanity. Sci-fi lets us navel gaze in new and different ways to give us a better perspective on ourselves.
Good cop/bad cop observation is so obvious and yet I didn’t see it. Same basic strategy the Gamergaters use (and since the Puppies have been trying to use the Gaters, that overlap in strategy makes a good deal of sense).
A funny thing about the military SF, though. A lot of the writers are assumed to be right wing simply because there’s guns go boom in the story. But no. Those fans are idiots.
For instance, Eric Flint is a die-hard socialist. And he’s a collaborator of David Weber who is very pro gender equality and makes it a theme in some of his work. Even Scalzi was once assumed to be right wing because y’know, Old Man’s War, it’s about War and War is Manly, right?
Has Flint’s piece been posted here yet? This is good. http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2015/04/16/some-comments-on-the-hugos-and-other-sf-awards/
From around 201-2004, I was in a wide-ranging email discussion group with John C. Wright, before he’d gotten anything published. This was before I was an atheist, but I was still the lone liberal up against a gang of conservatives. If anyone is interested, I can provide a truckload of similar quotes from him. The second coming of GK Chesteron and CS Lewis rolled into one — that’s him.
I just read that awful blog post about Pterry. Far too soon to read such bile about my hero.
I’m just cannot fathom this glorification of suffering — specifically, of *other people* suffering, as if it is some sort of moral good.
‘Acute toothache can burn through all but the strongest in faith*’, oh but do pass the panadol when it happens to them. The suffering of others though, is good for their souls because, erm… Reasons.
*Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
@ brucegee1962
Oh, please do. Get them in the public domain so everyone can see what a scumbag he is.
This reminded me of an episode of Deep Space Nine. Hey wait give me a second it’s pertinent, really!
I looked it up and it’s episode 137 called “”Far Beyond The Stars”. It’s a rare episode where the actors don’t play their usual characters, they all play humans in the 1950’s.
The thing about this episode is that Sisko is having these “visions” of himself as a black science fiction writer in the 1950’s that writes for one of those sci-fi pulp mags where they get pennies a word. There is a lot to chew over in the episode about various issues, pay inequality, police brutality, too many to get into. One of the main story arcs in the episode is that Sisko has written a story with a black protagonist and the editor won’t publish it because he says “People won’t accept a negro space station captain” or something along those lines, and tells Sisko to change it to a white guy. The story Sisko wrote is the story of DS9 where he is of course captain and he says “That’s not the way i wrote it”. But it’s not a typical Star Trek alternate reality universe theme.
Also I recall one of the characters played by the actor who usually plays O’Brien, he likes to write stories about robots and is clearly based on Asimov. So I’m thinking maybe the writers of DS9 were basing other characters like the editor who won’t publish Sisko’s story on someone like Campbell or someone very similar. Maybe the writers of the show we’re very aware of this kind of attitude in science fiction publishing and decided to include that in the show. I mean, the similarities are astounding really. (pun intended sorry)
The final story I think involves less woo than DS9 usually had with it religious themes. Sisko’s sci-fi writer character, I think, is supposed to be the dreamer, his existence is the reality while the DS9 universe is all in his imagination. Or maybe the DS9 universes existence is formed by his stories. Or something like that, it’s been so long since I’ve seen the show.
Anyway it’s just a bit of something that ties in with the subject at hand and I thought I’d put it out there.
Man, I was hoping I would be the first to mention DS9. Yeah, Sisko’s counterpart in the other world was based on Delany, and Odo’s was based on Campbell. O’Brien was Asimov, Quark was Harlan Ellison, Bashir was Henry Kuttner, and Kira was C.L. Moore (as well as D.C. Fontana, and a host of other initialed female writers).
@48, 49: Um, I beat y’all to it @19 ;-).
brucegee1962 @45: I looked him up on Amazon. Reviews are uniformly fawning, including frequent comparisons to, yes, G.K.Chesterton. Also, I read a lot of C.S.Lewis back in the day, and I don’t recall him being that sneeringly pompous (not usually, anyway). I think JCW is in a class of his own (and not in a good way).
I attended a panel discussion where Andre Norton discussed this issue, and she’s had novels with “Black” characters where the publisher forced her to remove the physical descriptions. And it wasn’t just the bigotry of Editors and Publishers, mags that published stories with sympathetic black or female characters would get hate mail about it, especially from the South. Remember, a lot of this was going on in the ’30’s, ’40’s, and ’50’s when overt racism and sexism was not only socially acceptable, but the norm.
Wow! Wright on Pratchett went full Godwin in the first sentence! Third word, to be precise, so I suppose this is not actually a record-breaker, but it surely gets bonus points for being about the author of Small Gods (to name but one). I didn’t make through a full read of that rubbish, but let’s just say that Pratchett out-thought him and out-wrote him, and was a far greater human being.
@50 I am so sorry Eamon Knight. I didn’t see your comment. I’m so embarrassed now. Look at me blabbering, all excited about it too. Heh. Sometimes there might be some truth in fiction.
@38, 39: You mean Dr. Botha from Matthew Reilly’s Area 7 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_7_%28novel%29#Doctor_Gunther_Botha ) is based on a real person rather than just being “what’s the worst that could come out of Apartheid South Africa? *shudder*
I read Wright’s Golden Age trilogy back when it first came out (and before he converted to Catholicism). It’s a series with a lot of big ideas, but the guy is just such an appalling writer that it was almost impossible to get through. All of the excruciatingly long-winded pompousness that’s in his blog writing is there in the books. Worse, I came out of the books with a strong feeling that the guy actively despises women. There are only 2 female characters in the series (which is a huge, sprawling story about the entirety of future society). One is a sort of mother-earth collective consciousness, which couldn’t be remotely described as human, and which is only considered female by convention. The other is the protagonist’s wife, who exists purely to get rescued or bumble around getting in the his way. In the end, you find out that she’s just a clone of his original wife, who killed herself because she couldn’t bear the shame of the protagonist’s (temporary!) censure by society.
In short, from what I can glean from JCW’s writing, he was a horrible and shitty person long before he became a Catholic. He really wants everybody to know that he’s a genius and a philosopher and a rhetorician and a deep thinker and a moralist, but you only have to read a few pages of his fiction to realize that he’s utterly terrible at all of those things.
PZ, I literally cannot view your site with ads right now. One of them is triggering me and I feel my skin crawling.
The bits about Campbell likely seems less than surprising for those aware that he gave Heinlein the idea for “Sixth Column”.