Communism - Making dystopian science fiction a reality since 1917.

That quip is usually a critique of some real-world excess that Communism/Socialism is creating in the real world that happens to rival the imagination of science fiction, e.g., the generational concentration camps of North Korea.

This article notices that the quip works in reverse - dystopian science fiction is a critique of the fascist, dystopian left wing project, where the extremes of utopian communalism are unmasked for the soul-crushing reality they really are.

*Sheesh*

Star Trek moved from a vision of a hopeful future into a post-modern totalitarian dystopia slow slowly that I didn't notice.

Star Trek bans use of the word "God."

Vox Day punks the Hugos.

This is the kind of street theater, piss in their cornflakes, that the left engages in.

The problem is that since they are now The Establisment, they have something to defend.

This story is a Hugo nominee.

A description of American society in a microcosm.

Leftists burn down the Hugos.

//What the Puppies represent, say organisers, is the insistence of fans and many writers themselves that awards should be judged solely on quality, and not become backslapping circlejerks for social justice groupies and their favourite minority of the month//

And this:

//The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics.//

That last part is fascinating from a historical perspective.  The history of the Communist/Leftwing movement involved infiltration of a non-aligned organization, the "coordination" of the organization toward the objectives of the Communist movement, the revolt of the membership, followed by the departure of the membership, and a final denouement where the organization exists as a shell and the movement looks for its next victim to wreck.

It seems like this tendency is continuing.

Hilarious.

Larry Correia fisks the Guardians diatribe about the Hugo imbroglio.

The post-modern leftist writer is all about diversity and inclusion for the Correct Demographic.

Then he gets to this:

//There’s no avoiding the politically partisan nature of this campaign.

Well yeah, considering that it all started because I wanted to demonstrate that there was political bias in the system, duh… Sadly for you guys, we had real success when Brad took over and pushed a group of politically diverse nominees this year.

Its leading lights range from respectable rightwingers such as US authors Larry Correia

Ha! The Guardian says I’m respectable. It must be crazy upside down day! Normally Damien just fabricates scare quotes to make me sound scared of gay people.

and Brad Torgerson,

Okay, seriously. My last name has double Rs and four vowels and you can manage to spell it correctly, but none of you can spell TorgersEn?

through to those with more outlandish views such as John C Wright

By “outlandish” you mean John is a devout Catholic who actually believes Catholic doctrine and doesn’t get all mushy and apologetic about it.

and Vox Day (also known as Theodore Beale).

Who is probably disappointed you only called him outlandish.//

You can just see how far that diversity extends.

Science Fiction and the Culture War.

The Men Who Started the Hugo Awards Controversy Review: The Work of Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen

Old: The personal is the political.

New: Everything is political and you are a racist.

Via Instapundit, the last few days in Science Fiction:

//SO ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY PUBLISHES A NASTY HIT JOB — Larry Correia Fisks it here — and without contacting any of the people it attacks, and then after publication, the author, Isabella Biedenharn, invites Larry to give the other side. After publication. What, did she come to Entertainment Weekly from Rolling Stone or something?

Correia responds with typical reticence: “You went to press with a bunch of asinine, obvious lies, and you’re happy to include my side AFTER YOU LIED?”

UPDATE: See, this is why you punch back twice as hard: Entertainment Weekly retracts claim of ‘misogynistic, racist’ Hugo Awards voting campaign.
CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.

This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.

Bottom line: Entertainment Weekly listened to some Social Justice Warrior types, made the mistake of believing them, and humiliated itself. Here’s the corrected version. Props to Entertainment Weekly for correcting so swiftly and prominently.//

The Left v. Science Fiction.


Seriously...

...this won a Nebula????

It is a fine, arresting little bit of fluff, but it is not science fiction and it isn't a story.

I used to admire the Nebulas, but if this is a winner, cancel my admiration.

When did political correctness take over science fiction?

Sarah Hoyt points out the existential "Oikophobia" of the story.

And John Wright offers this:

//The word for when a person erects in his mind a false image of a group of people, and sees them only as that image, that false stereotype, and moreover it is a despicable stereotype, one that robs them not just of dignity, but of their very humanity… that word is bigot.

Something rotten, very rotten has happened to the Left just in my lifetime.

They used to be champions of free speech; and now they are its most vehement opponents.

They use to be able to give some sort of argument or logical reason for their position, even if an incorrect argument; now they have no argument, none of them, aside from wild and insincere accusations delivered in a mechanical fashion without any hope of being believed, phony as a three-dollar bill.

They used to be firmly on the side of the workingman; now they hate the workingman as a white racist oppressor.

They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone or no one.

They used to be in favor of Blacks and other minorities; now their disgust for all the impoverished and dispossessed is plain to see. All they want is to keep the Blacks on the plantation, addicted to welfare, addicted to crack, their children aborted, their parents unwed.

They used to be in favor of the Jews, and other minorities; now they kneel to Islamic Jihad at every opportunity, vowing that those who slander the prophet of Islam will no be in the future, and ergo the Left now curse the Jews, and pray daily for the destruction of Israel, and a new Holocaust in the warhead of a Muslim nuke.

What? You say that his the not what the Left says? That they say they are creatures of purity, goodness, and sweetness, who live only to help others out of the depth of their hearts and the depth of your wallet? No, that was the old Left, back when the Left still had some scraps of sanity and intelligence.

They serve Sauron and have forgotten their own names.//

Interesting.

Science Fiction is a genre about ideas, and it seems that Tom Hanks may have an idea about the cultural shift against interest in space travel.

The left wrecks everything it touches...

...including science fiction.

//The right (counter)revolutionary slogan is therefore not “Drive out the social-justice warriors!”, it’s “Peddle your angsty crap elsewhere, lit-fic wannabes! Let’s get SF back in the gutter where it belongs!”//

Gene Wolfe

I "met" Gene Wolfe at Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions' bookstore in Hollywood when I was in law school.  I was surprised that a writer who could write so elegantly would look like an iron worker.

This is an interesting interview with Wolfe, including this:

//Which writers have most influenced you?

It’s a difficult question. My first editor, Damon Knight, asked me the same thing when I was just starting out, and I told him my chief influences were G. K. Chesterton and Marks’ [Standard] Handbook for [Mechanical] Engineers. And that’s still about as good an answer as I can give. I’ve been impressed with a lot of people—with Kipling, for example; with Dickens—but I don’t think I’ve been greatly influenced by them.

What struck you about Chesterton?

His charm; his willingness to follow an argument wherever it led.//

And:

//I see you often called a Roman Catholic writer. Once, even, “a very subtle but also very emphatic Roman Catholic propagandist.”  Is this identification unfair?

I think it an oversimplification. I’m a writer who is Catholic, as a good many of us are. I do not write Catholic books intentionally. I’ve never been published by a religious publisher.//

And:

//If it’s not too personal a question, do you consider yourself a professing Catholic?

Certainly I am. I go to mass; I receive Communion; I pray.

Were you born a Catholic, or was Rosemary?

No, I was a convert.

Like Chesterton.

It’s a bad thing in that born Catholics tend to look down on you. But being looked down upon has its advantages.

Like what?

You don’t put yourself forward as an expert. You understand other people who are in similar situations, and not only in religious matters. I once met Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who we’re trying to get made a saint now. He looked at you and you felt that he knew all about you, that he had taken your worth, both positive and negative, and had formed a correct opinion about you, and that was it.

Did Sheen feel saintly? He was canny by your account; he had an intelligent eye.

Sheen was a very intelligent man. He was smaller than I had expected. I suppose he was about five-five, five-six, or something like that.

John XXIII was a little man, too.

Well, size only counts with football players, really.

But did Sheen feel saintly? Did he have a quality of holiness?

He had a quality of something really quite extraordinary. I was at a party once for locally important politicians—a former governor of Illinois, for example. And Sheen came through as somebody who was actually on a higher level. A hundred years from now, he was the only one at the party who would still be important. The rest of us were lost. //

Chesterton is a gateway drug to Catholicism.

John C. Wright deals with the Bandar-log of the Left.

More of the Leftist thought police and their secondary boycotts against ungoodbadthink.

//The same hour Vox Day and I signed our contact, a small, shrill,  cowardly and mentally backward group of anonymous strangers and dank gargoyles wrote me incoherent and gargling notes expressing unsightly yet pathological hatred toward Vox Day for reasons that never were made clear.

(I am under the impression that he had offended their political cult dogmas by not allowing an arrogant leftwingy loudmouth named Jemisin to upbraid him in public, but manfully returned blow for blow. This is apparently an unforgivable sin, even though it pick no man’s pocket and breaks no man’s leg.)

But it is none of my business either way; I am not the father confessor of Vox Day, nor the father of N.K. Jemisin. I can neither hear his confession nor send her to her room without supper. The Morlocks knew this. The Morlocks were crowding my inbox merely to display their political credentials, that is, to pat themselves on the back for supporting Big Brother by dumping insincere ritualized hate on Emmanuel Goldstein.

I answered these uncouth Jacobin sans-culottes with the back of my hand, as any gentleman should do.

How is that a show of support for him? I just wanted the drooling and poop-flinging yahoos off my lawn.//

A cloud no bigger than a man's fist.

John C. Wright resigns from the SFWA:

When SFWA first departed from that mission, I continued for a time to hope the change was not permanent. Recent events have made it clear that there is not reasonable basis for that hope.

Instead of enhancing the prestige of the genre, the leadership seems bent on holding us up to the jeers of all fair-minded men by behaving as gossips, whiners, and petty totalitarians, and by supporting a political agenda irrelevant to science fiction.

Instead of men who treat each other with professionalism and respect, I find a mob of perpetually outraged gray-haired juveniles.

Instead of receiving aid to my writing career, I find organized attempts to harass my readers and hurt my sales figures.

Instead of finding an organization for the mutual support of Science Fiction writers, I find an organization for the support of Political Correctness.

Instead of friends, I find ideologues bent on jihad against all who do not meekly conform to their Orwellian and hellish philosophy.

Politics trumps Science Fiction in the modern SFWA.

I've been a science fiction reader since I was a teen. I've always admired science fiction writers and had a romantic view of the SFWA. Now it appears that the totalitarian left is taking over more and more institutions and driving off those who refuse to sign on to their ideology.

Note also that John C. Wright is an outspoken Catholic.  Is this a sign of things to come as Believers are made to feel less and less welcome among the "better people."

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another...

...hits science fiction.

There was a time when science fiction was a place to explore new ideas, free of the conventional wisdom of staid, "mundane" society, a place where speculation replaced group think, and where writers as different as libertarian-leaning Robert Heinlein, and left-leaning Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke would share readers, magazines, and conventions.

But then, there was a time when that sort of openness characterized much of American intellectual life. That time seems to be over, judging by the latest science fiction dust-up. Now, apparently, a writer's politics are the most important thing, and authors with the wrong politics are no longer acceptable, at least to a loud crowd that has apparently colonized much of the world of science fiction fandom.

The Hugo Awards are presented at the World Science Fiction Society's convention ("Worldcon") and nominees and awardees are chosen by attendees and supporters. The Hugo is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in science fiction, but in recent years critics have accused the award process — and much of science fiction fandom itself — of becoming politicized.

That's certainly been the experience of Larry Correia, who was nominated for a Hugo this year. Correia, the author of numerous highly successful science fiction books like Monster Hunter Internationaland Hard Magic, is getting a lot of flak because he's a right-leaning libertarian. Makes you wonder if Robert Heinlein could get a Hugo Award today. (Answer: Probably not.)

Here's how Correia, writing on his blog, characterizes what's happened since he was nominated:

The libel and slander over the last few days have been so ridiculous that my wife was contacted by people she hasn't talked to for years, concerned that she was married to such a horrible, awful, hateful, bad person, and that they were worried for her safety. I wish I was exaggerating. Don't take my word for it. My readers have been collecting a lot of them in the comments of the previous Hugo post and on my Facebook page. Plug my name into Google for the last few days. Make sure to read the comments to the various articles, too. They're fantastic. ... I've said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheerlead for left-wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

The ins and outs of politics and science fiction fandom are inside baseball to most people, though lately they've been juicier than usual. But unfortunately, this sort of thing is symptomatic of what's going on in a lot of places these days. Purging the heretics, usually but not always from the left, has become a popular game in a lot of institutions. It just seems worse in science fiction because SF was traditionally open and optimistic about the future, two things that purging the heretics doesn't go with very well.

Does the left even understand that it's engaging in "McCarthyism"?

The Science Fiction Writers of America is looking like a Stalinist-era Operation...

...is it turns the non-leftist Christian runner-up of its last election into a "non-person."

The SFWA's official announcement of my expulsion doesn't happen to mention me or why I was expelled.  The SFWA President didn't provide a reason in his email to me either.  That was interesting in light of this belated addition to the official announcement:

Amended to add: 

We will continue to omit the expelled individual’s name and the details of his behavior on advice of counsel.

They can't mention the reason, of course, because that would reveal that their action was either a) highly selective, or, b) ideologically driven. 

SFWA Board Report

Response to SFWA Board

Meanwhile, Jemisin makes it clear, in her uniquely civilized way, that she's got others on her hit list:

//I’m still thinking about how much I’m willing to put up with, and for how much longer. 

For the time being, though, I’ll remain a SFWA member. By expelling Mr. Beale, and making a clear choice to offend at least one bigot this one time, SFWA has done the bare minimum of what it must to retain relevance to the bulk of its membership. Much, much more needs to be done, and I suspect the organization will always be reactive to change rather than proactive in this area. Frankly I don’t expect better of a group that took 10 weeks to decide whether a member who spread hate speech in its name was deserving of the label “professional”. But at least for now SFWA might manage to stay relevant enough, to enough people, to last awhile longer. I guess we’ll have to see.//

Some time ago, I warned several SFWA members who were on the political left but concerned about the precedent an expulsion would set that my expulsion would not mark the end, but rather the beginning of the ideological cleansing. The mediocre feminist members of the organization, virtually none of whom should ever have been permitted to join in the first place, have nothing better to do than play sex police and ideological enforcer.  They love having an excuse to be outraged and if they can't find one, they will manufacture one. I may be the first to be expelled by the rampaging rabbits, but it seems very unlikely I will be the last.

Which is usually the way it works on the left.

The decline of real Science Fiction.

Vox Day offers some insights into what is going on in the SFWA:

The current chaos in the SFWA is primarily the result of two strategic blunders by the old guard who are now being driven out by those who wish to turn the organization into the Vereinbarunggehend Geschlecht Polizei.  The first was the decision to stop requiring Active members to requalify, aka "The Heinlein Aberration". That is why the organization now has an overabundance of Active members who have barely published anything, are terminally insecure about that fact, and are hell-bent on finding some way to demonstrate that They Are Too Equal to the real writers.  The second was the decision to permit Fantasy, and later, Horror writers to join the organization, aka "The McCaffrey Mistake" . There was always going to be a severe culture clash between the hard science fiction writers and the romance writers... even when they put their romantic triangles in space.

Since it is a lot easier to simply write necrobestial romances than master one or more scientific disciplines and turn that into interesting fiction, there are considerably more of the necrobestial devotees shambling about.  And they quite genuinely believe that their work is every bit as Valid and Important and Serious as the science fiction despite the fact that there isn't an original idea to be found in any of it.  Derivative schlock like Puppinette ripping off Jane Austen and McRapey ripping off everyone he has ever read is about the best one can expect from that crowd.

Will she choose the wolf or the vampire?  Will she choose the rebel spaceman or the alien stand-in for the Gentleman of Color? Will she choose the sexy zombie or the sexy witch? SFWA fantasy isn't a literature of ideas, it's a literature of geometries. 

Trainwreck

The Science Fiction Writers Association is being taken over by the delicate snowflakes of feminism and other members of the non-free speech community.  Older writers are lamenting the wild and carefree days of  the past.

It's like watching a trainwreck.

Interesting...

...for those of us who love science fiction.

Vox Day writes:

Science fiction is dying because it has been invaded by a parasitical and hostile ideology that has metastasized and spread throughout the genre. This ideology is opposed to science because science is weakening the assumptions on which it is founded. It is opposed to heroism because heroism is intrinsically anti-egalitarian. It is opposed to masculinity because its adherents are women and feminized gamma males. It is opposed to Western civilization because Western civilization is Christian.  It is opposed to free discourse because free discourse reveals its many incoherencies, contradictions, and complete flights of fantasy. 

Roberts's summary of the difference between left and right is accurate, but incomplete: "Heinlein's imagined interstellar future is an environment designed to valorise the skill sets (self-reliance, engineering competence, willpower, bravery and manliness) that Heinlein prized. Left-leaning Iain M Banks's Culture novels posit a high-tech geek utopia in which the particular skill sets, ethics and wit‑discourse of SF nerds turn out to be the gold standard of pan-galactic multi-species civilisation." 

But it is more than that. Roberts omits to mention that feminism, equalitarianism, cultural relativism, massive central government, unrestrained sexual adventurism, and ideological strawmen are de rigueur for the science fiction of the left.  And that is when it is more than simple romance novels in space or rewritten Regency romances with a modest sprinkling of magic. 

The fact that Roberts considers the genre's greatest writers to be "Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson" shows that he is speaking only of the genre's left and also suffices to show the inferiority of the works produced by that side of the genre. With the exception of Le Guin and Sheldon, no science fiction fan would trade a single Herbert or Heinlein novel for the complete collected works of all the others... well, perhaps some of the later Heinleins. 

The fate that awaits the world of professional published science fiction is that which ultimately befell the art of Socialist Realism. Because it is imposed by a small, centralized group that happened to seize the relevant power, it will collapse and fade away once the group's power ceases to be relevant.  As it so often does, economic and technological changes have eroded the power of the gatekeeper's, which is why we can watch the collapse of Nightshade Books and anticipate the coming closure of other publishers and imprints which are infested with the ideological cancer. 

SF/F's left-wing gatekeepers made the same error that the ABCNNBCBS cabal made when instead of simply reporting the nation's news, it attempted to turn itself into the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. But there will be no singular Fox News prison-raping its competitors in the case of SF/F, instead, there will be Glenn Reynold's army of a thousand Davids, with successful independent authors like Larry Correia and Marko Kloos demonstrating to every other writer deemed politically incorrect and/or unpublishable by the gatekeepers that the gates have been torn down. They no longer exist.//

Christmas Ideas.

Although what a worshipper of the Old Ones would be doing celebrating the birth of the Savior of Mankind is a good question.

Cthulhu jewelry.

Young Adult Science Fiction Author John Christopher passes away.

He was the author of the "War against the Tripods" trilogy:

The author John Christopher died in England last Friday, and I'm guessing that most of you have no idea who he was or what he wrote. He wrote an awful lot, in a lot of different genres, under many different names, but I remember him today because of three creased and crinkled used paperbacks of science fiction I stumbled across as a child at the "for sale" carousel at the Reginald P. Dawson Library in Town of Mount Royal, Quebec. I still have the books--35 years later--and have dutifully tried to get my son to read them. Maybe I'll try again now.

The books are The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire and together they comprise what is called the "Tripod Series," named for the shape of the giant aliens who have captured Earth and enslaved the humans at the core of Christopher's narratives. I don't remember much of the details of the books except that a group of young boys were always on the run, part of a resistance to the alien conquerors, in a sort of 1984 meets Red Dawn meets the French Resistance fondue.