And it looks like another shitbomb has exploded in the over-tight rectums of the SFF community.
The context:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/03/01/when-jonathan-ross-was-presenting-the-hugo-awards-until-he-wasnt/
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/jonathan-ross-and-hugo-awards-why-was-he-forced-out-science-fictions-self-appointed
A lame joke:
Not to be outdone, the horror fiction community is planning to get Russell Brand to emcee the Bram Stoker Awards . . . so they can abduct him and sacrifice him to the Great Old Ones.
"Yeah, we're tired of those SFF dudes grabbing all the publicity," a commentator for the Horror Author's Association said. "We're gonna grab Brand, shave his hair off, carve a pentagram into his scalp and then sacrifice him to Shub-Niggurath at the stroke of midnight. That'll show those SF snobs who the real crazy muthafuckas are."
And that'll be that on the subject.
I did have more written, but what's the point. I already know the community is toxic. It's what happens when hyper-sensitivity, self-righteousness and rigid inflexibility to other opinions all coalesce in a gigantic noxious turd. Better to stay the fuck away.
Outside starts to look not so bad when Inside is a slowly collapsing black hole full of sharks biting chunks out of each other. I suspect I'm not the only writer reaching this conclusion.
I'm going to stick to writing the best stories I can. It might take a while for word to filter through the outer void, but if the stories are good people will come to read them.
Outcast-Writer-And-Happy M.E. Hydra.
P.S. In happier, less-pitchfork'n'torch-mob news I returned to writing Succubus Summoning this week. Time to get Phil's adventures rolling again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Have you ever encountered anything similar in the erotic literature community?
ReplyDeleteAs for Succubus Summoning 208, do you have an estimate of when you think it'll be done?
My only real experience of a erotic lit community is the author boards at Literotica. That has a few people that like to stir stuff up, but mostly you can have discussions between people holding different opinions without them triggering vicious lynch mobs. What's been happening in the SFF community over the last couple of years is mindboggling.
DeleteI'm aiming for some time in March for SS208, ideally in the next couple of weeks +/- a week depending on how it flows.
Yeah. There were always some issues, but it didn't really kick into high gear until theodore beale and john scalzi started fighting it out over who got to run sfwa, and the whole community just came apart at the seams. (I know a few of the core people involved, but I'm not going to namedrop because I really don't want this fight flaring up *again* in my writer's group.)
DeleteTo make a very very long story short, Theodore beale is the turd that walks like a man, and he dug deep into the gutter to find something to smear scalzi with during the election, and his pack of goons came with it. A lot of other people scalzi knows/reads his blog rallied to counter it, and unfortunately the worst elements of the gnu athiests came with it to vomit their own flavor of bile all over the community, and this is basically what you're seeing here. It's a damn shame. they're not content destroying the feminism and secularism movements, so they've got to come and light giant blazing strawmen all over the sff community as well. I could go on for quite a while, but soapbox etc etc.
I remember following that and some of the other kerfuffles over the past couple of years. It's sad that a push for inclusiveness has resulted in an atmosphere so poisonous most people are better off avoiding it altogether.
DeleteI feel a little sorry for Seanan McGuire in all this. She seems to have come out the worse. Her initial comments were a little silly, but understandable given she only had a tabloid caricature for reference at the time. Twitter is far too brutal on anyone making the slightest misstep.