Fisking the Guardian:
Somebody sent this to me on Twitter this morning and asked my opinion on it. My quick response was that it was more Social Justice Warrior nonsense and their never ending search for perpetual victimhood, but then I decided that because the ideas in it are so poisonous to the very people it is supposedly is trying to help, it deserves an actual fisking.
Basically I’m taking the time to write this because if you have to stamp out another artist’s existence in order to justify your own art, you are not helping art.
If you don’t feel like giving the Guardian any clicks, I’ve reproduced the entire article here. However in the interest of fairness, here is the original: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/09/move-over-hp-lovecraft-black-fantasy-writers-are-coming-through?CMP=share_btn_tw
As usual the original article is in italics and my responding comments are in bold.
Move over HP Lovecraft, fantasy writers of colour are coming through.
A stupid title. If you are so desperate to prove racism in sci-fi you’ve got to dig up somebody who has been dead for 77 years, your argument might be a little weak.
By Daniel Jose Older.
Normally when the Guardian tries to prove how horrible racist/sexist/misogynist/homophobic sci-fi or fantasy is they trot out village idiot Damien Walter. This time they’re using somebody who has actually published something. Good for you, Guardian. Way to step up your game.
Non-white readers and writers are falling in love with speculative fiction in increasing numbers –
Excellent!
which is why we need to remove its racist figurehead
You’ll note that almost all SJW articles start like this. Here is a good thing, but here is why you are actually racist because of it.
Last month I walked through the crowded corridors of Javits Center with tears in my eyes.
Maybe it is just because I’m a manly cismale gendernormative fascist who is required by the patriarchy to keep my feelings bottled up, but the only thing that made me cry at the Javits Center was the line at the food court.
It was New York Comic Con and around me flourished a sea of black and brown faces, many partially concealed beneath goggles, prosthetic zombie wounds or masks.
I was also at this very same convention. I gave out a couple thousand free paperbacks and talked to people for three straight days. But since I’m not a SJW I didn’t feel the need to keep a tally of what color, religion, or sexual orientation every single person I talked to seemed to be.
The people I talked to were people who liked to read books. If you are an author and you feel the need to subcategorize much beyond that, you are setting yourself up to fail.
For one of the first times since I started writing speculative fiction five years ago, I felt at home in my own genre.
I started seriously writing speculative fiction seven years ago so I’m assuming we’re about the same age and we’re dealing with the same industry. This statement is either horseshit or Older hasn’t been to very many sci-fi conventions.
I’ve been to dozens of them all over America. I attended thirteen in 2014 alone. Cons and fandom are usually about the most inclusive bunch you’ll find anywhere. Hell, they accept Furries… FURRIES. Your argument is invalid.
But SJWs love to look for invisible micro aggressions at cons. Here is one where I fisked a SJW who tried to make GenCon sound racist http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/08/19/no-tor-com-gencon-isnt-racist-a-fisking/ (short version, it isn’t).
Earlier this summer, the old guard of fantasy got very uncomfortable over a petition I started asking for the World Fantasy Award to remove the bust of HP Lovecraft as its statuette and replace it with Octavia Butler.
Uncomfortable? I don’t think that is a synonym for WTF.
A few things for those not in the loop. HP Lovecraft is one of the most famous authors in history, who basically created a whole genre. Authors commonly use the word Lovecraftian today to describe themes and elements that he popularized. Among the creators who list Lovecraft as a major influence are Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Joe Lansdale, Alan Moore, F. Paul Wilson, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker, Guillermo Del Toro, H.R. Geiger, John Carpenter, Mike Mignola, and Neil Gaiman. Plus thousands of other authors, artists, and film makers.
Have you heard of Cthulhu? Yeah. That guy.
Lovecraft has influenced video games, movies, comics, and more heavy metal bands than you can count. Almost eight decades after his death every nerd in the world knows who HP Lovecraft is. There have been thousands (not an exaggeration) of stories set in Lovecraftian worlds.
And hell, Lovecraftian is actually a word!
Octavia Butler was also an author. She passed away in 2006. I think I read a couple of her books as a kid but don’t remember anything about them. I’m certain she’s had some influence, but Lovecraft influenced orders of magnitude more.
Butlerian isn’t a word.
EDIT: It turns out Butlerian is a word, just not on Earth. And I’ve not read a Dune novel in a decade.
Lovecraft was an uneven craftsman at best – his stories clunk along, overburdened with adjectives and stale characters.
Wow, bold words there dude who has written a couple of books.
It’s his world-building and imagination that helped solidify his legacy, but even that is tainted by a failure of craft and humanity.
Yet, the atmosphere he set scared the shit out of millions of us, to the point that when we grew up and tried to write something scary, we used him as a template. Nothing is more human than fear. Pulling that off takes craft.
Really, most Lovecraft tales only consist of well-spoken New Englanders telling each other scary stories in the dark, but the man practically invented creeping dread in literature. But to be fair, Lovecraft said his influence was Poe, so we all learn from somebody.
He detailed his rabid, paranoid racism in many letters, and it permeates his mythos. Lovecraft peopled his fiction with hordes of swarthy, child-killing and abjectly stupid black and brown people, while women are almost non-existent.
Lovecraft was a product of his time.
I’ve written three books of alternative history set in the 1930s. I’m fascinated by this time period. I’ve done tons of research into those years. Racism was common, ugly, and rampant. And I’m not talking invisible micro-aggressions or college students lecturing people about privilege, I’m talking systematic, legal, subjugation of groups of people based upon their ancestors.
Yes, Lovecraft was a racist. He was a 1930s Democrat. It is actually kind of hard to find 1930s democrats who weren’t racists. Eugenics then was the “scientific” equivalent to Global Warming today. The “science was settled”. Proper good thinking folks didn’t question it and the world’s governments used Eugenics as an excuse for all sorts of programs that seem insane to us today.
In actuality Lovecraft’s racism veered a bit from the typical democrat’s “scientific” racism, and he was more into looking down on other cultures. Keep in mind that he was a snooty New Englander. If I recall correctly he believed that anybody could move up in the world, provided they learned to act like a proper snooty New Englander. He didn’t have nice things to say about southerners either, and as far as Europeans went, the only culture he liked was the Anglo Saxon one that spawned New England. He married a Jewish woman because she’d become “cultured”.
How Anglo was Lovecraft? He thought the American Revolution was uppity.
Yet despite being someone descended from those swarthy hordes on one side and degenerate backwoods hill folk on the other, I’m not personally offended. Dude could still atmosphere the shit out of a scary story.
As for black and brown people being dumb savages… It was the 1930s. Now I know this is really hard for somebody in 2014 to wrap their brain around, but to the average American most of the world was a mysterious, scary, alien place. Africa was a distant land of adventure. People were still expecting to find Shangri La. Hell, Lovecraft was a New Englander, by his standards Florida was a distant, scary, mysterious, alien land.
Read any periodical from this time, listen to the radio programs, you’ll find that this attitude of foreign lands being cloaked in forbidden mystery wasn’t just common, it was the absolute norm. You can pull up old news reels on Youtube and watch them to see what I mean. I watched a ton before writing Grimnoir. “Here is beautiful Japan! Mysterious! Look at the crazy shoes! They eat with sticks! How do these crazy yellow people do it? Scientists say the Asian can’t see well through their squinty eyes.” You think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.
As for women being non-existent, first off, not true. Second, don’t matter, because they’d just die a horrible death or be driven insane anyway.
Supporters of the Lovecraft statue point out his influence on the fantasy genre, and they’re right: today, we’re still struggling to unravel the legacy of racism and erasure with which he and other early speculative fiction writers permeated their work.
What does that even mean? Diagram that sentence. Yes, he was super influential, but all with racism, so we need to ERASE what came before? That doesn’t make sense. So I think maybe Older is trying to say that Lovecraft and other early writers erased non-whites? But didn’t you just say that he had non-whites, you just didn’t like how they were portrayed?
So he was influential, but racist, so those of us he influenced learned racism by osmosis? Sorry, Dad, I can’t love you anymore.
Mainstream science fiction and fantasy narratives continue to center on white saviour narratives, as we saw recently on Game of Thrones.
Now hold on a minute, George R.R. Martin isn’t a racist. White savior narratives? Hell, any savior narrative is popular and powerful for the same reason that black vs. white/light vs. dark as a stand in for good vs. evil remains a constant in storytelling, and it has nothing to do with racism. Some themes are so deeply ingrained into humans that artists use them all the time. I can also think of popular “savior narratives” involving women, children, computers, aliens, and a Terminator.
Villainous, sexualised or helpless, rarely are non-white characters presented with the same humanity and depth as white ones.
How the hell does Older quantify that? Based upon the highly scientific study of pulling facts out of his ass? He might feel that way, but I disagree. But what do I know? I’ve only written a bunch of popular books where the main PoV characters aren’t white.
As Imran Siddiquee points out at the Atlantic, teen dystopias tend to have a glaring blindspot when it comes to talking about more complex issues of power and privilege: “While recent dystopias warn youth about over-reliance on computers, totalitarian rule, class warfare, pandemic panics and global warming, very few ask audiences to think deeply about sexism and racism …The results feel false, and undercut the films’ attempts to comment on the present day.”
All that paragraph says is that some movies are bad because they didn’t cater to some reviewer’s particular pet peeve topic. That would be like me saying that I really hated Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants because it didn’t have enough gun fights. Not everything in the world needs to be about whatever the hell it is you are personally hung up on. If you really want to have a story about Topic X maybe you should go write it and quit sniping at whoever wrote about Topic Y instead.
And while “urban” has become publishing industry code for books by and for black people, throw the word fantasy on the end and suddenly the characters and authors are very white.
Sigh… Again… This bizarre hang up on genres. Genres are just so book sellers know where to shelve stuff. I’m usually considered an urban fantasy author, but I think “contemporary fantasy” is more accurate, but hey, I don’t put things in the catalog for Simon & Schuster, so it isn’t my problem.
In this literary gentrification, the American city becomes either a goofy whitewashed playground, Girls with werewolves and vampires, or an abysmal urban nightmare. And like most dystopias, neither fictionalized versions of this city have much to say about the real-world conflicts threatening urban communities of color like police violence and gentrification.
What the hell did I just read? I’m not sure what any of this has to do with somebody winning a trophy that looks vaguely like HP Lovecraft, but because the marketing term “urban fantasy” stuck for books with magic and monsters set in the contemporary world, and some white people write books like that it equals Ferguson.
Seriously?
I had to look up Gentrification… Which for those of us who don’t live in democrat controlled cities means when they redevelop their inner-cities to increase the property values… And this is controversial because, hell, I don’t know… Stuff. Things like that are why I choose to live in a county with more cows than people.
Honestly, these Social Justice Warrior articles are like meaningless word salad. They throw out a bunch of buzz words about racism and injustice on top of some half-baked argument about equality. When you try to question it, they say you’re a racist and declare victory.
That’s why I skip right to mockery.
Unfortunately, this shouldn’t surprise us. According to a recent survey, Latinos and Asians make up 3% of the publishing industry each,
Hey, that’s me! Hi, guys!
while blacks come in at 1%.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It is actually very simple. Where do writers come from? Readers. Communities that have more readers are going to create more writers. Like I talked about in the linked article above about where gamers come from, same principle. Communities with more education, higher incomes, and leisure time produce more readers. Parents who read produce children who read.
Let me give you a personal example. I grew up in a very poor, immigrant, farming community. Of my 8th grade class half of us could speak English. Of those, half could read. Of my friends, I was the only reader. Where I’m from reading was for dorks, and what kind of sissy reads books about dragons and elves and shit? Most of your time was spent doing back breaking manual labor, and free time spent reading could better be spent “partying” (drinking yourself stupid and screwing around). Tough guys didn’t read (though having a nose in a book was a great way to get into fist fights, which explains a lot about how I turned out the way I did). Reading fiction was seen as lazy, effeminate, fluff.
That’s how my Dad grew up. I don’t think he’s ever read an actual book. I’d guess he’s got about a 4th grade reading level. He didn’t like the fact that I read books as a kid. I can’t fault him for feeling that way, because that was the culture he was raised in. Luckily for me, my mom liked to read. She was an Air Force kid, and had grown up all over the place. Also, very luckily, my little town had a tiny old library.
When I discovered books, I didn’t care that the characters didn’t look like me. I didn’t care that they weren’t from my culture. In fact it was awesome that they weren’t like me. I didn’t need a fictionalized version of what I already knew, I wanted new experiences. I wanted gunslingers, rocket ships, and monsters.
My high school was a junior gladiatorial academy. My senior year we had the 2nd highest teenage pregnancy rate in America (curse you, Dade County, Florida!). We were well divided between Mexicans, blacks, Hmong, Laotian, poor farm kids of various ethnicities, and white suburbanites. Guess who I talked to about books or played RPGs with in high school? Yep, the white suburbanites. There was a single exception to this, and that was the Pena family. The mother and father had immigrated from Mexico, opened a restaurant, and worked their butts off. They pushed all of their kids to be educated as possible and to read like crazy. Their kids appreciated GI Joe, nunchuks, dirt bikes, and other things that made the 80s awesome so I loved going to their house. Those kids got into nerdy stuff, and if I recall correctly they were the first kids I ever played D&D with.
But overall, not a ton of readers from the poorer groups. I was an anomaly. Of the people I grew up with, I’m not aware of anyone else who because a writer.
Now compare that to where I am now. I moved to Utah. Utah has a culture of readers. Everybody reads here. Education levels are extremely high. Disposable incomes are relatively high. Leisure time is common. So how many writers does Utah produce? Tons. For a state with less than three million people we’ve produced an absurd number of authors, many of them extremely successful, way out of proportion to our population.
If you want to increase the readership in any given community, give them the opportunity and introduce them to books that they’ll find fun. That’s really what it is all about, and as a particular community gains more leisure time, you’re competing against entertainment with lower barriers to entry, like TV or videogames.
Of course, the way our education system does this is totally ass backwards, by shoving dense, impenetrable “classics” onto kids and then discussing what the author “really meant” until you’ve beaten all of the love of reading right out of them. You’ll note that SJWs never talk about entertaining or fun books, but rather socially conscious or enlightening (i.e. boring).
On the other hand, we’ve got the SJW answer:
As Publishers Weekly puts it: “the world of speculative fiction faces the same challenge as the rest of publishing: overcoming a long history of books being primarily created by, for, and about straight white men.”
So the reason there are fewer minority readers is the fault of existing white writers for writing to their existing audience. Naw, I’m going to stick with my answer gleaned from (un-privileged) personal experience rather than some gender studies professor’s bullshit hypothesis.
The racial makeup of the industry matters.
Nobody is stopping anybody from any particular group from reading or writing. In fact, we’re all encouraging as many people as possible to read and write. The more people buying books, the better! If you’d like to write toward a particular audience, fantastic. DO IT. Just don’t demand that other artists create art only in your approved manner.
For writers who aren’t straight, cis, white men, the already steep uphill road to publication is complicated by issues of cultural translation, representation, passive and microaggressions, rage, and assimilation, among others.
That is all total bullshit, and I’m not just talking difference of opinion, but I’m talking a flat out lie.
First off, for everybody the path to publication is extremely difficult. I think traditional publishing has something like a 99.99% rejection rate. I got rejected a ton of times. However, in none of my query letters did I ever specify my ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation, or shoe size.
Over the last few years changes in technology have caused a revolution in publishing. There are now far more opportunities for authors to publish independently, and because of the eBook revolution, even the tiniest niche market can be targeted, and often in an economically viable fashion.
So there is literally nothing stopping you from submitting to publishers and agents. There is nothing stopping you from going independent and producing your own books. If you’d like to very specifically write a book about trans-whatever-queer-cis-binary-polar bears in the space future-past, knock yourself out. There is probably an audience for that.
Next, the bit about being shunned for that big old word salad list of gender studies terms, flat out wrong. Be some type of minority and show up to an agent with a sellable, readable manuscript, and the first thing they’re going to think about is going to be how much money they can make by marketing you as special, distinct, or whatever else separates you from thousands of other competing authors. Anything that can help market you to a specific audience is wonderful, because the agent wants to GET PAID.
In the time I’ve been doing this, I’m only aware of a single incidence where a publishing house discriminated against an author because of their sexual orientation. And it was a tiny publishing house. Immediately the entire author community condemned them. In fact, even the ultra-evil right wing International Lord of Hate (that would be me) reached out and put them in contact with his publicist because that sort of attention is marketing gold. http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/08/21/publisher-cancels-book-contract-because-the-writer-is-gay/ With all of the added attention, in short order they found a new, far bigger publisher, and got a much better contract.
Come to think of it, the only authors I know of who’ve actually been sabotaged in major publishing houses because of their political beliefs have been conservatives, and the mainstream Manhattan publishing industry is overwhelmingly liberal. Strange…
Maybe these ragey assimilators think they’re being held back from being nominated for prestigious awards… Nope. Not in recent years. They’ve been tripping over themselves to show just how Social Justice they are. And again, the group that gets attacked, sabotaged, maligned, and slandered when it shows up are conservative authors. http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/
Well, he listed Rage… Because… Shit… I don’t know. I got an accounting degree. I can’t wrap my brain around this gender studies tripe.
It’s impossible to know which of our truths will unsettle the privileged sensibilities of one of the many gatekeepers we face along the way.
Frankly, that is just narcissism right there.
Speaking of gatekeepers, anybody want to make any bets as to who has pissed off more of publishing’s traditional gatekeepers, me or this Daniel Jose Older?
“Why Butler?” people asked me when the petition went up, and I remembered how entrenched we all get in our own corners within the genre. Butler’s prose soars where Lovecraft’s stumbles. Her characters live and breathe, confront complexities of power and privilege amid fantastical, terrifying dreamscapes steeped in history and nuance.
Good for her. Get back to me when her nuance gets its own beer.
My SFF community is mostly black and brown, and Butler inspired many of us to start writing in the first place.
I’m all in favor of anything that gets anybody writing, so good.
These folks congregate more often than not in online communities like the Nerds of Color,Black Girl Nerds and the Fan Bros, because outside of ComicCon, SFF cons have historically not been safe spaces for women and people of color.
That simply isn’t true.
They always throw this victim stuff out there, because to SJWs being a victim grants them super powers. You can find a handful of anecdotes of bad things happening to a handful of people at various cons over the years, but considering that these are events that happen constantly, all over the country, the number of incidents is absolutely tiny. You are way more likely to get harassed at a pee wee football game or a Bar Mitzvah.
Fandom is cool. Many of them are the ones who grew up being picked on. The way SJWs keep maligning good innocent people really offends me.
Again. Furries… Holy shit. Fandom accepts FURRIES.
These are the online communities that signed the petition in the thousands, which is what transformed it from being just another attempt at dethroning Lovecraft as the face of one of fantasy’s highest awards (there have been several) to a global conversation with coverage in Salon, the Guardian, NPR and countless blogs.
The Salon, Guardian, and NPR? Well then. That is settled! I know when I think of unbiased, critical, hard hitting journalism I think of SALON!
Ultimately, the Lovecraft statue must go. He may be replaced by Butler, or Carrie Cuinn’s sea serpent wrapped around the world idea or any of the many other options,
Or how about a grey, formless, blob? That would be sure not to offend anyone.
But the thing is, the trophy is actually irrelevant. If it wasn’t this trophy, it would be something else for SJWs to get all outrage sputtery over. Any disagreements will be met with allegations of racism or sexism, so that you can be dismissed. Since most people are nice and don’t like being attacked as vile things that they aren’t, they give in. Keep in mind that whenever you are dealing with these people, they simply want you to be wrong somehow so they can browbeat you until you apologize, because then they own you. From then on your opinions can always be safely dismissed.
but the fantasy community cannot embrace its growing fanbase of color with one hand while deifying a writer who happily advocated for our extermination with the other.
Hey, doesn’t Salon, the Guardian, and NPR also think winning the Margaret Sanger Award is awesome. BWA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAA snort.
Read Lovecraft, be inspired by his wild imagination, repelled by his heinous worldview, learn from his mistakes – I certainly have. But the lionizing, sugarcoating and kneejerk flurry to defend and silence uncomfortable histories has to stop if we are to move forward.
Yeah, I’m not seeing a lot of sugarcoating from anybody other than the SJW crowd, who like totally wants equality (as long as you aren’t one of those evil privileged white cis-males) and diversity (as long as you are diverse in exactly the approved manner).
Lovecraft was a racist. He held racist beliefs. So did many icons of that and earlier eras. You can try to erase them, or you can be an adult that realizes that throughout all of human history people have believed things that were wrong or different, including those who accomplished great things.
While we’re on the topic of sugar coating, have you SJWs quit showering Marion Zimmer Bradley and Sam Delaney with praise yet?
People of color have been fantasy creators and fans for a long time; we’re not going anywhere. The We Need Diverse Books campaign took the internet by storm this year and is still going strong.
Good. You should go write some.
A recent digital renaissance in online speculative fiction magazines like Tor.com, Crossed Genres and Strange Horizons, has helped give rise to a new, flourishing generation of writers of color.
Writers of Color? I’m sorry, but this whole People of Color thing is absurdly racist. I’m technically a Person of Color, but fuck that noise. It was racist back when it was Colored People. You can’t just flip Colored People around backwards and it suddenly be cool.
And honestly, you’ve got way more in common culturally with a white American suburbanite than you do with a Mongolian shepherd or a West African villager, and I’ve got more in common with you than I do with an Azorean dairy farmer, so can we just knock this stupid shit off and get back to writing stories and entertaining people?
Networks executives have started to take notice.
He must have missed that NPR story I fisked where the only ethnic group underrepresented on TV was Latinos, and that was only when we forgot to wear sombreros for easy identification. http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/08/07/fisking-npr-about-latinos-in-the-movies/
More importantly though, we’ve stopped asking permission and begun finding ways of making our voices heard.
Again, the only people you had to ask permission from before were Manhattan liberals. Now you’ve got indy publishing. Playing the victim card is getting kind of silly when the people running your industry have been on your side.
Social media revolutionized fandom in ways few saw coming, and content creators of color find ourselves with unprecedented access to audiences. We’re entering a new time – one not so enraptured by the same tired hierarchies – and the genre itself will be stronger for leaving its oppressive tropes behind.
Help! Help! I’m being oppressed.
Out of curiosity when I was writing the paragraph about this author having more in common culturally with an American suburbanite, I googled Daniel Jose Older to see if he had a Wikipedia page that said where he was from:
Heh… Check out the Google images of him. He was walking around ComicCon in tears because there were people who looked like him? If they made a movie they’d cast Morgan from Criminal Minds to play him. Meanwhile, I look like the giant swarthy love child of James Gandolfini and Khalid Sheik Mohammed and they’re lecturing me about being profiled, privilege, and micro aggressions? :D
In the interest of full disclosure, my writing has been influenced by HP Lovecraft, because if you don’t like giant sky squids, there is something fundamentally wrong with you. I also share a birthday with Lovecraft and Ron Paul (yes, I know, this explains a lot). In actuality I’m more of a Robert E. Howard fan than a Lovecraft fan. I once got a negative review that said “though Correia uses some Lovecraftian themes, he is more of a modern Robert E. Howard” and he meant it as an insult. Personally, I wanted to use that as a cover blurb.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I had to rush to the comments so that I might just possibly be first.
Butlerian is indeed a word. Butlerian Jihad, from Dune. But I guess that would offend the SJWs, too.
Now, back to reading the rest of the fisk
Curse your unnatural speed, machine intelligence!
I did cheat. As soon as I read that line, I rushed to the comments without finishing the article. I’m mean like that.
A shameless plug: I used the word Butlerian as a total ripoff from DUNE in one of my own novels, JUDGE OF AGES. Or maybe it was a totally respectful homage and fair use, but hey, who can tell?
And I also made it a jihad, but my was genetically altered witches, not drug-addicted Fremen, so there is that.
So, that it two votes for it being a word. But it still has nothing to do with Octavia Butler, because I read maybe one book by her. It was not bad, but it did not stick with me.
Now, Linda Nagata, her stuff I remember, and everything she writes kicks ass. I don’t know if she counts for the SJWs as a minority or not, because she has talent.
Were I Octavia Butler, and someone wanted to reward me for my skin color and not my writing talent, that would be the deepest, cruelest and most lasting insult I could imagine being delivered to a writer. Imagine being told you are utterly worthless except for one shallow surface feature over which you have no control.
In any case, the muses are Greek goddesses. Does that count as a minority for the SJWs? What does the color of the poet through whom they speak matter?
One thing I do hate about Larry’s fisks is that I usually end up with another stack of books to read, either from Larry, or the rest of the ELEd. Now I have to go look into Linda Nagata.
re: John C. Wright
Technically the Butlerian Jihadists are not Freman, those guys come in later. The anti-Machine revolutionaries are forerunners to the witches of Dune Universe, the Bene Gesserit.
There’s the other Butlerian Jihad: Judith Butler and the wonders of gender-fluid oil changes who is the icon of many of these gender feminist pollen-challenged bumblebees. Her famous book is called Gender Trouble but I would’ve called it Up is Down.
“Gender-fluid oil changes”?
Why am I left with the image of Billy the mechanic earnestly explaining to some customer that the reason his car wasn’t running correctly was that Toyotas self-identified as cismale, and the previous oil change had mistakenly used SAE Fem-30 oil?
The Butlerian Jihad was a war against a form of intelligence. That leaves the SJW’s out…
Curse you and your demon-fueled keyboard for making this comment before me. ::shakes fist::
Actually, I would have been surprised if that was the first thought every reader of this site had upon seeing “Butlerian isn’t a word.”
“Butlerian isn’t a word.”
Maybe they were referencing this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Perhaps Older is anti-artificial intelligence.
Drat! My nerd-fu failed me!
Okay, Butlerian isn’t a COMMON word on planet Earth. :)
That’s OK. We’ve got your back!
It came out of a book written by a dead white guy, so I’m sure it doesn’t count.
Synchronicity definition: renaming an influential white male author’s award for a more obscure black female author whose name was made popular by one of the most influential white male SF authors ever.
Not only was a dead white guy, but he had libertarian leanings! And he culturally-appropriated the hell out of everybody.
So he was an Old School American then?
Artificial, perhaps. Intelligent? Did you read the article that just got dissected? I think my cat could barf up a more intelligent and cogent argument than Mr. Older presented.
Me encantaron sus comentarios en contra de la “corrección política” de The Guardian. Leo sus novelas y me encantan, en particular Las Crónicas de Grimnoir, que me parecieron excelentes. Un saludo cariñoso y además en español.
Gracias. :)
Muy bien dicho.
Nobody tell that guy about R. E. Howard. If Lovecraft’s cat “n***erman” causes offense Howard’s description of all non-whites as ‘thick lipped savages’ would give the poor guy a heart attack.
Oh, they know all about Howard’s racism, and want his writing tossed down the memory hole too!
Well, crap. So much for Conan.
Over my dead body.
IIRC Howard and Lovecraft were friends if not profuse pen pals.
Over a lot of our dead bodies, I assure you.
Well said as always.
Another comment.
Larry wrote: “Of course, the way our education system does this is totally ass backwards, by shoving dense, impenetrable “classics” onto kids and then discussing what the author “really meant” until you’ve beaten all of the love of reading right out of them. You’ll note that SJWs never talk about entertaining or fun books, but rather socially conscious or enlightening (i.e. boring).”
Boy, howdy, is that true!
I’ve never read any Dickens or Shakespeare since high school. I’ve never re-read “To Kill a Mockingbird” When I got to college, I saw an English course about Science Fiction and I was thrilled … but it almost ruined SF for me. Thankfully, there was enough Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Anderson, etc, etc. make it enjoyable again. I’ve never read any LeGuin since then. I think I must have run into a proto-SJW.
I actually have read quite a bit of Shakespeare since high school. My senior year English teacher was less concerned with interpreting themes and more interested in expanding our vocabulary of archaic curses and pointing out how deeply ingrained the themes of Shakespeare’s play have become in much of Western culture.
Had the person that stood in front of our class and made us read Romeo & Juliet (a person undeserving of the title ‘teacher’), instead done something like your teacher did, the outcome might have been much different. I’ve heard there’s a very fine Shakespeare company not too far away … I have absolutely zero interest in going to see them.
You too ? Thanks to one teacher, who explained the **words** and not the “hidden deeper meaning,” I became hooked on Shakespeare. And the more I travelled, and learned, the more of a fan I became.
Now my (now) 17-year-old son had Shakespeare hammered into him like a giant spike through the skull, after suffering through Great Expectations. This has made it very difficult for me to convince him that Shakespeare doesn’t SUCK!!!!!
Every time I have ever found myself stuck in an english class at work fixing the teachers computer while they discuss one of the “classics” I tend to want to slit my wrists right there. It is that bad. No one confronted with that is going to ever want to read. Fortunately I went through grade school and high school with books in my hands reading constantly even in class. ;) And not approved literature books fun things. Somewhere in one of the yearbooks is a picture of me with a 1st edition paperback of High Deryni in hand reading.
Oddly enough, I watched a TEDx talk by Orson Scott Card this morning where he briefly mentioned this same thing. Talking about his daughter, he told of how she was a voracious reader, until schools killed the love in her for several years due to how poorly they select and discuss the books taught.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weBTtaMqpHM if anyone cares to check it out. Slightly over 18 minutes.
Shakespeare I’ll read and “The Tempest” is probably my favorite play, not just Shakespeare’s, but overall. (I do like a BBC performance, I think it was, with Ephraim Zimblest Junior as Prospero–borrowed a tape from the public library when I lived in Akron. Damn, I’d like to find that one again.)
Other stuff forced on me in school? Not so much.
I like LeGuin. She has some neat ideas that she runs with in some of her books. And she’s the perfect antidote to some of the SJW’s who screech about how original they are when they have minorities or non-standard genders. Much of Earthsea is populated by people with non-Caucasian skin tones, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. It’s just there. And it’s easy to miss if you don’t think about it. She also wrote a book about a human civilization on a distant world in which people switched back and forth between genders. And another of her novels is set on a world that follows anarcho-communist principles, but ends up with the conclusion that no matter how idealistic the civilization, the same power-hungry individuals are going to be calling the shots.
DON’T LET THESE ASSHATS WIN! If you dislike Shakespeare or the classics because of how they were presented in school, look again. These things are great because they are good.
Start with a Laurence Olivier version of something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26GN6rQbZI
It is like wine, it is like a feast
I took a sci-fi class in college, too. I didn’t care for any of the books we read and basically decided I prefer sci-fi in movies/TV more than in books. Even now, when I read books classified as sci-fi (as opposed to fantasy, which is much more my thing), I’m usually disappointed. The class was pretty enjoyable anyway, though. I got to write my final paper about the differences between sci-fi in books and movies/TV, which included a scholarly analysis of 3rd Rock From the Sun. (Probably my second-favorite paper, after the Tolkien one comparing the books and movies where my prof liked my use of the phrase “Faramir went all Boromir”.) So I did have at least one cool lit teacher in college.
Shakespeare, though, I don’t generally care for, probably because of how it’s usually taught. I loathe Romeo and Juliet, mostly because of how people perceive it as the epitome of romantic literature. I do really like Twelfth Night, but then I’m a sucker for people-disguised-as-something-they’re-not stories.
You didn’t have to read The Taming of the Shrew in school? If not, then you might want to take a crack at it now. King Lear is great tragedy, and my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. And it was remade into a great Japanese movie called Ran by respected filmmaker Akira Korusawa. I could go on, but you get the picture.
And I’m of the opinion that Romeo and Juliet is an okay play that gets over-emphasized in Jr. High and High School.
I remember watching a theater-film version of Taming of the Shrew. That may have been one we were supposed to read and I kind of skipped over. The entire concept of that one irritates me, though. “Here’s a horrible harpy of a woman. I must tame her!” Because women are like dogs, apparently. I know this is a product of its time, but to me personally, reading in my time, that just irritates me. IMO, it’s like The Odd Couple: the entire basis for its humor is outdated.
I remember enjoying Julius Caesar when we read that in high school. I thought I liked Macbeth until I went to see a college production of it recently and realized that it’s actually way too bleak and unhappy and full of evil characters for my taste.
There are a fair number of his plays that I’ve never read and probably should, to see if I like any more of them. I quite enjoy some of the sonnets. I still have memorized the one I had to memorize for my Shakespeare class in college (sonnet 61). 130 is quite good, too. I do think that my prof dug a bit too deeply into the “meaning” of the works, though.
Shrew was used as the basis for a musical called “Kiss Me, Kate!” You might want to look into that instead.
And really, Shakespeare’s plays aren’t necessarily what they look like on first glance. In a college course, I had to debate one of my classmates on whether The Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic. We both thought that our opponent had the easier argument. There are levels present that aren’t always immediately obvious – and I’m not talking about the “meaning” that your instructor probably was. I’m talking about stuff that’s more or less in plain sight if the reader/viewer is paying attention to what’s being said.
I’ve only gotten a few paragraphs into this and my reaction is. Holey Shit! No. Seriously. This donkey’s shit is so holey it resembles brown swiss cheese and smells like, like…well a big flaming bag of feces. I gotta run so I’ll read the rest of it later.
I find Lovecraft’s prose to be less heavy handed than Henry James’, though I remember struggling with both the first time I read works from either of them.
As for Lovecraft being racist, as you said he was a product of his times. So were some of the Eugenics textbooks I’ve run across, and very few people think that those textbooks reflect modern scientific attitudes of genetics.
Yet as he complains about Lovecraft’s prose, a bunch of scholarly types just voted for James Joyce as the greatest writer EVAR. :p
But isn’t James Joyce another dead white guy? Aren’t they supposed to be horribly repressive and racist?
Holy crap, really?! I had to study him in college (that’s what I get for taking an Irish Modernism class), and I came to the conclusion that he was almost definitely suffering some severe and ever-worsening form of dementia.
I tried to read Finnegan’s Wake once. I think I got about two sentences in before I gave up.
Not just time, but place: as Larry put it, Lovecraft was your typical “snooty New Englander” who looked down on everybody. (The funniest example of Lovecraft’s “racism:” His line about “the degenerate Dutch.”**)
A type – snooty New Englanders, not degenerate Dutchmen – which is very much still with us…and they’re every bit as obnoxious now as they were back then. The ranks of the SJWs are chock-full of them.
I love pointing out to SJWs who think “intellectualism” is the cure-all for racism that HPL was himself an intellectual. So was the fanatical eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who saw abortion as a way to control and cull the black population. That really pisses ‘em off. :P
(**”The Degenerate Dutch” line comes from a couple of the authors at Tor.com – Ruthanna Emrys and Anne Pillsworth, no conservatives they – who just love HPL and are doing a re-read of his works. They use that particular line of HPL’s as a catchall phrase to describe Lovecraft’s occasional – OK, frequent – forays into genteel Yankee bigotry. One wonders what they might think of the effort to banish HPL…)
It reminds me of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion being turned down as too Celtic, cuz of the whites and their nods and winks and secret cis-white handshakes that publishes work based on race and sex.
Hey! I could totally argue that G.R.R. Martin is a white supremacist. I heard tell that he is a /Democrat/.
If he is social left, then he is a de facto supporter of LBJ’s genius white supremacist master plan.
Kids tend to make a lot of poor choices, partly driven by a poverty of life experience.
Welfare means that a girl can get pregnant, and raise the children living on their own, without whoever raised them being able to force help.
Which means that it is easier for the second generation to be deprived of access to people with more life experience than their mother.
Those of us who’ve stayed away from welfare are often raised around people with forty or sixty years more life experience then we have.
Some of those raised on welfare may have only been around people with twenty or thirty years of life experience.
Dammit – someone made the Butlerian Juhad crack before me.
Just because I’m a big meaney, striving to be an Evilly Evil Member of the Evil League of Evil, I’m going to point out that TWO people made the Butlerian Jihad crack before you.
Sincerely yours,
Skydaver, EEMELE
Considering the geekiness of my fan base, I bet I’m going to have fifty more before these comments die out. :)
Larry, you could put an addendum after ‘Butlerian isn’t a word’, but you’d better hurry!
I was going to mention it, but i decided to hit refresh before replying…
It’s not a word in the sense LC meant it. No one talks about a Butlerian school of fantastic literature like Burroughsian, Howardian, Lovecraftian. Contrary to what Older says, Butler’s books were rather childish and obvious.
Incidentally, did the Guardian Libel suit ever go anywhere?
Toni is far nicer than I am.
Why stop with the head of Lovecraft…
Gernsback was a crook, and Campbell was a jerk, why should their names be on supposedly prestigious awards…
Somebody please send the SJWs a copy of the Gor books. They’ll have a heart attack and be out of our hair.
Ohhhh they know about Norman.
He is hated more than Larry, Ringo, Kratman combined…hell Vox might be less maligned among the SJW worldcon intelligenstia…
IIRC, Dark Horse Comics was planning to reprint the Gor series when the SJWs (they weren’t called that back then, of course) began screaming their heads off. Dark Horse backed down and canceled the line. I don’t even care about Gor but that made me disappointed.
Oh John Ringo No!!!!
Oh John Norman no!
Oh yes- bring up John Norman to the SJW’s. Then lay this on ‘em:
1- He’s had more books published than they do- maybe more than the lot of them ever will (45, between his real name and “John Norman”).
2 He’s sold more books than the lot of them put together (“estimated 6 to 12 million”).
3- In his real life, he’s a philosophy PhD.- which means, by their own rules, he’s smarter than them.
When I used to work at Ace DAW books sent us complimentary copies of their monthly releases, including the DAW novels. Then-editors Susan Allison and Terri Windling picked up a GOR novel and took turns reading a paragraph to each other, and at the end of the paragraph they would chorus, “And then he tied her up again!”
[Search Engine] “Houseplants of Gor”.
“You will be watered!”
“You will beg me to water you.”
Particularly once they realize that the author is actually One of Them…
Blew my mind when I learned that John Norman is actually one John Frederick Lange, a professor of philosophy teaching at Queens College, City University in New York City.
He must have some interesting faculty meetings, is all I can speculate.
I did not know that, and that makes it way more awesome. :)
Interesting thing about Norman is that it is pretty clear he was blacklisted by the big New York publishers. After all how many PROFITABLE authors get dumped by thier publisher and cant get picked up another house?
And there were concerted efforts to get him kicked from participating in , or even being invited to, cons.
http://www.locusmag.com/2001/Departments/Letters10Norman.html
“That science fiction is to remain tile province of a political backwater, an enclave of uncritical, smug, effusively emoting, self-righteous leftist Bourbons who after a hundred million deaths and the collapse of civilizations have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, that it is to be forever the sanctuary of the “religious left,” the captive of proponents of a historically refuted, bankrupt ideology? She deserves better.
Monothink is not the salvation of science fiction; it is its death knell as an intellectually stimulating branch of literature. Science fiction could be so much, and it is confined to so little.
I do not need this genre, but I love it. Indeed, I must love it, to have put up for years with the abusive, predictable crap of the politically blinkered ideological Pavlovians, the psychologically insecure, the emotionally immature, the morally benighted, and the sexually retarded, of which science fiction has more than her share. ” john norman, 2001
I love it when they bitch because there aren’t more writers that match their perception of what the demographics should be. They bitch and yell about how they’re shut out of the publishing industry.
Um…the publishing industry ain’t run by conservatives or libertarians, so who should they be bitching to?
They just can’t accept the fact that there aren’t more simply because many subcultures don’t have an appetite for speculative fiction or even reading in general. Growing up in South America, I was in a minuscule minority – people who read for pleasure, let alone people who read science fiction or comic books for pleasure (among my English-learning tools were the X-Men comic books – the Claremont/Byrne years). I’d say that maybe three people out of a graduating class of a hundred had read any science fiction at all (unless one counts Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realism as SF – I don’t; I barely count it as reading material).
And, of course, most of the whiners are Anglos whose only contact with POCs has been through the service industry.
I tried – REALLY tried – after a recommendation, tread Gabriel Garcia’s books. I waded through Diary of a Murder foretold or some such, his non-fid (rumors of a kidnapping?) wasn’t bad, and then tried Melancholy Whores…
Ugh.
Dripping in class consciousness, condescension, hatred of tradition, and steeped in misery, more misery, and the hateful pointlessness of it all.
I rather love the things Terry Pratchett has to say about magical realism. The quote I can seem to find most readily online is that magical realism is “like a polite way of saying you write fantasy and is more acceptable to certain people – and who, on the whole don’t care that much,” which is great on its own, but I could have sworn I read a more succint “magical realism is what fantasy authors call it when they don’t want to admit they write fantasy” from him somewhere, as well.
Those were the best years of the X-Men. Although I wonder if a side effect of studying them is you tend to use the idiom “No quarter was asked nor given” far more often than is warranted.
Yep. Exactly.
I’ve got a few geek friends that are listed as some form of minority. My gaming group’s DM is, technically, but he looks white and even has the last name of White (but he’s half Cuban, so…). I have a few other friends who check something on the EEOC forms. Hell, *I* check some stuff on the EEOC forms (theoretically, at least) for Pete’s sake. None of us have any issue with the make up of geek culture because everyone we know who is interested? We invite them. It’s just that simple.
A while back, during a discussion about this topic, I asked about how many minorities actually read SFF. Were their any hard numbers? I mean, if only 2 percent of the SFF reading population are black, but 5 percent of the publish SFF authors are black, then they’re well represented as a group. If 20 percent of the readers are black, and the published percent is only 5, then maybe there’s something someone might want to look at. Of course, that was immediately dismissed as a topic worth consideration because reasons.
I’m sorry, but based on my life in a town where my white butt is the minority, I can honestly say how rare it is to see minorities in the science fiction/fantasy section of either the library or the book store. Honestly, I think the reason we don’t have more black or brown science fiction authors is the same reason we don’t have more white rappers. Artists are people who grow up appreciating a certain art form so much, they seek to emulate that. Since not a lot of white kids grow up appreciating rap music to a sufficient degree, you don’t get a lot of white rappers. The same with black and brown people and science fiction.
Tom, if we go with the 20% black readers and 5% black writers, then it makes it pretty clear that the race of the author is relatively unimportant to the black readers. As they might be perfectly fine reading non-black authors.
Actually, reconsidering, that breakdown can’t actually tell us anything unless all readers are reading all books by all authors. If an average reader can only read the output of 1% of the authors is a year, in theory, those 5% black authors could supply 100% the reading material that all the black readers want (And the way the SJW’s look at it, black readers would ONLY want stuff written by black authors. Hey, we know SJW’s are racist.).
Lies, damn lies, and Statistics.
No arguments from me. I was trying to illustrate a point, however, and that was that they didn’t have any data from which to tell if there actually WAS a problem with the percentages.
I’ve always thought that the best place to start getting more minority writers isn’t to just wish them into existence (which seems to be the current plan), or to demand more books about certain types of people either. It’s to simply get them to read the books. Get enough of these groups reading SFF, and some of them are going to start writing it. As others have said, with indie being such a viable alternative today, there’s nothing stopping anyone from publishing.
Of course, then the SJWs wouldn’t have anything to whine about.
Not just wish them into existence, but to increase their proportions by eliminating EEEVUL White cis-male authors.
Getting minorities to read more and having those who love reading turn into writers is a good plan. If only the Schools run by the Left would actually, oh, I dunno, teach Minorities to actually READ.
It would help if they didn’t try to make kids read the most boring crap on Earth and then get into the whole “What does it mean?” thing.
“Why does the old man go fishing?”
“Uh…to catch fish?”
“No, why does he REALLY go fishing?”
“Uh…to REALLY catch fish?”
With apologies to Ferris Bueller’s:
“What do the bars of the prison symbolize…”
@T.L. Knighton – mind you they rather conveniently like to ignore oh, I dunno, most of China, South Korea and Japan. Especially Japan. Y’know, the place that has musicals of … Rurouni Kenshin, Sailor Moon, Black Butler… (and those are just the ones I’m aware of.)
Hell, Deltora Quest, which is written by an Australian author is made into an anime.
Buuuut they don’t count coz … reasons! And Stuff! or something that is FEEEEELS!!!!!!!!!
They have to ignore Japan in particular, otherwise, they also lose out on things like the American/Western European-centric nature of modern SFF.
After all, in anime, every single alien invasion or monster attack happens in Japan rather than Brooklyn (where no one would notice them).
The fun thing is the cross-pollenization of genres is really starting to come through outside of video games. The Edge of Tomorrow – based off of a light novel. Samuel L. Jackson is in a more action-focused version of KITE … uhm, and if you don’t already know what the Japanese version of that is, …don’t look it up, because the live action American version is Bleached Underpants version. (I vaguely recall a cut version of the anime existing though but that might have been a European only release…) Those are just off the top of my head.
I think their problem is that they have more writers that match their perception than readers….. Kinda like MSNBC reporting.
This smacks of blaming others for his own lack of success. “It’s not because publishing houses reject the vasty vast majority of everyone who subs to them, they’re deliberately keeping us down!” Uh, no. And if you think that, then go indy and show them what they missed out on by not signing you.
No one is stopping anyone from writing and publishing anymore. NO ONE. What I’m taking away from this is that I’m somehow holding “writers of color” and “writers of femaleness” back by… daring to exist, and daring to write the stories I want to read of manly men doing manly man things. (Yes, most of my protags are men. Suck it, feminists.) Or something. Well. This is America. If I want something, I go after it.
So. Can. They.
But…but…but…reasons and stuff!
I really wish these people would take a page out of Ben Aaronovitch’s book. His ‘Rivers of London’ is everything these people constantly screech about in terms of diversity and all the rest, but done *right.* It’s not a Message, it’s an entertaining urban fantasy series.If he’s ever engaged in any Issue agit-prop, he’s successfully kept it out of the story, which is all I ask. I wonder who’s encouraged more people to write similar books – he or the plethora of twitter ‘activists.’
But but… but nobody can possibly publish indie and then have a major publishing house pick up their work! It can’t possibly be done! I mean, nobody has ever done that ever! It’s unheard of! Unpossible, even!
Please tell me you’re gonna link back to this one too =) I know I am.
I’m currently unpublished, but… most of my main characters tend to be men. Why? Not because I’ve been conditioned to default to a white male character or because I look down on my own gender. It’s because, as a straight woman, I like men. Not just romantically, but, you know, as men. As people. I like the male mind when it’s at its best, and even when it’s at its worst it can make for interesting characters. Sure, I write women too, but in general, my male characters tend to outnumber my female characters. Same as how my male characters in online MMOs outnumber my females. This whole idea that people should only–or even primarily–write characters who are just like them (which is what the SJWs seem to be saying) is just ridiculous.
One of my WIPs has a male MC… and the rest of his band end up being women. None of the women join him for romantic reasons, but because his job gives them opportunities to benefit in their own quests/jobs/thing they’re actually out in the world to do. There’s another male character who joins them much later on, but that’s long after the initial group of companions have grown to work well together.
I don’t really have a preference for gender in the characters I write. I write them as ‘characters/people’ and the rest is just part of the profile.
This. So much this. I primarily play/write male characters for that very reason. I also tend to avoid books with female protagonists, largely because men are of interest to me. I’m a woman, I understand that already. I’d rather read about something I don’t know.
“I don’t really have a preference for gender in the characters I write. I write them as ‘characters/people’ and the rest is just part of the profile.”
Naturally, yes. You’d think that would be the way to go about it, but then you’re not a SJW. (My WIP actually has quite a bit of gender/ethnic diversity, not that any of that would matter to the SJWs, I’m sure. Although it’s funny to try to imagine how they’d react. “Why is one of the villains a black woman?” “Because she’s a former slave.” “So she’s a victim! Why is she a villain?” “Because she didn’t handle it well.” “Why are there so many white males?” “Um, most of those are the other villains.”)
They don’t want to publish. They want the validation of having someone else publish them.
I see Danny-boy goes pretty much straight from “We’re oppressed!” to “We’re mighty and you’d just better run!” See the same thing all the time from the Islamists, whipsawing from whinging to bluster.
Oddly enough, I’m not a Lovecraft fan, nor has he influenced me. Robert E. Howard and Louis L’Amour now, they influenced me.
As an ex-swordmaker and martial artist, I wanted to see how certain authors cadence their fight scenes and keep them from being boring {its not that hard to write in to much detail}.
When I wanted to see tempo in action, Howard was the first author I looked to. When I wanted another view, and how to work a martial arts fight, I re-read several L’Amour westerns for his fist fights and boxing matches.
Thanks for the fisking, Larry. It was nice to see you come out swinging again.
Robert Parker’s Spenser series is another excellent one for body-on-body (i.e. no weapons) fights. I don;t care as much for his gunfight stuff, but Spenser and Hawk fighting bad guys is as good as it gets.
The scene where Spenser and Hawk run down the Russian assassin at the Olympics was like something out of Melville.
*squeee* Angus Trim of “Atrim” swords?
Sorry, I’ll slink off now, I just wanted to say thanks, and wish I’d been able to buy something before you stopped making them.
Yeah……
Don’t tell anyone but I am going to do about another 25 or so over the next two years. They’ll appear at Kult of Athena’s without any warning.
The toxins of making the swords finally caught up to me. So I’m pretty much done. I have a few to finish, and a few I want to do. But then it’s time to tip hat and walk off.
Thanks
“Or how about a grey, formless, blob?”
Grey is far too close to white for their comfort. ;-)
Oh, so you think it should be a black formless blob?! Man, that is racist! Is thinking of the black man as a monkey just too humanizing for you, you gotta go dehumanize all the way to a black formless blob?
;-)
a child of foulness?
They could always use the Greendale College Human Being.
Completely race-nuetral.
>;-D
How about the color of The Damned Thing from the story by Ambrose Bierce (who, IIRC, influenced Lovecraft):
“I am not mad; there are colours that we cannot see.
And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a colour!”
Ah, so it’s a color out of space? ;-)
“Supporters of the Lovecraft statue point out his influence on the fantasy genre, and they’re right: today, we’re still struggling to unravel the legacy of racism and erasure with which he and other early speculative fiction writers permeated their work.”
Unless I am misreading him, I am fairly sure he’s saying that the *only* legacy of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror authors is racism. I am not sure why he’s erasing the rest of the evil-doers from his little Zola episode. Down with Faulkner. Burn every Hemingway book you can find. Holy crap – there are still Kipling’s books available to the unwary public!
They will have to pry Kipling’s books from my cold, dead hands.
Likewise, if not even then- they’re going to my godson next, and after that, who knows? Even if it’s gone, I still have at least one of his poems memorized (Copybook Headings)- I’d start reciting it at city council meetings, football games, on random street corners and bars…
I’m drawing my own little line in the sand – if anyone in a discussion with me tries to use a “cis-” term without irony, I’m going to ask them to fuck right off. I realize this will make a hopelessly unenlightened stick to the SJWs of the world, but at the crusty age of 39 years old I’m just too far set in my antiquated ways.
I expect any day now to hear that the SJWs will want “To Kill A Mockingbird” banished from the library shelves. After all, Atticus Finch dared to question a woman’s accusation of rape, which makes him an eeevil rape apologist and everything… :P
I’m surprised they hadn’t gone after Mark Twain, myself. If they have, I haven’t heard of it… yet.
There was a short story I read, where they could recreate the personalities of long dead people. Mark Twain was called up, and offered the choice to stay around. He agreed, only to discover the people who wanted to talk to him wanted to abuse him for his views on race/religion/politics.
100 years of listening to nothing but your critics? {shudder} Leave me in the grave, thanks!
I hear about once every year or two about a district looking at banning Twain or using a ‘scrubbed’ version of his works because he uses bad words (that accurately reflect speaking of the time). I’ve even seen Huckleberry Finn referred to as a “anti-black racist polemic”; never-mind that the entire point of the book was racism is bad.
Wes, saw a couple people link comments on twitter a few days ago pushing that angle. They were sufficiently trounced that they deleted their tweets.
“I’m surprised they hadn’t gone after Mark Twain, myself.” Oh, they have, and frequently. How dare he have his characters refer to Jim as a nigger, just because that’s the way whites of the time talked?
Truly, I find myself pitying the fools, who can’t appreciate a novel that makes a black slave the most intelligent and humane person in the story, and demonstrates relentlessly that slavery was evil.
“Butlerian isn’t a word. ”
And if it were, it should refer to being like Rhett Butler.
As in, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Not that I mean to defend this Guardian article (since, really, it doesn’t deserve any defending) but to be fair, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Game of Thrones, the show, not A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels. The show handled Dany’s conquest of Meereen in a very trite and stereotypical manner, so I can’t help but agree with him there.
…of course, if the rest of the lack of understanding of literary history that he’s demonstrated so far is any indication, he probably thinks the show is all he needs to know.
He was, but that wasn’t the issue. It was in depicting the Dothraki as non-white, same as the book, and attaching it to barbarism. You see, a proper SJW will turn that around and we’ll all be blown away by that because Robert E. Howard never wrote this about Samarcand 83 years ago:
“The Frank’s wonder grew; the cities of the West were hovels compared to this. Past academies, libraries and pleasure-pavilions they rode, and Ak Boga turned into a wide gateway, guarded by silver lions.”
Why be surprised – in the cult of the PC, they still have Hammurabi’s edgy new Code in their future.
*facepalm* … Yes, because staying out in the sun, on horseback, all day long ensures one will keep alabaster white skin.
@Shadowdancer: Mutated melanin that makes the skin brighter with UV exposure? ;-)
There aren’t enough gun fights in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Amen! ;-)
Somebody should write the sisterhood of the travelling gunbelt.
It would have improved the movie immensely.
“…to the average American most of the world was a mysterious, scary, alien place.”
And that was true as recently as the early 80s. Just look at the original Oriental Adventures handbook.
And the reverse, of course. To much of the world – even to this day – the US is a dangerous, lawless, violent frontier.
That doesn’t seem to stop them all from wanting to move here, mind you.
We must beat the fun out of reading. You will read the acceptable novels comrade.
Where’s a booklegger when you need one?
Yet, the atmosphere he set scared the shit out of millions of us, to the point that when we grew up and tried to write something scary, we used him as a template. Nothing is more human than fear. Pulling that off takes craft.
Really, most Lovecraft tales only consist of well-spoken New Englanders telling each other scary stories in the dark, but the man practically invented creeping dread in literature. But to be fair, Lovecraft said his influence was Poe, so we all learn from somebody.
I actually can only read Lovecraft as comedy – he’s too farcical for me to read as horror. I’m not sure why that is, maybe I just haven’t read the right works (I’ve only read a few – the one that really sticks in my head is “The Colour out of Space”), or if I came to it too late in life… but his style of “well-spoken New Englanders telling each other scary stories in the dark” just doesn’t immerse enough to actually feel any fear.
That said, I can definitely see & appreciate his influence on genre fiction since then, including horror stories that really do scare me. But back on the humor side… I cracked up *hard* when I first read the opening paragraph of chapter 23 in Lost in a Good Book, the 2nd Thursday Next novel by Jasper Fforde. If anyone enjoys meta-fiction w/ tons of call-outs to classic literature, I highly recommend that series.
To be fair, I found Lovecraft’s Rats in the Wall utterly terrifying. The ultimate in the untrustworthy narrator.
I remember reading my first Lovecraft book as a high school senior. Of course, back then I was running. It was 9:00 at night (and very dark) and I’d just finished the book I’d been reading all day. I went for a 6 mile run. About 3 miles out, I started getting spooked, and then more spooked (I lived in a rural area without many lights). I think I set records for the last mile home.
And Bradbury didn’t like walking by his ravine after he’d seen the silent Phantom of the Opera as a boy.
Older’s as bad as anyone in SFF’s PC clownmobile and that’s saying a lot. The competition for that is far stiffer than who can write the most anti-white, anti-male, non-SF, non-fantasy limerick about the oppressive nature of heterosexuality in order to gain the prestigious Nebula Award for Outstanding Supremacist Cult Literature of the Year.
Keep in mind that in another anti-Lovecraft piece this guy wrote, he didn’t know what cyclopean architecture was. He thought it was about the cyclops or something, or maybe Lenscrafters.
As for Lovecraft being a product of his era, what then is Older’s excuse?
In looking at Amazon to see how many orders of magnitude Older has to break the Top 100 I noticed that once again the Top 100 has not one single Social Justice Manatee on its SFF list.
That rather startled me because I’d think a racist white supremacy would rather dote on having a kindred spirit diversity division of the KKK to boost membership and so buy lots of their #DiversityIsApartheid books.
And we should perhaps clarify that though these idiots are picking on HPL, what they really mean is the entire era is racist and sexist:
“Crossed Genres @crossedgenres Dec 3 The ‘Golden Age’ of SFF contained absurd amounts of racism, sexism, etc. in its most revered works. So no, we wouldn’t publish those books…”
Once again The Guardian rates a 10 on Prof. Latrine’s Stink-O-Meter.
I must admit, I’d never heard of Mr Older, but I am grateful that he shared with us his disdain for “straight, cis, white men”.
It saves me from ever wasting my straight, cis, white money on his books.
Why is it that Lovecraft is derided as a racist for wanting non-whites kept far away from him (a common sentiment at the time) while H.G. Wells gets a pass for advocating ethnic cleansing against non-WASPs? Could it be because Lovecraft was an Anglophile monarchist while Wells was an avowed socialist?
” Butlerian ” is to sci-fi novels what the Mike Tyson Mysteries are to Saturday Morning cartoons, only by accident.
You know, there was this really popular science fiction author who wrote a book where the main characters included a black dude, an Arab Muslim, a couple of girls, and a bit who was the product of a genetic experiment; oh, and the *main* main character came to hate humanity as much as he ever hated his infectious alien enemies… And boy do sjw’s *hate* Orson Scott card. That should tell you everything you need to know.
Actually, the Muslim in question was a black African. It’s a minor plot point in the Shadow novels when it’s noted that his Arab followers are all racists.
The movie changed that. I can’t imagine why…
After looking at his web page, he’s just another hipster deuche who needs to hear himself talk while belittling others.
Where can I get one of those natty little hipster deuchebag hats?
It’s a pattern baldness thing.
Does anyone else feel that when Larry Corriea fisks another pathetic SJW, it’s like sending a fully-armed AC-130 against a special-needs kid with a cap-gun?
I wonder how many of the Guardian’s readers are persons of colour (Note tony UK spelling)? Of course, in the Guardian’s defense, its staff have been SJW’s since before it was cool; in fact, most of them were born that way, with head firmly up ass and convinced the funny smell was white oppression…
So he wants to have a — dare I say it? — Butlerian Jihad?
Another smile making fisking Larry, thanks.
You mentioned some confusion on Older’s use of “Gentrification”. Its another of the Liberal Progressive “codewords”. To really see their fuss and bother about it I’ll direct your attention to an article, but first…..
**ALERT** **ALERT** Correiaken Trigger Warning, Repeat, Correiaken Trigger Warning. Social Justice Warriors are advised to seek immediate shelter.
Larry. Before looking this up you should take a few precautions. First, you should cover your computer and keyboard with Heavy plastic…that skimpy saran wrap will NOT suffice. You may well consider covering any an all walls, floors, ceilings, furniture within frothing spittle range of your computer (Think of one of Dexter’s killing rooms).
Next, Arm the lovely Mrs. Correia with an advanced med kit and a tranquilizer dart rifle (not pistol…rifle) and have her load for rhino. Fortunately she is a good shot, but having met you, please make sure she has several reloads.
Now you should be ready. If you dare, look up “Spike Lee’s opinion on Gentrification”. I’m guessing that before you reach the end of his rant you will understand the Progressives “Outrage!” about whitey taking over the hood, or you will have popped all the veins in your neck and head and maybe have died.
Good luck!
*eyes narrow at the recommendation of prepping up the computer area like a Dexter kill room.*
…Damnit. I am stupidly tempted to look it up but I’m not done reading a different article that’s busy dismantling a SJW’s screeching about Frozen not being a feminist enough movie or something similarly insane.
http://chezapocalypse.com/thefrozenthing/
You’re frakking kidding me, right? A movie that makes a grrrrll power theme out of a scene where a main character nearly destroys the entire country in a fit of “self empowerment”?
In fairness, when she realizes that ‘her moment of self-empowerment’ nearly kills everything and everyone she’s trying to protect, she freaks right the hell out. Elsa’s primary motivation is to protect everyone – especially her sister- from herself and the realization she’s inadvertently hurt people – and keeps doing so – damages her badly. Which I liked. It gets lots better for her and everyone involved when she figures out how to control her powers.
But hey, Disney movie. =)
I really do like that movie – but then I look at it through a “normal” lens. Ironically, like Whedon’s Firefly and Avengers, it looks like someone was dedicated enough to the craft of story, and letting the characters be characters, that it ended up oddly “red pill” overall.
Ironically, many of the characters are what feminists claim they want…
Cool – so the portag is a girl. The misinterpretation of “learn to control it” into “suppress it” requires a bit of “I believe” but sets up the rest of the story nicely.
Anna is, if anything, a girl. And she ACTS like a girl, and not some rip-roaring “hear me roar” wunderkind. But a strong girl with a sense of purpose. And courage. And even some competence, given how cloistered she was, and how few practical skills she had to really learn.
There is no “entitled, look at me” outside of the jarring triumph/freedom song as her sister nearly destroys the kingdom – a very scary moment actually watching her personal triumph counterpointed by the consequences of not learning self – discipline and control.
Actually, if you think about it, the core lesson for Elsa was anti-SJW. Control, self discipline, justice.
While I’m sure the “nice guy but-really-a-bad-guy-prince charming” has something to do with recent “nice guys suck” (they really do…. and really aren’t THAT nice..) in feminist circles, it’s still a good lesson that people can be false and deceitful without sinking into SVU territory. And while Kristoff is a bit TOO willing to help out for no good reason (but without heroics, there would be no story), is certainly his own man and willing to tell Anna how things are without putting her on a huge pedestal. He even gets to be right. Though I disagree he needs any fixing-up.
In short – it was a believable story, coherent plot, fun songs, well executed, that didn’t break my “people aren’t like that” detector.
Actually, that scene came across to me as having very much a “who is she trying to convince” vibe. She was feeling very lost and alone and all the “look at how free I am” stuff was to try to cover that up.
That movie was full of heartbreaking moments.
Loved it.
Utterly agree on the vibe. In context, the song, the beauty, the triumph of breaking free, and the horror of the consequences WORK and I can’t think, outside of a slight shift of tone in the music, how it could be done better. There is a sadness in the delivery of “the cold never bothered me anyway” that fits well.
Incidentally, the spanish translation is more literally “free myself” which is actually more appropriate to the scene as she IS breaking free, regardless of the collateral damage.
The movie is a DAMN good study on the difference between being suppressed, and learning self-discipline and control.
NOTE: my response to “do you want to build a snowman” being sung is NO!
I liked Frozen. I thought it was just the right amount of feminist. It emphasized the sister relationship and warned that not all “princes” are good guys while still having a cute love story (which also showed that not all good guys have to be princes). Though it is funny to me that “Let It Go” is so popular as a sort self-empowerment song, despite the fact that by the end of the movie, Elsa realizes that she really does have responsibilities and that living as if life had no consequences wasn’t really a good idea.
Yeah, I liked Frozen too.
The fisking I linked was, well, fisking an article with some serious issues.
One of the things that has been annoying me of late is the criticism “It’s not perfect” – something applied, I’ve noticed, to movies and shows and rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggh there’s ever anything that’s ‘perfect’ made by falliable humans?! It’s a KID’S MOVIE, that adults happen to also enjoy. I don’t expect perfection, I hope to have fun.
And yeah, Elsa does have responsibilities. The really freeing part is being able to have her magic, her family, her people, and no longer have to run away or hide/fear her magic. Mind, the motivation of trying not to accidentally kill everyone around you makes loads and loads of sense – to me the primary initial motivator for Elsa’s flight from Arendale. My heart broke for her when she pleaded for her parents not to touch her. It’s not until she’s up in the mountain that she realizes … ‘hey, I can’t hurt anyone up here.’ Or so she thinks, the poor gal…
Yeah, good points.
I think what annoys me most about the critics of the movie are the ones who either go, “Elsa’s not paired with a man, so Disney was trying to say she’s gay! Except they weren’t explicit about it, so she’s not gay enough! The gays have to be more gay!” and those on the other side who say, “They didn’t pair her with a man, and the antagonist was a man! Disney’s saying all men are evil or idiots! Man-haters!” Like, dude, everyone just chill. It’s a kids’ movie.
Yeaaaaaaaaaaah, I banged my head a lot against my desk when I heard those. Or the whole ‘gee, the female love interest, if she were gay, is her sister’ being met with HAAAAAAAAAAATER. My brain had to bury cells for that one. Do they listen to themselves?! But then again, these would probably be the same subset of crazy that is okay with the several years long incestuous abuse that the Dunham sisters did. Guh.
My 3 year old niece loves “Frozen” and I think her opinion is much more valid. ;-)
Let it go.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html
I apologies. I am Techno impaired. No idea how to make that a link.
well…damn. It is a link. This one has the audio of Lee’s oratory. Being a left wing rag, they treat the issue with kid gloves and ignore the massive irony of a multimillionaire NOW living in a $15 million dollar Manhattan home lamenting about the vanishing ghetto he, himself GTFO of.
I prefer Will.I.Am’s method of using his money to move his entire extended family out of the ghetto, and then setting up businesses to train people still in the ghetto in skilled trades.
Is being techno-impaired like being colorblind but auditory?
Y’know – you can hear heavy metal, rock, folk, pop, but somehow EDM just passes over you and you don’t even notice? Can’t dance to it, etc?
:)
Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, Asimov, Merritt, Heinlein, Brackett, Smith. All products of their times, but creators of timeless works. Their works are among the foundations of modern SF, Fantasy and Horror.
SJWs are foolish enough to believe that a house can remain standing after you remove the foundations.
I’d throw in Poe, Bierce, Wells, and Verne, too.
I’m with Beolach in never finding HPL’s work particularly horror-inducing. His writing style was too overwrought and pretentious for me to take seriously, and there wasn’t much in the way of dramatic tension, since all his stories (at least that I read) were basically the same formula. Monster shows up, everybody dies and/or goes mad, the end. Not much point there, and about as exciting as watching flies in a jar. They’re all doomed from the start, so why waste my time.
That said, there’s no denying he had a profound and defining effect on the genre, however much the SJWs may wish otherwise. When or if Ms. Butler attains commensurate renown and influence, replacing the bust might be considered, but not a moment before.
I also suspect that were Lovecraft to have been de-canonized prior to this latest bit of silliness, they would currently be screeching that it was an effort to cover up ‘SFF’s disgraceful history of intolerance and racism.’ But maybe that’s just my cynicism talking.
I’m not at all fond of horror so I’ve never bothered to read Lovecraft and am only mildly curious (and have a huge pile of books to read already, so…) but I *know* about Lovecraft because he’s such a significant part of the culture. I know the iconic squid monster, Cthulhu. I know the Elder Gods. I get the cultural references, none of which are ever, in any sense, having to do with race.
Same here. Horror isn’t my general thing. I’ll read an occasional one, but really, my nightmares don’t need inspiring. -_-; I’ve also been told I should try to write the things I have woken up screaming from, but I consider horror – and scaring the everliving hell out of people – to be one of the most difficult forms of writing there is. Fear is a hard emotion to inspire, IMO.
Try “The Shadow Out of Time.” It is a bizarre and unique combination of SF and gradually revealed horror that is big time fun.
This kind of crap just peeves me off.
A little background: I’m Hispanic (born in NYC of Peruvian parents and grew up mostly in Venezuela. English is my second language and I speak it with a thick, noticeable accent. Looks wise I’m a shorter, more rotund version of Larry.
I’ve been writing roleplaying games for some twenty-odd years, and been attending gaming and SF conventions for longer than that. I was never made to feel unwelcome or like an outcast, either by my publishers or editors or by any convention staff or attendee (well, once or twice a couple of a-holes made fun of my accent; boo-hoo, woe is me, just writing about that almost triggered me. Ok, maybe not). Maybe I’ve just been lucky so far, or maybe I just don’t walk around with a chip on my shoulder looking for crap to offend me.
That this pendejo can be brought to tears because there’s more brown and black faces in a con annoys me. That he’s crusading against Lovecraft infuriates me. That he’s living under the delusion that mainstream SF publishing industry has been discriminating against non-whites at any time since, say, 1968 or thereabouts, just astounds me.
Anyways, great fisking, Larry. I’m getting sick and tired of all the people acting like SF&F is some sort of Apartheid Reich from hell.
Oh boy. I’m teaching a 10th grade makeup Lit class at my school. Wanted to teach “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and “The Rats in the Walls.”
I got the ok from my department chair provided that we had a lesson on HPL’s racism before we covered his book. I had no problem with this as the majority of my students are minority students (yes, I realize what I said) and the cat’s name is N****rman. I talked with the students about all the authors, including HPL and informed them about the cat. For some reason they were most interested in the book with the weird racist cat name.
Before we got to HPL there was a school board meeting and a very vocal group upset about the disproportionate % of black teachers to black students. They also went on to say that the district should only hire teachers who live in that city…but that’s another story.
Well, after that, HPL got pulled by my bosses. Not just “Rats,” either. I was told it was best to skip him all together because a white teacher teaching a white racist author, no matter how you preface it, would stir up more unrest than it is worth. (Translation: If you teach HPL in the current climate, certain members of the community may be calling for your job.)
I was told there are plenty of canon pieces out there that I could fit into the theme, and if not I could always find another theme. Ugh.
Well, I hope you told the kids that the story was forbidden and then casually mentioned where the library could be found.
They were actually upset. They said it was stupid to keep it from them at that point since they already knew about it. I actually laughed when they told me their parents would never find out, because I told them there was no way I could be certain of that, to which they responded that they never ever bring up school to their parents. (They ARE in makeup lit so they have at least an F or two under their belts so…yeah, I’m figuring “Guess what I did in school today,” is never heard from them!)
Of course, I showed them my copy of the book (in case they wanted to see what it looked like) and was strangely occupied at the end of class so if any of them grabbed a copy of the story off my desk before I could remove them I didn’t notice.
*grin* Well done. *claps*
Older’s a fanatic who cannot be moved. Samuel R. Delany is many times the writer Older is but if Delany had lit up his readers as a pack of racists you never would’ve heard of Delany.
And there you have Older’s future as an artist – there isn’t one. He’s a crap writer anyway if you’ve ever read his blundering prose. He has a tin ear for it and thinks non-white=plot. The Guardian seems content to use Damien Walter and Older as disposible chum for sharks and ending their careers as writers before they ever started.
Another highly entertaining fisk.
“And like most dystopias, neither fictionalized versions of this city have much to say about the real-world conflicts threatening urban communities of color like police violence and gentrification.”
Maybe that’s because people write urban fantasy because they want to write about vampires/werewolves/zombies/etc. and not “police violence and gentrification”. It’s astonishing that anyone could call himself a fantasy author and not get that.
“Of course, the way our education system does this is totally ass backwards, by shoving dense, impenetrable “classics” onto kids and then discussing what the author “really meant” until you’ve beaten all of the love of reading right out of them.”
Yup. I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember, but I can remember maybe two books that were assigned reading in any of my English classes that I actually liked. Well, until I got to college and took a Tolkien class. Even while getting my BA in English (with lit emphasis), I skimmed and BS’d my way through so much of my schoolwork because the stuff we studied was just so damn boring. (Howard’s End? Really? I could barely stay awake through the movie. I didn’t dare try to read the book.)
From what I see on certain agent blogs lately, the publishing industry is actively seeking non-white authors, to the point that a recent agent blog encouraged the query writer to include that information in his query.
Okay, so about Lovecraft, I really appreciate his influence in certain authors I like, but I tried listening to an audiobook of one of his stories (something about mountains of madness, I think), and I just couldn’t because it was so incredibly boring. Just endless description of exactly what the monster fossils looked like, way past any point of me possibly caring. So I have to ask, can someone recommend one of his stories to me that’s actually exciting and has interesting characters?
Listening to Lovecraft on audible is like chugging fine wine out of a bottle. He needs to be read at night, alone, maybe in an attic bedroom, with no one else in the house. When you can hear every creak of old wood and the beating of your heart, he won’t seem so boring.
Haha. Noted. So I guess listening to it while on the treadmill at the gym was the wrong way to go.
I once read Lovecraft in a tiny detached one-room bungalow by lantern light late at night on the shores of Lake Toba. I once read Tarzan and the Ant-Men over two nights alone on top of a massive volcano with an active crater erupting at its base far below. I once read The Moon Pool sailing up the Amazon River. I would bang my head against a wall before listening to Bradbury while running errands.
Essential Lovecraft:
THE OUTSIDER
THE CALL OF CTHULHU
THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP
Personally, I’d also add THE SHUNNED HOUSE.
For best results, follow James May’s spot-on advice.
Thanks.
Well, I might enjoy writing about gendarmes using fire magic to kill rioting drug addicts.
I’d read that.
“HANDS UP! DON’T STAKE!”
Ugh,really? You know LoveCraft lived in a different era from ours. The cultural norms & politics of that time period were drastically different from our own.
Look,I liked Sword Of Truth but “truth” be told,Terry Goodkind is an objectivist and I think he’s a bit of an arrogant tosser. The fact remains I still enjoy some of his stories.
Perhaps Lovecraft was a bit racist but it was probably the harmless kind of ignorance brought about by the fear of the exotic and the unknown. I mean is there any evidence of Lovecraft going out of his way to physically assault immigrants or blacks? He seemed more like a peaceful recluse who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
During the years Lovecraft lived I imagine many “normal people” were a bit prejudiced. Civil rights activism had not even kicked off in earnest at that point.
Having been introduced to Lovecraft by a cute Chinese girl, I’ve never tied his writing with racism. Yeah, his characters expressed attitudes that were common at the time, and he was just as bad. But isn’t part of reading being exposed to other cultures and ideas, even if they’re BAD ideas and just an older form of your own culture?
The SJWs are some of the most parochial people around, and nothing makes it clearer than their constant declarations of being sophisticated, in terms that make it clear how narrow their concept of humanity is.
Lovecraft’s horror never, ever scared me, but his fantasy, particularly his novel length paean to Dunsany DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH formed my idea of what a fantasy book should be: dreamlike, exotic, oriental, mysterious, alluring, repellant, slowly building to a phantasmagoria of words and images …
I could probably recite the opening four paragraphs from memory.
Seriously, Lovecraft was my gateway to Milton’s PARADISE LOST and Keat’s HYPERION not to mention my undying fondness for Clark Ashton Smith’s mystic, horrid, gorgeous and ornate THE HASHISH EATER.
I had not previously connected Lovecraft with Milton, but now that you mention it I can see the similarities.
I always connected Henry James (particularly his TURN OF THE SCREW) with Lovecraft. Especially the way that both authors had dense descriptive prose that hinted at the horror instead of outright description.
I have some degree of sympathy for the notion that maybe they should change the statue for the award if Lovecraft is that racist. Besides, have you seen the statuette? The damn thing IS a Lovecraftian horror.
So wouldn’t the logical step be to change the statuette to a dragon or something? If the problem is that we named the statue after a guy, who decades after he wrote is now considered problematic, why would one want to pick another real person who might hold some belief that we will consider nutty decades from now.
No; we can’t do that. Instead we must model the fantasy award statue after an author who isn’t widely considered to be a fantasy author. Counting generously, Octavia published something like one novel and two short stories that are considered fantasy. The rest of her work is generally counted as SF, and wouldn’t be eligible for the award that they want to name after her. It appears to me that Butler was selected for those campaign because she was a black woman. Nope, nothing racist about that; no sir.
If we really must change the award, shouldn’t we pick an author who casts as large a shadow over the world of fantasy as Lovecraft? The obvious candidates are Robert E. Howard and Tolkien. I’m sure those suggestions will be well-received by the Guardian.
“If you’d like to very specifically write a book about trans-whatever-queer-cis-binary-polar bears in the space future-past, knock yourself out. There is probably an audience for that.”
Considering that someone made darned good money writing dinosaur porn, this is undoubtedly true. And that’s a good thing.
To be honest it’s upset me some, here in the south west, when in the process of promoting Hispanic authors they seem to be simultaneously put in Hispanic time-out. I think this happens any time that the author’s ethnic category is presented and promoted as the most important aspect of their book. But the thing is that a little story about a girl visiting her grandparents who speak only Spanish and making traditional treats with her grandmother, reminds me forcibly of my Scandinavian grandparents, just as a war blog story about an old man moving an irrigation ditch in the middle of the night in Afghanistan reminded me of my grandfather and old Norwegians, and things about the Philippines were so familiar they made me homesick for my economically depressed home town, because humanity is universal.
And presenting your special narrative as inaccessible to people without your particular special skin tone or plumbing is… presenting your special narrative as inaccessible. It’s like… putting yourself in the Hispanic time-out corner.
Yeah, there might be seriously viable niche markets out there, but why would you do that?
Quite a few people have made money writing dinosaur porn by now. It’s basically an entire genre at this point. I’m not sure if you were just trying to make fun of that one “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” short story that was up for a Hugo, but I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that “A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay” is basically God’s gift to literature.
A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay
You’re welcome. :op
Huh. I wasn’t actually trying to display that image, just give a link to Amazon to prove that was a real thing which existed. I suppose that cover just helps prove my point, though…
I suppose if Daniel Jose Older were in the film industry, he’d be howling about the Oscar statuette being too slender or too White or something like that.
I suspect that he is a product of the modern University system, which teaches its acolytes (not so much students anymore, it seems) that their job is to find the nails that stick up in the world and hammer them down. Of course, some ideologies find nails in just about everything–and they treat this as a feature and not a bug.
Do SJWs have to make a SAN check when the Correiakin appears?
;-)
They’re SJW’s, they automatically fail SAN checks.
Good point.
The SJW has no applicable san score, and as such not so much. However there is a bummer of a frenzy check
Something like that “Ia! Ia!” cry I’ve come across from various game supplements and around the net?
“Ia! Ia! Correiakin ftagn-” somethingsomething….
I think they’d be more fun if they’d develop some good, interesting pathologies.
“Cismales are the enemy! Also, frogs are the evil masters!”
and no one has said anything about the re-writing off Mark Twain, because some people found it offenceive, not sff, but still this is what the sjw would like to do to all books they don’t like
I remember reading once about someone planning to release new versions of The Chronicles of Narnia, with all of the Christian references removed.
/facepalm
Short books.
Did you ever catch the guy who rewrote William Hope Hodgson’s The Nightland because of its bad prose?
Let’s put Lovecraft through some editing and grammar software and get rid of those weird words. Why the weird words? Why? What’s with the weird words?
Two thoughts:
First, the article is self-refuting. He begins by noting (as I have) how diverse and young the crowd is at the big conventions nowadays. Why, then, is additional pushing for diversity needed? Diversity has triumphed, end of story. But then his column would be full of blank space, I guess.
Second, nobody has mentioned the only good reason to remove HPL from the World Fantasy Award: he wasn’t a fantasy writer. Almost everything he wrote was science fiction.
It’s getting to the point now where I almost kind of cringe anytime I see the words “fisking” and “The Guardian” in a Larry article. I mean, how many public floggings can you watch before you just start to feel a little bit of pity for the poor bastard getting fisked?
Of course, that feeling of pity is rather fleeting, and I go back to watching the proceedings with a smile on my face after that momentary lapse.
Yeah, if you would turn away from a good fisking, then you’re not the guy who reviewed Empress Theresa so awesomely. :D
Nope, not feeling the pity. :-)
It would help if The Guardian didn’t make itself a platform for the new gentrified KKK.
Reblogged this on The Obsession Engine and commented:
Larry Correia has written some great books. I particularly like his Grimoir Chronicles (As does my wife and partner-in-crime.).
I’ve also come to enjoy his scathing takedowns of “social justice warriors.” Here’s a dandy example.
You’re old and irrelevant and I’m so happy stultified unselfaware narcissists like yourself are inexorably vanishing to be replaced by more interesting ppl.
Try harder.
The SJW definition of “interesting” jibes with that of Apartheid S. Africa, in that you would like to put art bracelets on women, non-whites and women. Art doesn’t work like that. I’ll read E. Hoffman Price and his stories about the orient based on actual knowledge before the racial PhD you attach to an America Asian writer who grew up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer then portrayed as “interesting.”
The problem with you identity addicts is this: you can’t make simple comparisons based on larger metaphor, analogy or principle. That means it escapes you that if women, non-whites and gays can be declared interesting, they can just as easily be declared uninteresting… or mopish, stupid, vapid, retarded, or 8th class.
We’re all well aware of what “interesting” and “mind-blowing” means in Newspeak.
The comment would have had more impact had you taken the time to write out the word “people” at the end.
If one is aiming to fake intelligence via overuse of the thesaurus, don’t end with text speak.
But they’re not, see. You SJW types might come across loud online but that’s because a lot of you have no claim to fame offline so you spend your time type-screaming online, looking smugly at your screen and talking to your cat. You do know that no matter how hard you smash the keys of your little keyboard, it won’t make your diatribe true, right? You’ll only break your keyboard and scare your cat away.
Amen and amen!
Larry, there’s a book I’d like you to consider for a spotlight or even a book bomb.
Mary Leonhardt http://teachloveofreading.blogspot.com/ taught high school English for 37 years–in public, private, and parochial schools across the country. She was dedicated to getting kids to LOVE reading. She wrote a number of books about what works. She knew these things because she practiced and tested them in her classroom.
The book I want to recommend that you look at is Keeping Kids Reading: How to Raise Avid Readers in the Video Age: http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Kids-Reading-Raise-Readers-ebook/dp/B00A58XIEM/
Here’s just a snippet.
The other laws she outlines:
Second Law: Children must form a habit of reading.
Third Law: Children should learn to read with a critical eye.
Fourth Law: Children should learn to appreciate classical and multi-cultural literature.
Again, these are in a hierarchy. So if you try to help the kids build a habit (law 2) and those efforts begin to break the first law in a major way, then you stop. You go back to law 1 and work on it and try the habit thing later.
Superwife Nellie, who teaches 7th and 8th grade language arts, has found her ideas useful.
Give it a try, dude. If you like it, please think about turning your large platform spotlight on her.
Seems like jacobins always want to erase history.
Maybe we can start photo-shopping people out of images too…
“The Commissar Vanishes” , by David King
Some SJW on Twitter was talking about doing a Kickstarter to fund photoshopping outspoken libertarian Adam Baldwin out of every episode of Firefly and replacing him with Jar Jar Binks. No… I’m not making that up. They really are like an inept version of Stalin.
SJWs have already photoshopped all non-white colonialism and slavery out of history because they hate Winston Smith as an unruly employee.
The reaction to Adam Baldwin makes me laugh. If I threw a hissy-fit about every actor and creator whose politics I didn’t like, I wouldn’t be able to watch *anything*. Grow up and man up.
How about we counter by launching a kickstarter to take Sean Penn out of one of his movies and replace it with Adam Baldwin. :D
What get’s me is that they don’t seem to recognize the similarity in behavior.
That’s because it’s completely different when they do it.
Claim was that a “person of color” faced “barriers” to publication that “straight white men” did not. Come again? When I was just starting (I’m still just starting, but there was a long gap between that “just starting” and current “just starting”) the way you got published was you wrote something, then you sent it by mail to people who might publish it. They didn’t know you. They didn’t see you. You could be black, white, purple, a highly intelligent shade of the color blue, or a Lovecraftian Horror for all the publisher knew.
All the publisher knew was the words you put down on paper, oh, and whether you followed basic directions like standard manuscript format. It was on that basis _alone_ that he or she decided “yes” or “no” on a new writer. There was no Facebook where the person could find you. There were no Blogs. There was no Google or Bing. There were just the words you had put on paper.
So, like Larry, I call bullshit on those “barriers”.
Elsewhere, Older cites actual conversations with editors he’s had about these issues. But I think he willfully confuses marketing with racism. Marketing is a reality and not one proven to be all about bigotry or supremacy. If I wanted to be a rapper or Egyptian pop singer it’s pretty clear there are other hurdles to consider than simply lashing out at an entire industry, ethnic group, or country as racist.
N. K. Jemisin recently cited an old O. Butler PB cover from the ’70s or ’80s where the character was changed to a white woman. Again, claiming that was done because that PB was marketed into a KKK doesn’t hold much weight. It requires the power of mind-reading millions of people because of what one or two people rightly or wrongly decided to do.
We all know from their non-fiction writings Jemisin and Older are predisposed to believe these conspiracies. Oddly enough, for people so oppressed and who never shut up about it, they have no stories of their own personal oppression. Jemisin apparently thinks being nominated for 4 Nebulas is a way to strangle her career. Older thinks calling his readers a pack of racists who then don’t read him only confirms he was right. And he never considers he may be a pitiful story-teller, nor does Jemisin. Older saying Butler was a better writer than HPL speaks not only to his own prejudice but his inability to understand fundamental artistry aside from proper grammar and writing workshops.
Max Brand had 25-30 million words in print over 30 years of writing. Try that on for size and then tell me about privilege. Some of these people are Tweeting the equivalent of 3 novels a year about how no one wants their novels.
> Jemisin apparently thinks being nominated for 4 Nebulas is a way to strangle her career.
And she’s right! I actively avoid Nebula winners unless I know the writer from other books because the award generally signals a book I will despise.
Why would anyone despise anti-white racial revenge fantasies, gay selkie elopement, Tarzan and the Jewels of Jim Crow, and feminist blubberings about thousands year old Dworkian robots who can’t tell men from women and so calls everyone “Bubba”?
Then there’s the Hugo-winning essays like “We Have Always Fought Our Way Into the Draft Board Never” also known as “Yes, We Have No Bananas Because Matriarchy.”
Slightly OT – remember when Damien Walter and his ilk were all aghast that story was of overriding importance, rather than SJW checklists?
http://damiengwalter.com/2014/12/10/frank-herbert-legendary-author-of-dune-on-the-vital-importance-of-story/
I’ll bet if you pointed that out to him, he’d block you. :-)
He’d probably make a single comment back, asking a question that sounds sincere coming from anyone else. You’ll answer, and then he makes a comment about how you’re not “open minded” and then block you.
At least, that’s how it shaped up with me. :D
Epic fisking as usual. :) Keep it up!
LC is providing an important clearing house that is making a difference. Although this particular Guardian article is a neutral space where all can comment, the vast majority of such posts appear where we are banned and deleted if we attempt to engage.
By SJWs doing that, we have done an end around and simply abandoned those spaces. Much has changed in less than a year. Now, every time an article like Older’s appears, we signal boost, mock and quote it. There is no “Do Not Link.” There is no exaggeration or lying or straw man scare quotes required by us, such as SJWs do. We do not engage in racial and sexual defamation. If we did, the filthy SJW quotes from within SFF’s institutions wouldn’t outnumber ours 100 to 1. There is no “everybody says women can’t write SF.” We use quotes.
Now, essentially every time some SJW moron writes some racist nonsense, they are marginalizing themselves and their careers. The monopoly is over. When 0% of the Top 100 in SFF at Amazon are social justice warriors and I’m seeing names I’ve never even heard of in their place, it’s time to learn the words “shut up.” I am tired of SJW hate speech being passed off as justice.
Make no mistake about this: these people absolutely detest being quoted from places they think we don’t read. Well, we’re reading them, and their goofy icons like Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir too. The irony is how many of the middle-class “allies” don’t even know who those people are even while they parrot their ideology and speech and ask us to “bone up” on perversion and madness. Well, I propose to make them even more iconic, especially when it comes to making direct links between the here and now and their heroes who say outright they wish to destroy the nuclear family and “binary” sex in quote after quote after quote.
We now know what “rape culture” really means and where it comes from; all men are rapists or accessories. We now know what “white privilege” is and where it came from. It is a noose-like Mark of Cain prepared for us by racists. We now know what “misogyny” means; it means women don’t hate and are never wrong, even when they lie about rape; SEE: rape culture. We now know what “diversity” means; always too many white straight males – never too many of the opposite identity, even when they have purposefully segregated anthologies, symposiums and rooms at conventions we never have and never did. In SJW nut-land “only one award went to a white male” is followed with an Orwellian hashtag of “#diversityinSFF” in the same Tweet.
You can see how people like LC are making a difference. You can see how this is cross-polinating onto other venues where similar arguments are coalescing. Just a few months ago, the words “intersectional” and “Third Wave” were considered some daffy irrelevance. Now you’re seeing those words at Breitbart, the Washington Post and even among commenters. What is being revealed is a coalition of a vicious supremacist ideology of bigots being mainstreamed by clueless idiots who think they’re fighting racism in ’60s Mississippi.
Good luck, assholes. You’re taking a dive. Don’t let the selkies hit you in whatever you call an ass on gender-fluid Friday on the way out.
From The Guardian comments. Apologies to the commenter, but this was too good not to share:
“You can’t artificially manufacture stature for an author. Readers decide who they want to read.”
Amen.
And I see The Guardian is going the full Tor.com on their comments, removing dissenting opinions.
Not really. They were fair in the last Walter piece and are being fair here. Walter implying anyone who disagrees is a reactionary racist is a little over the top to stay but then he’s a Guardian undernut.
It’s a typical excuse for a debate from SJWs. He’s essentially saying that to oppose the KKK is to oppose all whites so don’t do it you racist white-haters. Simple comparisons like that are completely unavailable to the metaphor autistic SJW. Try this one on for size from Jeopardy champ and honky-loving Arthur Chu:
“Arthur Chu @arthur_affect · Nov 27 Do people who change #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter run thru a cancer fundraiser going ‘THERE ARE OTHER DISEASES TOO'”
They are perfectly brainless people. If you can sort the logic out of that you’re smarter than I am. I’m not sure when equal protection under the 14th Amendment became one must address all diseases at once.
As an example of a 1930s Democrat who was NOT racist, I offer Robert A. Heinlein.
I laughed at the comment about Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants did not having enough gun fights. In fact that sounds like a writing prompt.
But of course, Heinlein would be disqualified because he’s Heinlein.
I still don’t get how the guy who wrote free love space messiah hippie is such a target for that team.
I read Heinlein once (in my college SF class). The only impressions I was left with were 1) dude loved himself some nudity, and 2) he wrote women as if he’d never even met one in his life. Granted, The Puppet Masters had some cool stuff going for it, but if the characters don’t seem like real people, my interest is minimal.
His lack of ability to write women as actual people (and if anyone has an example of where he did it better than in that book, please tell me) is probably part of the problem that the liberal side has with him. (Y’all will probably think this is some kind of geek blasphemy, but I actually preferred Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, which is the same concept as The Puppet Masters, taken from a totally different and vastly more feminine angle.)
On one hand, the anti-Lovecraft movement is purely annoying.
On the other hand, the WFC award is really ugly.
Maybe they could compromise and change it to Cthulhu.
You ain’t kiddin’!
The irony is, REH was way ahead of his time in many respects. All these calls for more non-Western settings in fantasy make me laugh, because Howard was doing that 70 years ago. Most of his Conan stories take place in analogues of Africa, Asia or the Mideast, and only a few in the pseudo-Europe of the Hyborian kingdoms.
It’s pretty clear from the lack of citations that SJWs mostly haven’t read the stories they hate. If they did they’d realize what morons they are.
The fact that these nimrods can ruin Shakespeare for generations of people is a crime against humanity. I was lucky, my mother read the plays to me like bedtime stories. Sure we talked about the meaning behind the words, and the plot. But none of this “critical theory” BS.
They can suck the joy out of anything, and this is why they can’t leave gamers or fen alone.
These people…
/sigh
I’ve read one of Butler’s books. She apparently graduated from my High School, so the school invited her to come talk to the student body while I was attending. We read one of her books in preparation. My recollection is that the book was decent. But her topics of interest weren’t my topics of interest. So I didn’t read anything further by her.
On the topic of non-white or otherwise non-standard subjects, Le Guin gets mentioned frequently, of course. Earthsea is largely people by non-white races, and the protagonist isn’t white. The Left Hand of Darkness is about a human civilization on a distant world in which everyone switches genders.
And of course there’s that homophobic bigot Orson Scott Card (/sarcasm) who wrote a fantasy novel, Magic Street, that’s set in a modern-day black middle-class neighborhood.
I could go on and on. But Older and his ilk likely can’t be bothered to care about any argument that doesn’t fawningly agree with them.