Tale of Two Comments
There is a scene in ATLAS SHRUGGED where Dagny is astonished that the crowd cannot tell that John Galt is the hero and that the little men around him are whining rotters merely at a glance, and she is nigh lightheaded with indignation and surprise. How could they not see? Who cannot tell the difference between darkness and light?
I understand her frustration.
Today, on the same day, on the same topic, I came across these two quotes concerning the efforts of disenfranchised and excluded science fiction writers trying to combine into a voting bloc to get our names on the Hugo ballot. We are excluded because, and only because, we put story-telling above sermon-preaching. Leftwing nutjobs (but I repeat myself) indulge in sermon-preaching at the expense of story-telling.
The difference is that the jester who tells a story serves the king, and wants to make His Majesty smile. The sour but bossy busybody who lectures her charges want them to serve her, conform, and obey. She wants them to make her stop frowning.
Deep down, it seems the Left do not even like story-telling, because story serve truth and joy; stories praise heroism and serve as examples of love and self-sacrifice.
The Left likes lies. Joyful men are hard to control, hard to convince, hard to break to spur and crop.
The Left regards joy as childish, and despair as the truly sober and mature frame of mind in which one should bow to Tsathoggua the Toad-God of Hyperborea, or Yg-Yralkh the Terrible in the Eighth Dimensional Dominion of the Living Brain Slime, or whatever unholy creature the Leftists actually do worship, such as Mao or Che.
Tsathoggua the Toad-God! Learn your eldritch Lovecraftian Elder Gods! Love them!
So for the last few years, the Left has crowded out science fiction story-telling and instead thrust the awards into hands (or paws, or pincers) of whoever preaches a sermon vaguely dull and exquisitely politically correct, especially if the author were someone of a race, sex, or sexually deviant behavior the Left regards, due to his alleged misery caused by imaginary suffering by dint of merely belonging to that designated victim-whiner group, as superior.
Or, rather be precise, the Left indulges in antisermon preaching, since real sermons tell you the truth about God and the Devil, right and wrong, virtue and sin. Leftwingers tell you God is the Devil, because He is so judgmental and irrational, right is wrong and wrong is right, because all values are relative, and virtue is sin, because virtue is bigotry, and sin is virtue, because sin is bravery.
So, the science fiction writers, weary of being shouldered aside by the killjoy preachers, gathered for an effort to oppose, with manly fortitude, the in-creeping deluge of talentless slime from the Dominion of Yg-Yralkh aforementioned.
Somewhat in the spirit of jest, the effort is called Sad Puppies 3, and the forces behind it, somewhat in the spirit of full disclosure, are the dread and dreaded Evil Legion of Evil.
One comment epitomized, in words more adroit than any I can summon, the reasons impelling the Legion to this action. A reader of Vox Day’s blog, one Sir Thermite, comments:
Any moral apprehensions I may have had before about voting for Blue SF without reading everything first, went out the window after reading all of the Hugo-nominated novellas, novelettes, and short stories and skimming through a lot of the other material in the Loncon voter package. In addition to the dino revenge porn story, there was the delightful tale of a lesbian wereseal’s daughter, the interracial gay rain Pinnochio, hybrid human/horse bestiality/pedophilia, and a story revolving around a “no coloreds allowed” sign at a swimming hole. Also a graphic novel about necrophillia, and some article about how “Queers Dig Time Lords.” Yeah, that’s all I can bear to remember at this point.
“Blue SF” is Vox Day’s jargon for science fiction that is not ‘Pink SF’, which is a combination of femininsm, Marxism, or both.Here it is being used as a shorthand for the Sad Puppies 3 slate of candidates.
On a very similar theme, one Tom Galloway commenting on snarkmeister 770’s blog says this:
In other words, the highminded Mr Galloway is so disgusted at we science fiction writers attempting to wrestle the science fiction award away from the laypreaching lecturers of the political correctness cult so we can give to stories that at both stories and science fiction stories, that he can only vow blind obedience and loyalty to those who use the awards for political purposes. Because he hates the injection of politics into science fiction. Because he thinks it damages the Hugos to give a science fiction writing award to science fiction writers.
Hugos belong to SJW because Leftwing Politics is Not Political! Only trying to be not political IS political! Because Ignorance is Strength! War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! A is not and never has been A! A is always not-A!
Mr Galloway’s final sentence brings the doublethink to the perfect Orwellian pitch of self-parody. He remarks:
If the SJW crowd is doing such [i.e., promoting works in a coordinated fashion for political reasons], they’re clearly clever enough to do it only among sworn to secrecy true believers, and thus I’ve not heard of it.
Got that? He is willing to vote for the Social Justice Warrior crap because and only because they do not openly and honestly admit what they are doing, hence, there are no public statements to that effect Mr. Galloway has had intrude into his lightcone of awareness. Evidently the victory dance of the Socialeers about shutting out all males of Nebula Awards last year eluded him.
Now I ask you to look at the two statement, both of which announce an unwillingness to read the opposite camp’s books before casting a vote. What is the difference between them?
The first implies he has no willingness to read the other camp’s books because he has read enough Politically Correct lay-preaching to recognized that it is not science fiction story-telling and not meant to be. He is basing his decision on past experience. He implies he knows stories of this type will not be good in the future because they have not been good in the past.
The second denies that he is in fact a member of the other camp. He then implies that because the motives of the participants of the first camp is ungood, he can decide sight unseen that the stories themselves are ritually impure, and must be removed from the Hugos whether they merit the reward or not, because … wait for it … merit does not matter. Only good intentions matter.
The idea that merit does not matter, results don’t matter, only intentions matter, is, of course the Nicene Creed of the SJWs. (They surely recite it as the opening prayer of every Black Mass to Tsathoggua the Toad-God. Ia! Ia! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua! )
He does not say the SJWs writers write better stories; he says they do not have bad motives, or, least, they are clever enough to hide their motives from him.
By this logic, the Hugo award is not based on the merit of the story but only on intent of the voter or candidate — which makes the award of the Hugo a big, fat lie.
You can certainly make and give a ‘good intentions’ award to a philanthropist or anyone else having good intentions, and giving an award for good intentions to the candidate with the best intentions is a perfectly cromulent thing to do.
But you cannot give a person an award based on good intentions regardless of the merit of the work and then claim the award is for the merit of the work.
That is a straight-out, pure-quill, one-hundred-proof self-contradiction, if not a whopping fib the size of Pinocchio’s whale.
Mr Galloway makes his point as straightforwardly as his Moebius-strip logic can make: he wants to exclude us unfairly on the grounds that we are tired of being unfairly excluded, and it is unfair of us to complain about being excluded unfairly.
We are politicizing the award by trying to exclude politics (and especially p0litical correctness) from the award; whereas the politically correct ninnies are apolitical for introducing politics into the award and ruining its merit and reputation among all non-Tsathoggua-worshiping readers. Who like, you know, reading good stories instead of nagging yet dreary lectures about nonbinary cisheteronormalist inclusivity or something.
And yet he starts by saying he is not a Social Justice Warrior.
Pardon me? Really?
Well, I have no reason to disbelieve him on that point, but I must say his logic at least what is betrayed in this short paragraph, his approach, and his elliptical and eccentric method of reasoning is the same as theirs, and reaches a conclusion beneficent to them.
(Also, he uses the wrong pronoun, plural were a singular is needed, and this is sign that often betrays a Leftist. They don’t like words.)
I have no object to the Leftwinglings handing out their own good-intention awards to their own kind somewhere else, far from the sight of civilization, beyond the range their odor can reach.
But, of course, that obviate the whole point of the exercise. A harpy does not want to eat: she wants to prevent you from eating. So she craps on the feast.
A social justice warrior does not want to read books he likes. He does not like books for the same reason harpies are not hungry for food. He wants to take from you books you like, so that he can level accusations, and accusations, and accusations against you. And if you end up liking the books he likes, he will accuse you of something else.
In this case, the accusation, which is believed by no one familiar with the science fiction field, is that editors and readers in the early days of science fiction were misogynistic bigoted racists, who excluded women, Crypto-Buddhists, Anglocatholics, Etruscans, Etrurians, Ebionites, Bimetallists, Caledonians, Ghibellines, Hyperborians, Lunarians, Mi-Go from Yuggoth, and persons of alternate sexual practice from the special SF clique.
The accusation is that because of this injustice, all these excluded persons must be intruded into science fiction, whether they can write worth beans or not.
Not the specific people excluded, mind you, to whom the alleged harm was allegedly done: merely other folk, having nothing in common with the first group except for shallow physical details of appearance, and who have hitherto lived lives of comfort, even privilege.
Excluded? All this will be news to any fans of Mary Shelley, who invented our genre, C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett, who were in it before any Campbellian author, not to mention Marion Zimmer Bradley and Samuel R. Delany, of whose sexual orientations perhaps it is better not to speak. I believe at least one of them is an Etrurian.
Northwest Smith first appeared in print in 1933, you idiotic young whippersnappers, back when my father was in kneepants, before the moonlanding, before the jet plane, before radar; and I discovered in awe that Darth was Luke’s father when it first appeared on the big screen, when I was still too young to drive a car; and I am now a greybeard.
And if you don’t know who wrote those things, get out of here. You are no science fiction reader, and have no business condemning a community you do not understand and of which you are woefully ignorant.
In fact, the only person, to my knowledge, deliberately and willfully excluded from the clique was one John Norman, a writer of decidedly alternate sexual practice, and he was excluded simply and merely on that ground.
He was excluded by the Social Justice Warriors, the Left, the oh-so-tolerant tolerators of tolerable toleration.
So the accusation is not only intercourserrifically bat-guano barking moonbat crazy if anyone honestly believed it (no one does. The jalopy of socialism runs on dishonest belief, that is, hysterical affirmations of fictions one wishes to believe without proof) — but it is also diametrically opposite the truth.
The merit of the accusation means nothing. It is the act, in and of itself, of leveling an accusation that is the sole purpose of any Leftist.
Why? That is a question too deep for this brief column to answer. One might as well ask why some degenerate people or nonhuman moon-things worship the the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
All hail Tsathoggua! We Adore the Toad-God!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
Well, now I know what to autorank below No Award should any of the obvious Puppy only items make the final ballot.
And to the Puppies, no, I’m very far from an SJW. And while I don’t mind a creator doing a post in their [sic] personal social media as to what they [sic] did last year that’s eligible and in what category, I do seriously mind a politically oriented effort from any political axis to stuff the ballot box. I feel that’s damaging to the Hugos, thus my decision to put all such below No Award if it appears the creator is cooperating with such an effort.