Categories
science fiction worldcon

I wish I could trust you and I hate what we’ve become.

File 770 posted the Sad Puppies list (slate? what? We’ll get in to that in a moment) last night, and here. My knee jerk reaction:

I’m not proud that this is my initial reaction. But I’ve got 3 years of good reasons to feel really gun shy on this. It’s not like we all came together after Sasquan and hugged it out. There was nasty, horrible shit raining down long after the convention had been laid to rest.

Is this a slate? Several of the categories have more than five possible choices. Does that make it a rather truncated long list instead? From File 770, it sounds like this was recommendations-based, spreadsheet included. Does that make its existence no longer a political jab? What does this do to writers who said they categorically do not want to be on a slate, ever, ever, ever? Do they ask to be removed? What about writers who just want nothing to do with any of this, slate or no?

I know for a fact that at least two of the people on that list weren’t asked if they were okay being included. I would not be shocked if most/all of the other unexpected names (Alyssa, Nnedi, Ann, etc) are in the same boat. Not cool.

But it’s just a recommended list. But it’s got the “Sad Puppy” name all over it and all that goddamn baggage.

Because this is the thing. After three years of slates and shouting and people being intensely shitty, after the porous barrier between sad and rabid and the fecal stench known as Beale that clings to everything, I cannot fucking trust any of this.

So is it a recommended reading list, innocently offered? Or is it a Trojan Horse, intending to get people to maybe think hey, we don’t really need to ratify those WSFS amendments everyone voted on last year when we were almost universally pissed off about a slate rolling the Hugos. See, it’s not so bad. Let it go. And then next year it starts all over again because nothing’s been fixed.

Or is it a way to try to fuck over a lot of writers who don’t want anything to do with this, because suddenly they’re on the damn list, and no one knows if it’s a slate or not, but there’s the knee jerk feeling of if these assholes want a thing, I don’t.

Or is it a way to score some cheap points because if these writers end up on the final ballot and win (or score over No Award), look at all these SJW hypocrites, see they’re okay with slates as long as it’s people they like. That’s certainly consistent the Wile E. Coyote-style Sooper Genius I’m Totally Playing Six Dimensional Chess nonsense we perennially get told is really going on, you know, where people get roundly slapped down by the community and then loudly proclaim that it’s what they wanted all along. (PS: You’re transparent. We know it isn’t.)

And is the very existence of this post (and ones like it) going to be used to add to the carefully curated sense of grievance that’s been fueling this entire stupid, stupid fight?

This makes me so angry, because I’m already seeing people getting dragged into this bubbling cesspool of bullshit and paranoia. And I hate thinking like this. I hate it. I want to believe the best in people. I want to believe in good intentions, and change, and moving on from bad times.

But I’m also not a fucking idiot, and I can remember further back than yesterday. I remember the last three years that led to me fucking dreading the Hugos this year because I knew the drama would be inevitable. I remember the incredibly fucked up (and at times racist, misogynistic, homophobic) things that have been said about friends of mine and writers I deeply respect. And I remember the transphobic shit that got spattered on Sasquan right next to the puppy ribbons very clearly.

I’d like to believe the best of you, Sad Puppies. But I can’t. Give it a few years of people not treating the fucking Hugo awards like some Game of Thrones-lite eliminationist slap fight and maybe I’ll be able to. (Though the forgive and forget threshold of others is certainly not dictated by my comfort level.) But this year I’m paranoid, and I’m mad, and you’ve fucking earned it.

Additional: Please read Catherynne M Valente’s post on the topic. Cora Buhlert has much more measured commentary than mine as well, and I totally agree with her commentary about branding.

Categories
rants

Brad Torgersen, I invite you to fuck all the way off.

Partial quote:

What sort of things were they saying before? No, expelling Correia or Torgersen is easy, but it’s not enough. Not enough! We have to investigate the entire science fiction field and the publishers, we need to find out how the field could have allowed an unsafe environment to thrive in which these cisnormative, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic authors could operate with impunity. I think, comrades, that we need to send a Hate Crimes commission to Worldcon. And to identify all the unsafe elements that may be present.

So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.

If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.

My friend Paul reposted that borderline incoherent comment from Brad on his own blog; read it in its entirety there.

Frankly, I am not interested in wading into the sea of strawmen and attempting to dismantle them. (Shaun Duke’s already taken a shot at it at his blog.) Nor am I at all interested in trying to present the positions of my “side” and offer gentle correction, as has been done nicely here.

All I have to say is this: how dare you, Brad. After you helped garner John C. Wright, a man who not-at-all-coyly talks about gay bashing as an “instinctive reaction” to “fags” a record number of nominations, how dare you project your paranoid fantasies of people wanting to harm you on us. How dare you wrap yourself in a blanket of imagined persecution when to this day transpeople are being murdered for simply existing. How dare you whip up false fears about people wanting you to die over a fucking literary award when right now black men and women are being killed by the police for simply existing. How dare you imagine yourself a second-class citizen when underprivileged women and girls are suffering because their male-run government has decided they have no right to bodily autonomy.

How dare you talk about people being shipped to frozen gulags when, today, gay and trans youth are still subjected to the very sort of reeducation you claim we want.

How dare you.

Real people are harmed every day by the positions those with whom you associate yourself espouse. Real people, who experience real pain, and real suffering, and all too often real death. The number of your faction that has been sent off to a reeducation camp is zero, and it will remain zero.

I’m sure if you dig hard enough, you can find some crazy, leftist asshole out there who says something in line with your beloved delusion. And then you can go ahead and compositional fallacy-it up if it makes you feel all warm and squishy inside. No one can stop you. But this insulting, despicable lie of yours will still not be true.

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of the paranoid fantasies. I’m sick of the pathetic attempts to play the victim in the same world where I suffer the real fear that one of my trans friends will drop off the internet and I will never know what happened to him or her because someone decided ignorance and hatred justified violence. Because this is the real world, you fucking asshole. This happens to real people.

So no, Brad. I do not want anything bad to happen to you. I never have. I have never wanted any harm to come to anyone. Even now, with my hands shaking with anger, I don’t. All I actually want is for you to take a step back, listen to yourself from outside your echo chamber, and understand how basically insulting this melodramatic persecution complex over a goddamn literary award is while outside, tire irons are not a coy little non-metaphor.

Failing that, I want you to fuck all the way off. Because that is an expression of my anger that suggests no action and has no power to do real harm.