Monday, June 25, 2018

Kickin' them Sad Puppies again.


I'm so sad.
Now that the Sad Puppy Campaign has been dormant for two years, those of us who participated having declared victory and moved on, there are still those people trying to start shit up out there in Media land.

This time it was the Arizona Republic.

Q: There's been some pushback against emerging voices in science fiction, especially women of color, particularly with the campaign a few years ago to vote against those authors for the Hugo Awards. How do you respond to that?
A: Science fiction, as Ursula LeGuin would probably tell you, is always about social issues. It's never not been about social issues. Even if you're writing rocket men going to space, you're writing from a certain perspective. Whatever it is that defines your place in society, that's where your voice comes from. So actually it makes a lot of sense that if science fiction is telling us what the future is supposed to look like, or fantasy is letting us play out our dream ideas of what society might be, that they would take up these issues of identity. I think it's kind of exciting that you're seeing the science-fiction and fantasy community push back against people like the Sad Puppies, the organizations that were trying to push out the voices, some of the underrepresented voices, from women of color, disabled voices, queer voices.

This was from the Friday edition of the Arizona Republic, from an article about a "Navajo" author's first book. The author of the article is Kerry Lengel, and a quick duckduckgo gives us: https://twitter.com/KerryLengel, revealing the usual SJW boilerplate one expects in an "Ahhht" critic. He loved Hamilton, 'nuff said. He's the "Q:"

The "A:" is Rebecca Roanhorse the author of "Trail of Lightning," her first book. Trying to get some SJW cred and brownie points with her publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Just so you know who is making shit up about y'all this week.



The Proudly Puppy Adjacent Phantom

Update: Welcome vast wave of Instapundit! Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so tell all your SFF friends that Arizona Republic is making shit up about them. Again.

8 comments:

The Overgrown Hobbit said...

I politely told the writer he was printing lies and slander and requested a retraction. Let's see what happens.

Shadowdancer Duskstar said...

Goodness, they really don't have any life beyond this, do they? They keep hauling up SP and GamerGate as if those things were still ongoing.

The Phantom said...

Greetings, ladies and Germs. ~:D

Yep, the Left has run out of people to hate. The last of the Victorians died off in the 1980s. Now that there are no real racist/bigot/homophobes left, they have to make some new ones. Otherwise their whole project comes to nothing.

The AZ Republic has always been like this. There's a Republic columnist named E.J. Montini who's been lying in support of gun control since forever. Whenever I need a laugh I look up his column and see whose boilerplate he's printing this week. I've sent that doofus many a letter since the 1990s, never makes an impression.

On the bright side, it seems that they are getting more militant and are starting to mob Republican politicians and government workers. That means we are nearing the end, they're running out of gas. The candle burns brightest right before the wax is all gone.

JC said...

Shame about that Tony Hillerman guy.

Akiva said...

"pushback against emerging voices" - As a rabid consumer of the science fiction product, I never noticed the author's names being published in a particular color. I'm interested in the product, an engaging scifi story. I many cases I have no idea of the author's gender, could absolutely care less about their partner preferences, identify, preferred genitals, or quantity of melanin in their exterior skin covering. Nor do I care about the color of their eyes.

I care very much about a story being engaging, reasonably well written, and include enough science and science speculation. If the 'voice' wants to 'emerge' in scifi, it should tell a good scifi story. And while plenty of scifi authors do sometimes engage in social scifi (where the story includes or is focused on major 'future' societal or human functional change) - those are usually successful authors experimenting and having enough of a history of engaging stories that their customer...like me...are willing to give such a story a try.

But if you want to 'emerge' while providing such as your exclusive, I doubt you'll be selling many books in the scifi market (and then will cry about the fanbase being phobic or biased in some way...boo hoo.)

Rob C said...

Gee, you have to really salute an intellect that can come up with a gem like this though:

"these tropes that you see in science fiction and fantasy that clearly come out of the Manifest Destiny handbook"

With such brilliant insight as this you have to know the story is just going to be a real hum-dinger.

werewife said...

See, this is why they invented the public library. You can taste the new books and spit out the nasty taste of social justice sauce without spending your hard-earned money first!

HMS Defiant said...

An outpost of civilization.