Wait 'till the fire turns green (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_archfiend) wrote2013-08-26 04:59 pm
the_archfiend) wrote2013-08-26 04:59 pm
Entry tags:
Far-out space (wing)nuts
Everybody knows that the field of science fiction (and its attendant fandom) attracts a diverse, sometimes oddball group of people. Quite a few of them are either too intelligent or too outside cultural and social ideas of "normalcy" to ever truly fit in in many other social milieus; for the most part, that fact is an incredibly weak reason to issue a caveat about how "getting into that Sci-Fi stuff will rot your brain". I can think of more than a few other pastimes that are far worse for you than picking up a book and reading or attending SF conventions, especially since you're not going to end up in an ambulance or doing jail time as a result.
On the other hand...
There have always been fringe figures in SF who've driven off the road with a large bottle of Crazy as their primary drug of choice in the past; one only has to look at, say, historical figures such as L. Roy Hoover and his First Church of Appliantology (as well as lesser known hoaxers such as Richard Shaver in the pages of Amazing Stories) and more contemporary examples like James P. Hogan's thoroughgoing crank magnetism (up to and including Holocaust denial, depending on who you ask) to realize that SFnal culture has produced some towering problematic figures in the past. Which brings us to now, of course.
Recently, a series of massively unappealing (at least to me, IMHO) public rants ended up causing both the SFWA and the rest of SF in general a serious collective headache. on the one hand, the SFWA was pretty much forced to expel an individual known by the sobriquet of the RSHD (among others) for online conduct that would've been merely repellent (but predictable) if he had used his own web site to divulge those views and not a SFWA-owned Twitter feed. He didn't, hence the expulsion.
On the other hand, non-SFWA authors like Orson Scott Card and Sarah A. Hoyt ended up stepping in it hard and deep as well. Card recently issued a weak walking back of his formerly intense opposition to gay marriage in order to make sure that the upcoming theatrical release of Ender's Game wouldn't fall prey to either a boycott or adverse publicity; unfortunately for Card, his strangeness doesn't merely gravitate towards that subject alone, as David Weigel of Slate found out when he dug up a Card-authored essay from the Rhinoceros Times that pretty much states that Barack Obama Is Out To Get You, Whitey, and he's putting together a political police force of inner-city gang members to do it. This is minus any real proof of that assertion, of course.
As for Hoyt, her particular recent moment in the sun (?) occurred when she posted a strange item on her web site entitled "I am Spartacus" (parodied to death at Wonkette and given a further "that's not even wrong" treatment by Brad DeLong) that lends itself to parody because self-parody seems to be a rather spent option given the pompousness and multiple crank magnet points of Hoyt's original. It's as if every Tea Party manifesto writer in existence had a drunken party featuring a noxious blend of Jolt, Everclear and Skittles and decided to publish the results.
Fine work in terms of proving that "that Sci-Fi junk'll rot yer brain, kid", even if it isn't the actual writings of the genre causing the mess. It's just the non-fictional ramblings of some purveyors of the genre who should know better but don't.
The point is, this: it is now AD 2013, at last count. Still no flying cars, but never mind that unfortunate fact. You might think that a wider range of participants in the SF/fantasy/horror blender in terms of gender, race and sexual proclivity would cause others to be more capable of polite - or even sane - public discourse in this day and age. Apparently, you'd be wrong. Not for every author out there, mind you, but the amount of pros (some, like Card, quite prominent in the field) who are sipping the Conspiracy Theory/Fugghead Kool-Aid and authoring things that speak more to their bizarre state of mind than any real facts is genuinely distressing. And this isn't anything like the innumerable feuds of past generations of fandom, incidents like the charge of the asshole brigade in the online forum for Asimov's or even the ridiculous petulance pros like Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg displayed in the face of criticism of a column they wrote for the SFWA Bulletin; these are actual professional writers acting like bomb-throwing loons. And yeah, I fully realize that writers can be loons as much as anyone else;. that doesn't keep such a fact from being disheartening.
People like this are entitled to their opinions. I'm also entitled to take issue with those opinions when I think they're composed of fertilizer-grade bullshit. Such is the case here, and I have to wonder why it's becoming such a nagging issue in SFnal circles these days.
On the other hand...
There have always been fringe figures in SF who've driven off the road with a large bottle of Crazy as their primary drug of choice in the past; one only has to look at, say, historical figures such as L. Roy Hoover and his First Church of Appliantology (as well as lesser known hoaxers such as Richard Shaver in the pages of Amazing Stories) and more contemporary examples like James P. Hogan's thoroughgoing crank magnetism (up to and including Holocaust denial, depending on who you ask) to realize that SFnal culture has produced some towering problematic figures in the past. Which brings us to now, of course.
Recently, a series of massively unappealing (at least to me, IMHO) public rants ended up causing both the SFWA and the rest of SF in general a serious collective headache. on the one hand, the SFWA was pretty much forced to expel an individual known by the sobriquet of the RSHD (among others) for online conduct that would've been merely repellent (but predictable) if he had used his own web site to divulge those views and not a SFWA-owned Twitter feed. He didn't, hence the expulsion.
On the other hand, non-SFWA authors like Orson Scott Card and Sarah A. Hoyt ended up stepping in it hard and deep as well. Card recently issued a weak walking back of his formerly intense opposition to gay marriage in order to make sure that the upcoming theatrical release of Ender's Game wouldn't fall prey to either a boycott or adverse publicity; unfortunately for Card, his strangeness doesn't merely gravitate towards that subject alone, as David Weigel of Slate found out when he dug up a Card-authored essay from the Rhinoceros Times that pretty much states that Barack Obama Is Out To Get You, Whitey, and he's putting together a political police force of inner-city gang members to do it. This is minus any real proof of that assertion, of course.
As for Hoyt, her particular recent moment in the sun (?) occurred when she posted a strange item on her web site entitled "I am Spartacus" (parodied to death at Wonkette and given a further "that's not even wrong" treatment by Brad DeLong) that lends itself to parody because self-parody seems to be a rather spent option given the pompousness and multiple crank magnet points of Hoyt's original. It's as if every Tea Party manifesto writer in existence had a drunken party featuring a noxious blend of Jolt, Everclear and Skittles and decided to publish the results.
Fine work in terms of proving that "that Sci-Fi junk'll rot yer brain, kid", even if it isn't the actual writings of the genre causing the mess. It's just the non-fictional ramblings of some purveyors of the genre who should know better but don't.
The point is, this: it is now AD 2013, at last count. Still no flying cars, but never mind that unfortunate fact. You might think that a wider range of participants in the SF/fantasy/horror blender in terms of gender, race and sexual proclivity would cause others to be more capable of polite - or even sane - public discourse in this day and age. Apparently, you'd be wrong. Not for every author out there, mind you, but the amount of pros (some, like Card, quite prominent in the field) who are sipping the Conspiracy Theory/Fugghead Kool-Aid and authoring things that speak more to their bizarre state of mind than any real facts is genuinely distressing. And this isn't anything like the innumerable feuds of past generations of fandom, incidents like the charge of the asshole brigade in the online forum for Asimov's or even the ridiculous petulance pros like Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg displayed in the face of criticism of a column they wrote for the SFWA Bulletin; these are actual professional writers acting like bomb-throwing loons. And yeah, I fully realize that writers can be loons as much as anyone else;. that doesn't keep such a fact from being disheartening.
People like this are entitled to their opinions. I'm also entitled to take issue with those opinions when I think they're composed of fertilizer-grade bullshit. Such is the case here, and I have to wonder why it's becoming such a nagging issue in SFnal circles these days.