John C. Wright's Blog, page 35

Dinosaur-sized bigotry

Sarah Hoyt speaks at length about the disturbing nature of the short story ‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love‘ by Rachel Swirsky which was a story I could — and did — do a better version of in one sitting, in less than an afternoon. And I did it without ripped off IF YOU GIVE  A MOUSE A COOKIE. Now my yarn might not be to your taste, but at least it is a story, and it contains science fiction. That makes it a (1) science fiction (2) story. Miss Swirsky’s work is neither.

I, for one, congratulate rather than belittle Miss Swirsky for her award. She deserves heartfelt congratulations. It is the voters I belittle. They betrayed their trust. They deserve the whipping post.

Sarah Hoyt talks about what the story’s choice of theme and antagonist implies:

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/01/31/if-you-were-a-grown-up-my-love/

When I was very young I used to think that stories where everyone died, or stories where pointless but sad things happened were about the best thing ever. They were profound and so different from every other story I’d read till that time which were all boys-aventures or fairytales that ended well and with a moral.

If You Were A Dinosaur my Love’s win bothered me at a level I can’t begin to explain, and it still bothers me, like an aching tooth to which the tongue keeps returning.  It’s not just that could have been written by me at 12 and would have got, from my middle school teacher, exactly the sort of praise it got from science fiction professionals.

It’s the ideas packed into the story that are truly disturbing.

A story that reveals a total lack of knowledge of an entire class of people (manual laborers) and instead others them as sort of scary all purpose evil that will beat to death anyone who doesn’t look/act like them won an award voted on by – supposedly – adult professionals. Not only that, but adult professionals who keep claiming their tolerance and love of the “other.”  What’s more, adult professionals who would almost certainly embrace “Marxism” as a good or at least correct idea.  When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class?

And admitting it?

Read the whole thing. I found it shocking. Her remarks open up the gangrenous wound and show the maggots already swarming among the dying flesh.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A Message from My Publisher Concerning Sad Puppies

From the pen of Vox Day:

Sad Puppies: the last day

These are the final hours to register for Sad Puppies 3: The Ensaddening. Here is why you might want to consider doing so even if the idea of spending $40 to poke a sharp stick in the collective eyes of the SJWs who are doing their level best to destroy the science fiction and fantasy literature you love for the next two years isn’t enough in its own right.

Hugo Awards are worth around $13,000 to an SJW, according to one Kameron Hurley. For a fraction of one percent of that, you can deny multiple SJWs their ability to commit Pink SF and force them to spend their time delivering pizzas instead. (Have no fear, the awards are worth absolutely nothing to us in financial terms, because the gatekeepers who value them for marketing purposes won’t publish even national bestselling authors of the Right; they are far more driven by intersectional equalitarian ideology than by evil capitalist business sense.)
Short of wiping their hard drives and deleting their current manuscripts, there is literally nothing you can do that upsets the SJWs more than putting the sort of right-wing writer they have spent two decades working very hard to suppress in the limelight that they seek for themselves.
The more obvious our numbers, the more it encourages the moderate elements at the major publishers to rein in the left-wing inmates who have taken over the SF/F asylum. The Toad of Tor is no longer at Tor and it is unlikely that her dismissal would have taken place without the fact that people were finally standing up to her crude bullying, causing her to double-down and attract the attention of higher-ups at the publisher. Tor’s German owners don’t give a damn about politics or the imperative of strong female characters and they’re only beginning to understand how the SJWs running their subsidiaries have let them down.
It’s very good value for the money. Last year, the $20 spent on a supporting membership got you the complete Wheel of Time series, the complete Grimnoire Chronicles, and sundry other works as well. Granted, it also got you a fair amount of Pink sludge, but no one is going to make you download it. The more of you that register, the more likely it is that there will be great stuff that you want to read as part of the Hugo Packet.
Sarah Hoyt says: “I suggest we kick them while they’re down and make them fight for the awards and prestige they crave. Also, that we point at them and make duck noises.”
We have the momentum. Last year, the Dread Ilk showed up in respectable force without me doing anything more than putting up a single post with a modified version of Sad Puppies 2. This year, we’re locked, loaded, and ready to be all that we can be. Trust me on that. About which more soon….

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Klavan on Gamergate

This is roughly two months old, but I only saw it today for the first time. Just in case my one fan or my six other readers has not seen it, I would like to pass it along.

Andrew Klavan with the revolting truth about Gamergate:

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Four Anecdotes about Racethink

I have people, or, rather, Morlocks who look a great deal like people, using the term African American to refer to Blacks from England and France and elsewhere in Europe.

I was in a time travel role playing game once, based on Roger Zelazny’s ROADMARKS. There was a mystical road through time the time travelers used, and branches and exits led to alternate histories. At one road stop hotel, the moderator of the game was describing to the players what some of the travelers from other timelines looked like, including Aztecs in Spanish armor and Eskimo astronauts and so on.

We saw a tall and stalwart Negro in a crew cut from a world where Prussia was inhabited by black men in the 1930s, and he was wearing a Nazi SS uniform. One of the players, a liberal, was surprised or perhaps scandalized, asked to hear the description once again, saying, “You mean an African American Nazi?”

The moderator raised one eyebrow and said, “No. He’s clearly from Germany.”

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A Sad Puppy Speaks!

This is a nice, concise, well written column over on Sarah Hoyt’s blog, written by Charlie Martin. His point: do not let MiniTru rewrite history, and make out Science Fiction to have somehow been anti-female, despite the large number of top notch female writers and despite the extremely large number of admirable female characters.

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/01/28/be-the-bojum-charlie-martin/

The money quote:

… the majority of award-winning writers for the last 20 or 30 years had actually been women. People of vaginitude. Oppressed womyn under the heel of the patriarchal publishing establishment.

Thinking about people I’d known personally: Connie Willis. Marion Zimmer Bradley. Karen Joy Fowler. Joanna Russ. Other big names, like Ursula K LeGuin, C. L. Moore, Leigh for Gods’ sakes Brackett, who not only wrote SF but wrote what I think may be the best screenplay of all time, Rio Bravo.

Ah, but they didn’t address sexual roles — well, no, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness — except that wasn’t, somehow, really “groundbreaking” enough. (Hey kids: I was there. If you don’t think LHoD was groundbreaking, it’s because you’ve been plowing and replowing that same patch of ground that LeGuin took the arrows for breaking.)

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Sad Puppies 3: The Ensaddening!

Yea, verily, yea, it is that time of year again, dear friends and comrades, when once again the war for the soul of Science Fiction is at hand, or, rather, for those of us lacking hands, at hook.

It is that time when we lay aside our personal differences and take up arms against the foes of common sense, human happiness, and good, clean fun, namely, the Morlocks who are trying to ruin Science Fiction in the same way they have successfully ruined the Oscars.

They want to turn your space yarns and tale of speculative fiction into social commentary on leftwingnut non-issues and Democrat Party talking points. They want to turn your entertaining stories about star fleet captains and space princesses needing rescue into social justice message lectures about ending nonbinary gender.

They want to steal your cake and give you boiled cabbage.

And we here in the Evil Legion of Evil say NAY! We say ‘nay!’ because we talk in a Faux Shakespearean dialog first concocted by Stan Lee for Thor comics. Because that is how we rolleth, forsooth! You may not have my pulp copy of Amazing Whizz Wonderbang Space Stories until you pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Sad Puppies 3: The Ensaddening!

Yea, verily, yea, it is that time of year again, dear friends and comrades, when once again the war for the soul of Science Fiction is at hand, or, rather, for those of us lacking hands, at hook.

It is that time when we lay aside our personal differences and take up arms against the foes of common sense, human happiness, and good, clean fun, namely, the Morlocks who are trying to ruin Science Fiction in the same way they have successfully ruined the Oscars.

They want to turn your space yarns and tale of speculative fiction into social commentary on leftwingnut non-issues and Democrat Party talking points. They want to turn your entertaining stories about star fleet captains and space princesses needing rescue into social justice message lectures about ending nonbinary gender.

They want to steal your cake and give you boiled cabbage.

And we here in the Evil Legion of Evil say NAY! We say 'nay!' because we talk in a Faux Shakespearean dialog first concocted by Stan Lee for Thor comics. Because that is how we rolleth, forsooth! You may not have my pulp copy of Amazing Whizz Wonderbang Space Stories until you pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.


Already the slanders against our noble cause have begun, claiming that we here at the Evil Legion of Evil want to cram our rightwing social commentary down your throats rather than their leftwing social commentary. Fooey and phoo and pist-tush, say we. Because we talk weird. The only social commentary we are interested is this: BORING STORIES SUCK.

The social commentary involved in stories where a brawny space-privateer in a torn shirt and broken power-armor is firing a vehicle-mounted automatic weapon one-handed upon an undead but rampaging vampire-lord Tyrannosaurus Rex thundering down the blood-soaked golden streets of primordial Atlantis risen, drenched in seaweed and eldritch lore, to the surface of the unquiet sea due to the evil influence of the Red Demon Star of Gthothmorg during a near-collision with Sol while a buxom yet lithe cavegirl in a leopardskin bikini clings to his manly yet roguish thigh, her flint-napped dirt held calmly in her brave yet slender hand (pause to draw breath) is summed up in the word AWESOMSAUCE. Which, technically speaking, is not a word. Neither is grok a word, or muggle, but I still use them in my everyday speech. Forsooth.

Interested? You bet you are, because if you try to read even one more gender-sensitive noncisnormaltive hackwork or an ad for the latest social justice cause de jour written by a muggle you cannot grok, you will be driven to perform rishathra with a fungi from Yuggoth. A just remember, not every fungi is a fun guy.

If you’d like to nominate good books, stories, and related works for the Hugos you need to get yourself a supporting membership to Sasquan before the end of January, only five days hence.

https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php

Supporting memberships are $40. (If you registered last year as part of Sad Puppies 2, you are still eligible to nominate this year.)

And now for a word from our sponsor and International Lord of Hate, Larry Correia. His heart is too full of sorrow for sadness in puppies to express himself in words, and so he will now communicate in the universal language of cartoons. In color. In English.

All the words below are his, except where I changed them for no reason:
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Also, please watch this very special commercial that prepared last year, which in no way was ripped off of Sarah McLachlan’s sad puppy video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGKlOkQsxY

Last year’s Sad Puppies campaign accomplished it’s goals of raising awareness about Puppy Related Sadness, but the struggle continues…

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Now our SP3 spokesmanatee would like to share a few thoughts about why it is so important that you help to combat the scourge of PRS.

Thank you, Wendell. That was so profound I may have shed a single manly tear.

This year we will be expanding the suggested slate to include several other authors, artists, and creators who are usually locked out by the SJW voting block. The men and women of Sad Puppies want to get more fans involved, even if they’re the *wrong* kind of fans. We want people to vote based on what they loved and enjoyed, not on what sends the approved message or checks the right box.

You need to register now in order to be able to participate, but your actual nominations are not due for some time. In the comments feel free to suggest other eligible works that you think we should take a look at.

And please tell your friends. Help spread the word, because only you can stop PRS.

For those just joining us who missed last year’s controversy, here is a recap of what happened when a bunch of barbaric outsiders got nominated: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/

Thank you, International Lord of Hate! Long may your loving and thoughtful yet somehow hate-filled words continue.

Tens of Thousands of Invisible Men

I Google’d the words MARCH FOR LIFE today, January 22nd, and clicked the ‘news’ tab. The results were fascinating: articles from Fox News, from Vatican Radio, Breitbart News, Patheos Blog, Newbusters, WTOP‎ (our local Christian radio)  the Catholic News Agency, and Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate. Notice anything odd about that?

Someone with more mathematical alertness than myself, and more patience to comb through the articles, should puzzled out what the ratio of mainstream media coverage to niche market Christian, conservative, and Catholic media coverage. So a sex hundred thousand man march, far larger than most political movements, simply is not news? I invite you to compare it to the anti-Ferguson marches and protests, accusing an innocent policeman and deifying a stoned thug, and how much news coverage they received.

Here is one of the columns:

From https://cocacolaman.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/12214-650k-will-march-on-washington-but-you-wont-hear-anything-about-it/ This is written by Ryan M. Adorjan, seminarian for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Joliet-in-Illinois.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Word Fetishes

A reader with the abstract yet addictive name of Concept Junkie leaves this comment regarding the case in favor of marriage, now, for some reason that does not bear close examination, called traditional marriage. (As if a three-sided triangle needed to be called a traditional triangle to distinguish it from all those square triangles with four sides):

Our gracious host has made the case better than anyone I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think his arguments, however sound and logical would change the vast majority of minds.

An understatement. My reasoning will change NO minds, zero, nada, zip, simply because those who uphold the perverse as equal to the decent, the sick as equal to the hale, the unwholesome as equal to the wholesome were never reasoned into that worldview, no, not one, not ever.

You cannot reason someone out of a stance he was not reasoned into.

A Leftist is not someone who has an alternative political philosophy to yours, or different reasons. He is someone who, in the realm of politics, has decided to eschew philosophy and abandon reason.

Leftism is what you get when you stop reasoning, kill it dead, and substitute word fetishes instead.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Sequel of Gor

I am ashamed to admit, and also amused at my own expense, that I read John Norman’s Gor books when I was young.

To be truthful, I actually thought the first six books or so were perfectly fine Burroughs-style sword and planet  romance when I read them as a youth. At the moment when Ballentine dropped him and Daw picked him up, I assume the author got obsessed with his message and stopped trying to spin a yarn. But I was too young, or too undiscriminating, or too perverted in my early teen geekhood to notice what was really going on in those books, or perhaps I did know but I did not have the mental or moral vocabulary needed to disapprove of them, or the character.

After the seventh book or so, the quality diminished sharply, the writing became ever more mechanistic, and the action and adventure took a backseat to the sex fantasy, and then was dropped entirely. The same stubborn and misguided loyalty that made me read each and every sequel and prequel to Sherri S Tippers TRUE GAME  trilogy that came out, or each and every trilogy or subseries in the tales of the Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion did not serve me well in this case. Yes, I sought out and read every single stinking wretched hollow-eyed and soulless sequel to what once had promised to be a perfectly serviceable Sword and Planet yarn. Woe is me. I would not wish this upon my foes. I read all the way from the HUNTERS OF GOR to WITNESS OF GOR, and I cannot tell you what pain it causes me to realize that I have spend some of my limited supply of brain cells to memorize the names of those books.

Would I actually recommend the first three to six book? Reluctantly, I would. Let us give credit where credit is due. As Sword and Planet Romances go, John Norman’s conceit is as good or better than, not to pick on anyone, Michael Moorcock’s Burrough’s pastiche WARRIORS OF MARS and BLADES OF MARS. Norman could write an exciting fight scene, and knew how to keep the action moving.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.