Fisking the Guardian’s Village Idiot: Part 1

Damian Walter is that dude over at the Guardian who made shit up about me before. That time he put words in my mouth, said that I warned writers not to write about gay characters if they want to remain commercial, and he even put it in quotes as if it was my actual words. That isn’t even close to what I said, or what I’ve actually done, and doesn’t match up with my real life actions, writing, or even the philosophies of other authors I’ve promoted, but hey, whatever.

Here is the last one: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/15/larry-f-correia-international-lord-of-hate/

Note, this is going to be two part Fisk, with today being the article, and tomorrow I’m going to go through Damien’s comments where he threatened me with some nebulous harm if I don’t apologize for and confess some sins, and then he went on Twitter to ask his followers to find bad things I’ve done (normally journalists do research before writing about something).

So here is Part1. As usual Damian gets damn near everything wrong, so let’s go through and take a look at what passes for journalism at the Guardian. This is going to be long, but Damien has a real gift for shoving two or three lies, half-truths, or distortions into nearly every line. Hmm… I heard Jay Carney’s job is open.

As usual, the moron is in italics and my comments are in bold.

Here is the current article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/30/science-fiction-real-life-war-worlds but it is all reprinted below for your enjoyment. Note that Damian’s article is absolutely filled with links, let’s see… a dozen of them in fact, but not a single one of those links are to the actual words of the people he is maligning… Curious.

Science fiction’s real-life war of the worlds

For many years, a very particular and very narrow set of authors has dominated SF. But battle for a broader fictional universe is under way.

When is a giant lizard not a giant lizard? When it’s a metaphor for the might of the military-industrial complex. Audiences turning up for the latest cinematic incarnation of Godzilla have expressed some disappointment that much of the battling kaiju action was kept off screen.

Keep in mind, his last article about what evil homophobic hatemongers conservative writers are started out by explaining the reason male gamers played female characters in video games was so they could explore gender roles… as opposed to it being nicer to stare a girl’s butt for 200 hours of Skyrim. But nope, exploring gender boundaries.

Because when I think of socially conscious, non-binary enlightenment, I think of the LOL WUT tits or GTFO denizens of Xbox Live. So keep in mind, Damien isn’t very smart and does a lot of grasping at straws.

In its place director Gareth Edwards makes the smart decision to tinker with the kaleidoscopic political meanings that surround the giant lizard. What Edwards chooses to place front and centre are the twin legacies the second world war foisted on modern society – nuclear weapons and the United States military in all its glory. By the end of the movie we’re left in no doubt that, whatever risks they pose, we need the monstrous forces mankind can control to defend us from the monstrous forces – be they real or imagined – we cannot. Audiences want sci-fi to entertain us, but even blockbuster movies come loaded with political messages.

Okay, heavy handed straw grasping intro out of the way, I wonder how many people bought tickets to see Godzilla for the political messages versus how many went to watch giant monsters smash stuff? But hey, let’s roll with it. I think Damian’s point is that political messages in sci-fi exist… Yep. As much as they try to rewrite my old posts to be that message fic shouldn’t exist at all, on the contrary, I said it did, but that if you wanted to be successful, you needed to put the story first, and once you’ve provided your readers with enjoyment, then you can slip in your message… Message first can turn off readers. And as much as they try to change the narrative, my words (which they never actually link to) are right there.

Or in this case, the giant lizard came first, message second. Damn, Damien, even your intros get the slander wrong. I really hope you’re just an unpaid intern or something and the Guardian isn’t actually giving you money for this shit.

In recent months the community of science fiction readers and writers has been embroiled in an escalating war of words over the genre’s political soul, catalysed by the nominations for this year’s Hugo awards.

By escalating, he means some people on my side actually got involved for once and quit letting his side set the narrative unopposed. It was so much nicer when my side just immediately shut up out of fear of backlash, career sabotage, and threats of character assassination.

Allegations of bloc-voting arose

Yes, allegations of block voting, which means I asked my fans to vote. A quick search found about thirty other authors, fanzines, bloggers, and even publishing houses that did the same thing I did. Only I had the audacity of having the wrong kind of fans (and more of them!). Damien knows this, but he’s simply obfuscating the issue to get in some more snide insinuations.

He’s leaving out the allegations against me of fraud, misogyny, racism, homophobia, wife beating, and threatening puppy murder… No. I’m not making any of those up, but when dealing with Social Justice Warriors you will quickly discover that they will say anything to sabotage their ideological opponents. Proving that was sort of the whole point of my nefarious campaign. They certainly rose to the occasion.

as a slate of little-known writers appeared among the nominees,

That’s right. Little known writers. Since I’m the unnamed guy who put together this evil voting plot and is up for best novel, let’s take a look at how little known I am.

My 11th novel comes out this summer (Don’t worry, I’ve got 13 more under contract). I’m a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and bunch of other lists bestseller, and the most accurate bestseller list of all is Nielsen Bookscan where I’ve been as high as #5 and stayed on for 20 straight weeks. On any given day I’m usually in the top 50 fantasy authors on Amazon and that’s without anything new out (highest I’ve been is #3 after Martin and Gaiman). I’m published in 7 languages. I do even better in audiobook, where I’m one of the bestselling and best reviewed authors on all of Audible, and I’ve been nominated for 3 Audies and won 2 of them. (those are pro juried, so sadly no allegations of ballot stuffing there).

According to the Guardian’s own stats about how much authors actually get paid, I’m way above the cutoff for the top 1%. But to be fair to Damien’s inability to actually know stuff, I’ve only been professionally published since 2009. The fact that I’ve only been doing this for 5 years kind of sucks for my detractors, since so many of them have been doing this far longer yet are much less successful. That has to gnaw at them.

But little-known. Got it!

after a concerted campaign by a small group of writers to get the books on the ballot.

By concentrated campaign, he means a couple of blog posts, a poorly drawn cartoon, and a video of sad puppies. No, I kid you not. My spokesman was Wendell the Manatee. Unlike Damian, I’ll actually post links to the topic, here is where I go into it in detail: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/ The whole thing and the reasons for it were out there in the open the entire time I was doing it.

Behold the architect of your doom.

A startling conspiracy theory was at the heart of the campaign. It alleged that a powerful clique of liberal writers and editors had taken control of science fiction, and worse, were politicising a genre that should exist purely for entertainment. They were filling the genre with heavy-handed “message fiction” and excluding conservatively minded writers. So conservatively-minded fans should vote for those writers to redress the imbalance.

That’s sort of related to what I said, as rewritten by somebody with a paint huffing addiction… I do like how Damien stated it all super nefarious like that though. But strangely he didn’t link to the posts where I talked about the demonstrated bias against non-leftists, or the posts about how the heavy handed message fic was driving away readers and causing the market to shrink? I’m sensing a trend. I wonder why Damien never seems to link to what his opponents actually say, when it is so much easier to make up really dumb straw man versions instead?

I wouldn’t call any of this startling though. I pointed out that the awards were biased, and if any openly conservative author got on the awards ballot they would be attacked and sabotaged. I was called a liar. So I got some conservative authors on the ballot and they did exactly what I said they would. (they were even shriller than expected, and major professionals jumped into the witch hunt, so for that, I sincerely thank them for being so predictable).

Point proven. Hilarity ensued.

Of course there is a certain irony in forming a political clique and launching an overt pol1itical campaign to de-politicise sci-fi– although registering the irony requires more self-awareness than these authors can seem to muster.

I like how he restates my publicly proclaimed goals to be something they weren’t so he can say I’m dumb for not achieving them.

The goal was exposing people like you, Damien, and you can try to say I failed, but poor, depressed little British man, my campaign consisting of manatees, big eyed puppies, and cartoon moose rocked your little world so badly that you’ve repeatedly talked about it in your national newspaper column now. So, I’m very aware of the irony, and it is so very delicious.

This dastardly clique was my fans. If your crowd hadn’t been such obnoxious, pretentious, bossy assholes on Facebook, Twitter, and blog comments, constantly bitching at us, explaining how conservatives and libertarians can’t ever be *real* writers, and calling anybody who disagreed with you racist/misogynist/homophobic without any actual evidence continually for the last five years, then getting a bunch of fans to pony up $40 to vote wouldn’t have been so darned easy.

And that irony is only made stronger when 2014 has proved to be a pivotal year in liberating science fiction from its own innate political biases.

Yes. The publishing industry—which is mostly based in Manhattan—is politically biased. For once we agree!

For decades, science fiction’s major awards were given, year after year, to white male authors.

That’s fantastic… Except when Damien says decades, he’s not talking about any of the recent ones. There have been blog posts (written by reasonable moderate types who really don’t like me or my campaign either) pointing out that women have won about a third to half of the awards over the last forty years, so once again, Damien is just a liar.

Women writers have asserted a growing presence in the genre, leading this year lead to a strong presence in all of the genre’s major awards.

Great. Despite the narrative about me to the contrary, I like female authors. I support female authors. I support authors from any group you can think of as long as they tell a good story and they’re not complete douchebags, so I guess you could say that I just support authors in general. I’m all in favor of anybody from any group being able to write what they want, more power to them.

So if we want true equality among writers how about we give awards based on quality rather than what box the author checks on an EEOC form?

Oh, but wait. I forgot. I like to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That’s racist now. I also like to judge a book based upon whether I like it or not, rather than ranking the nominees based upon the acceptability of their political outlooks or which ones best assuage my warm-beige guilt.

(speaking of irony, when the announcements were made and I immediately started getting character assassinated for being a hater of women, homosexuals, sunshine, and goodness with zero evidence, the book of the week I was promoting on this blog was written by a non-white immigrant woman and had a gay hero, but hey, narrative).

Women and non-white writers swept the board at the Nebula awards, winning every major category.

Normally, if there is a bunch of gloating and back slapping about how one particular group was totally shut out of something, we’d consider that bigotry. However I tend to forget that to a libprog diversity is literally only skin deep, while diversity of thought is evil and must be crushed. The same people crowing about this year’s diversity were happy to attack nominees last year for their religious beliefs, because that’s the wrong kind of diversity. They routinely attack non-whites and women if they aren’t of the correct political persuasion.

Speaking of gloating, Twitter after the Nebulas was interesting. If you take the tweets of the Social Justice Warrior crowd, Ctrl H, find and replace White Male with Jew, they totally sound like snippets of Heinrich Himmler speeches. It is hilarious until the nausea sets in.

High profile crowd-funded publishing projects such as Women Destroy Science Fiction are proving the commercial potential of a more diverse genre.

Not to bash this particular anthology, because I know nothing about it, but this super example of commercial potential raised $53,136. Good for them. But to illustrate just how profoundly disconnected Damien is from reality, keeping in mind that I’m a “little-known” author, my Kickstarter for a role playing game based upon one of my series raised $80,681, and my Kickstarter for merchandise related to my novels raised $101,396.

So I wouldn’t recommend taking business advice about commercial viability from a lying euro-weenie-socialist who has probably never held a real job. Now fetch my latte, Damien!

It is fair to say that SF is coming to terms with its historic gender and racial biases.

From a genre that really came to be in the 1930s to the 1950s there may have been bigotry? This is my shocked face. Well, good thing you guys are ready to attack people now for the sins of those that came before, because they share similar plumbing, DNA, or sexual orientation.

But not without some resistance from reactionaries within the genre.

They really need a boogieman, don’t they? Isn’t it interesting about how my campaign to demonstrate that there was bias and sabotage in the awards system, is immediately changed by the biased to be all pro-racism in order to sabotage it?

As Samuel Delany noted, at a time when he numbered among the very few black writers in the field, prejudice within science fiction would “likely remain a slight force – until, say, black writers start to number 13, 15, 20% of the total.” Author NK Jemisin employed Delany’s quote in her own Guest of Honour speech at WisCon. Her incendiary argument to fight against bigotry comes at a the time when she and other writers of colour including Aliette de Bodard, Sofia Samatar and Nalo Hopkinson command a higher profile in the genre than ever before. And the resistance Delany predicted has come true.

Does that mean that since I’m the only non-white author up for best novel, I have your vote, Damien?

It is no coincidence that, just as it outgrows its limiting cultural biases, science fiction should also face protests from some members of the predominantly white male audience who believed it to be their rightful domain.

That doesn’t even make sense. So, I’m not a white guy, but I hatched this elaborate plot to keep sci-fi white… even though us right wingers are capitalists who want to sell books to everybody. Sure, I’m super excited for my Chinese translations to come out this year, but that must be because of the billion white men who live there.

Since Damien brought up irony, here’s some for you. My audience is diverse. That’s what happens when you are popular and actually sell books. Look at the picture of the Diversity panel at the Nebulas. It is a bunch of old white people fretting about their white guilt. It is so white and old it looks like a Klan rally compared to my average book signing. My fans are the rainbow fucking coalition compared to that picture.

You know an organization that is actually diverse? The US military, #1 book in Baghdad and Baghram, baby.

But as we’ve already repeatedly seen demonstrated, it doesn’t matter that my fans are all over the board, young and old, straight and gay, all sorts of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and even some liberals (though by that I mean they’re actual well intentioned liberals, as opposed to the wannabe fascist control freaks who’ve taken over the term), but my fans don’t count, because they’re the wrong kind of fan. They are united in that they’d rather enjoy books than get snidely insulted by people like Damien for racist attitudes of their grandparents might have held.

What the conservative authors protesting the Hugo awards perceive as a liberal clique is simply science fiction outgrowing them, and their narrow conception of the genre’s worth.

That makes pretty much no sense whatsoever since over recent years sci-fi readership has been shrinking. It hasn’t been outgrowing anything other than Damien’s dignity.

Why has our market been shrinking? Well, it can’t be because people don’t like sci-fi and fantasy, because they love throwing lots of money at it in movies, TV, and games.

The opinion that I’ve long held, and which helped inspire my dastardly campaign of evil to begin with, was that sci-fi readers were leaving our genre because they were getting tired of being preached at with liberal cause of the day message fiction. They were bored with dying polar bears, murderous bigoted Christians, lectures about the dangers of capitalism, and thinly veiled Dick Cheneys as bad guys. You can really only slap half of the country upside the head and tell them their beliefs are stupid and backwards so many times before they quit buying your stuff. (but keep in mind, the left are supposed to be the inclusive ones).

How did I come to this belief? Because the people who’d been quitting told me so. I kept getting messages from readers with some variation of “I’d quit reading SFF because I was bored/tired/annoyed etc. but your stuff is fun!” over and over and over and then they’d provide me with large royalty checks. This got me to thinking that there might be something to this crazy idea of putting reader enjoyment ahead of placating the perpetually outraged Damiens of the world, where everything including Godzilla and Tomb Raider had to be boiled down to cisgender patriarchal neocolonial military-industrial privilege.

Of course, if those authors really wanted to de-politicise science fiction, they could easily help to do so – by admitting the genre’s historic bias and applauding its growth.

I don’t think anybody has ever said that bias hasn’t happened somewhere at some point, so thanks for that piece of straw. As for applauding its growth that’s the point, you moron. It isn’t growing. You guys are shrinking it. You might think you’re all about diversity and inclusiveness, but you’re not. You’re the opposite. You’ve drawn battle lines and then done everything possible to damage the careers of anybody who believes differently than you.

De-politicize? I was never in this to sway people like you, Damien. That’s impossible. We can’t de-politicize genre fiction any more than we can get leftists to stop banning university commencement speakers, boycotting businesses, or getting people fired for having differing opinions. Censorship and intimidation are simply in the nature of all statist bullies.

My mission was to convince the undecided. My side aren’t the ones trying to silence anyone, and all of the observers have watched your side try to stomp me (and fail miserably). Of course, your side will immediately cite somebody disagreeing (or failing to cheerlead sufficiently) with one of their ludicrous ideas as silencing, which will require them to retreat to their convention mandated racially segregated safe zones with a case of the vapors.

But in reality it isn’t the right trying to shut anybody up. Quite the contrary, Damien, we want you guys to keep talking so the world can see what censorship happy little fascists you are.

My successful campaign was met with a concentrated effort that would have made most normal authors apologize, run away, and hide (that’s what usually happens, but the fact that there isn’t anything you people can actually do to intimidate some of us must drive you nuts).

And by doing everything within their power to welcome new authors from diverse backgrounds, instead of agitating for protest votes to push them out.

And by diverse backgrounds, you mean as long as they are in complete political lockstep with your side?

The real prize for science fiction is not diversity for diversity’s sake

(although I happen to believe that would be prize enough).

A nugget of truth? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Since you’ve never actually created a single piece of fiction anybody has ever wanted to purchase, you are perfectly happy for sci-fi/fantasy to crash and burn, because then you can self-righteously brag about how at least it was mostly straight white males who died in the fire.

We live in a world of seven billion human beings, whose culture has not been reflected or rewarded in ‘the mainstream’. Science fiction

Wait… You mean the ENGLISH LANGUAGE award and books haven’t fully reflected genre fiction from the entire rest of the world? How dastardly.

– from cult novels that reach a few thousand readers,

I wouldn’t know what that is like.

to blockbuster movies and video games that dominate contemporary culture – has the potential to talk across every remaining boundary in our modern world. That makes it, in my opinion, potentially the most important cultural form of the 21st century. To claim that potential, it cannot afford to give way to the petulant protests of boys who do not like to share their toys

What a bunch of pretentious dribble from a sad little man who has never created anything of worth in his life.

So tune in tomorrow as I go through Damien’s pathetic threats, his complete lack of research skills, how my teaching women to carry guns is actually misogyny, and his pathetic attempt to channel Stalin.