Real Life

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Four

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Four

*drumming on a table that looks like it belongs in a kitchen from the 1950s*

New McCarthy, Loads of bitchin’, Monster Huntin’, Internetin’
Trad Publishing, Indie Pubbing, and Jeff Bezos

Blacklisting, Barflies, Evil League and Rabbit Guys
eBooks, ePub, mobi rise — nook flames out in Kindle’s fires

*chorus repeats*

I am so not a songwriter so the lyrics are actually the part of the post that takes me the longest to come up with, guys. 🙂 I hope you’re enjoying them.

So, this post is going to look at the Sad Puppies 2 era. SP2 was a lot more organized and successful than SP1 and it caught much more attention. It was headed up by Larry Correia and announced in this post over at his site. As with SP1, SP2 did not initially advocate for any specific works and, from that post, the central theme was this:

The ugly truth is that the most prestigious award in sci-fi/fantasy is basically just a popularity contest, where the people who are popular with a tiny little group of WorldCon voters get nominated and thousands of other works are ignored. Books that tickle them are declared good and anybody who publically deviates from groupthink is bad. Over time this lame ass award process has become increasingly snooty and pretentious, and you can usually guess who all of the finalists are going to be that year before any of the books have actually come out or been read by anyone, entirely by how popular the author is with this tiny group.

This is a leading cause of puppy related sadness.


The only thing missing is “Think of the children…”

However, while nomination and discussion about who should be nominated was going on, a very fun thing happened in the sci-fi/fantasy world. Tor.com started a rather big dust-up over ending binary gender usage in sci-fi and fantasy works. From that post:

Conversations about gender in SF have been taking place for a long time. I want to join in. I want more readers to be aware of texts old and new, and seek them out, and talk about them. I want more writers to stop defaulting to binary gender in their SF—I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered. I want this conversation to be louder.

Note that she’s not saying “I want people to come up with races where gender/sex traits are different” or “I’d like an exploration of what it means to be a man or a woman in a given culture” or that she wants an end to gendered roles or anything like that. What she wants is to continue the current clusterfuck of chaotic confusion that is crossing between the kink and LGBT community with the genderqueer. However, she’s actually being a few billion magnitudes of order less understanding and tolerant than they are — the genderqueer and those who don’t identify with their apparent physical sex know that they’re going against biological norms (the word norm is being used in a statistical sense just like my being blonde is abnormal) and they do *not* expect everyone to know how to address them on sight. They also know that most people do identify with their birth sex. Further, they’re not demanding that the whole of society change itself and its language to accommodate them without them making any concessions.

I’m pretty damned tolerant and “whatever, so long as I don’t have to pay for it ’cause I’m skint.” I’ve got gay friends, trans friends, genderqueer friends… I even have one friend who is a gay, trans black man. However, none of them have an issue with gendered characters. All of them *write* characters that are binary gendered. If they have a character that is genderqueer or goes against the binary system, that character is the exception (if the cast is human. In cases where we’re dealing with an alien race, all bets are off). Still, when Tor.com posted this little thing, it set the entire sci-fi/fantasy world alight and kicked SP2 into high gear. Larry Correia had a lot to say about this particular bit of social justice insanity.

There’s a reason I mention it here and you’ll see in a bit. At any rate, SP2 continued until the nominations were chosen and then submitted with reminders of how to nominate and reminders about when nominations were getting close to ending as well as when the nominees were announced and the resulting aftermath that followed the awards ceremony. Sad Puppies 2 was the beginning of the deeper reflection on how the Hugos, SJWs, and the trends in sci-fi and fantasy publishing were not just an anomaly but were part of a greater culture war.

Remember the “end of binary gendering” thing I mentioned earlier? Well, 2014 was the year that Larry Correia really started riling up the SJWs (at least that I can see) and the Sad Puppies effort in many ways became a bit of a rallying cry for many sci-fi and fantasy authors across the Internet to discuss the SJW incursion into their realm.

Keep in mind that this happened eight months before GamerGate.

People were getting sick and tired of being preached at. They were sick of token diverity-ism that was being held up as more important than the story and the way that identity politics and the author’s personal life and beliefs were used in place of actually judging whether or not their work was well-written, entertaining, and told a good story where the message played a role.

If you read the discussions, you’ll see that much of it is well-thought-out arguments about the problems of writing non-binary characters as well as the truth about historical depictions of women in sci-fi that flew in the face of the alternate reality the SJWs were advancing.

Not that that stopped them. They went after Larry Correia very hard in 2014 with File 770 and the Guardian attacking him and misrepresenting what he was hoping to achieve with Sad Puppies. The Guardian journalist, Damien Walter continued his attack on Larry’s Facebook page.

In August 2014, GamerGate happened and in November came ShirtStorm which had some overlap with the SP community due to shared interest (just like there is overlap between people who like French cooking and people who like French wine). However, SP2 really just served to underscore Correia’s initial points about the Hugos and caused the movement to gain more attention than SP1 had.

It was the next year’s effort, Sad Puppies 3, that really blew the lid off the entire mess. That will be the subject of the next entry.

— G.K.

On dinosaurs, colossi, golems, governments, and adaptation

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On dinosaurs, colossi, golems, governments, and adaptation

…and why they all tend to die out in the end.

It’s an interesting fact in the history of biological life that the oldest form of life on Earth is the bacteria (and arguably the virus). Not just because they’re simple entities — amoeba are also fairly simple as are many members of the protist branch. It’s also interesting to note that bacteria, protists, and viruses from the Proterozoic Eon (roughly 2500 million years ago) of the are still around. They’re still happily doing their thing, sometimes killing vast swathes of plants and animals, without a care in the world. They’ll be here long after humanity has either turned to dust or departed for worlds unknown.

It’s amazing, when you think about it. These tiny, simple, mindless, invisible things have outlasted the dinosaurs. The KT impact was barely a blip on their radar. The Ice Age? Again, barely registered to them. They kept on keeping on. The dinosaurs had them beat on size, strength, teeth, defensive features (immune systems and thick hides and spikes!), could move around more, reproduce sexually, were more genetically diverse… and then along came a single hunk of rock and it was bye-bye dinosaurs while the little microscopic dudes kept on truckin’. The dinosaurs were the masters of their environment, true, but bacteria and viruses are the masters of adaptation. And, when it comes to long-term, long-scale, universal and planetary survival, adaptation is the key trait if you’re going to be more than just a bit player in the grand game of life.

Humanity has been fighting an on-going war with some members of these groups forever. We have an immune system that fights them and we also use plants to try to counteract them and have done since we figured out we could do that way back during the prehistoric era. It’s been a long-running fight and in all that time, we’ve managed to eradicate one of them. Small pox. The rest are still merrily going about their way. Some of them we need. Some of them kill us. Some of them we are trying to eradicate and can’t even with all our technology, all our grand colossi and skyscrapers, all our golems and governments. And, compared to the dinosaurs, we’re easy prey. I mean, we don’t have big sharp teeth, scaly hides, powerful muscles, we’re not the size of the brontosaurus or the T-Rex. We don’t have the armor plating of the Triceratops or the stegosaurus. We couldn’t outrun a velociraptor if we wanted to.

However, like the viruses and bacteria, we’re great at adaptation and we’re capable of breaking off into small groups. We can mix traits on multiple levels — not just genetic but memetic — and see what works. It’s when we try to be like the dinosaurs that things get bad for us. Yes, we can gather into large groups and become like a tsunami sometimes and sometimes that’s good — think things like food drives, building houses for the homeless, SETI@home, KickStarter — but notice that all of those things are voluntary. They’re also all temporary efforts. No one joins in every KickStarter campaign or builds every house. And, tribes banding together in a common effort isn’t always a bad thing — look at the success the United States and the entire Anglosphere has enjoyed over the past few centuries. But, if we’re not left with room to adapt inside those structures, it’ll all go wonky.

The problem in recent history has been that some parts of human society want us to be more colossal and monolithic because they believe that’s the only way to progress. I’m specifically thinking of the left-wing “progressives” who want to grant the government the power to regulate just about every aspect of life — economic, social, education, cultural, philosophical — to mandate certain outcomes they deem “fair.” However, doing that has always bred the ability to adapt to sudden change right out of the people and the society. Just look at what happened to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe. Look at what’s happening in all of the South American and Latin American countries that embraced socialism and communism and their five-year plans. Just look at Cuba and North Korea. Look at the Middle East and most of the African nations. Look at most of Europe that’s embraced socialism. When changes happen, they can’t cope. Birth rates fall — they cannot adapt to the new reality. In Europe, they imported new generations to replenish their falling population rates but could not adapt to the changes that brought and still can’t handle it — look at the riots, the carbeques that are just a fact of life there, the zones sensibles around Paris, the re-emergence of a new underclass and caste system that may be socially and culturally permanent since there’s no way for the French, the Germans, the Britons, or the Swedes to change how “French,” “German,” “British,” or “Swedish,” is defined or how someone can become a member of those tribes other than by birth. The Industrial Revolution ended and was replaced by the paradigm-shifting Digital revolution and these nations cannot adapt.

Industries are having problems as well. The publishing world got hit by the KT impact of Amazon and the Internet just like the movie and music industries and since they’re all populated by rather monolithic corporations who have a lot vested in the status quo ante, they not only don’t want to adapt, but they may not be able to. The Big Five may die entirely just like the dinosaurs did because, while Amazon is a large beast, it’s more like a large colony of bacteria and less like a brontosaurus. If one part of Amazon fails, it won’t bring down the whole thing. Amazon is acing the adaptation thing while the Big Five not only are failing at it but, given some of Tor’s senior management’s recent behavior, they’re doing everything they can to destroy their own food supplies and water sources.

Hell, the United States is having trouble dealing with the chaos that the Digital Revolution has wrought and we’re probably the most flexible and adaptable nation and society on the planet. The genius of the Founders guaranteed that. Which is why I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the idea that we should be like the rest of the world and become more rigid and inflexible. Do we have our problems? Yes. Do we have our imperfections — of course! Are there inequalities? Without a doubt. Is it better to have those problems than to be unable to deal with changes in reality? Is it better to be a bacteria or a dinosaur?

I say it’s better to be a bacteria. I say it’s better to be something that can adapt quickly and rapidly even if that means that there’s going to be a lot of inequality and imperfection and problems because it means at least you’re alive to deal with them instead of being extinct the first time a big rock comes your way. After all, if you’re alive, you can work to try to minimize those inequalities — for instance, make it illegal to discriminate against people based on things like race, religion, orientation, gender, political philosophy; make it so that society and economics is more of a meritocracy. If you’re dead… well, there’s really not much you can do (other than vote Democrat, of course).

— G.K.

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Three

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Three

*dons shades and sits at a table in a kitchen from the 1940s*

Larry Correia, Sarah H., Puppy Sadness, Vox Day
Social Justice, WrongFen Haters, Scalzi’s Twitter Mob

We didn’t start the flamewar
It was always burning
Since the ‘Net’s been churning
We didn’t start the flamewar
No we didn’t light it
But we’ll damned well fight it

Lyrics to be continued

So, this is the first part of the in depth history of the Sad Puppies part of this series (wow, that’s a mouthful). I spent a lot of time yesterday reading up on this. Sad Puppies has been running for three years now and was started by Larry Correia back in January 2013. That means it predates GamerGate by a fair margin (since there have been some accusations that Sad Puppies and GamerGate are the same thing or that GamerGate started the Sad Puppies. The only way that could have happened would have been for the GamerGate movement to have access to 1) a time machine, 2) a DeLorean with a Flux Capacitor and either a Mr. Fusion or Plutonium, or 3) a TARDIS. Since I’m fairly certain none of those three things are true, it’s a safe bet that GamerGate and Sad Puppies are two distinct phenomena which simply have some members in common since people who like video games also tend to enjoy reading and occasionally writing fantasy or sci-fi books).

Like many of us, Larry noticed that there had been a divergence between what was selling well and what was winning the Hugos and had been for some time. He informed his fans that all they had to do in order to nominate a work for the Hugo or the Campbell awards was to purchase a membership to WorldCon. Since the membership for WorldCon is rather small, it doesn’t take many votes to get on the ballot or to win an award. He called his effort to get his own work on the ballot “Sad Puppy” as a tongue-in-cheek commentary against the current tendency to award works that were literary-fic or message-fic instead of works that were selling or well-liked by the entire sci-fi/fantasy audience. It’s not the first time such a gag was used — after all, on various tech forums I hang around, “Think Of The Children” is used in the same sarcastic fashion.

sad-puppy
Won’t someone think of the sad puppies and the children?

In Sad Puppies 1, Larry did suggest his own works because there wasn’t any real organization back then. It was just him on his own. He was soliciting his own fans to nominate him (but he did not buy votes or memberships for anyone) and probably felt it would be a bit strange to ask them to nominate someone else. Additionally, he had a theory about the Hugos that he wanted to test — namely that they were biased, represented the preferences of only one tiny section of the sci-fi/fantasy fandom community, and that authors with the “wrong” political beliefs (meaning politically to the right of Mao and Stalin) who got on the ballot would be attacked, slandered, libeled, made the subject of whisper campaigns, harassed, have Twitter mobs set upon them, have their books given negative reviews, etc etc etc.

Sad Puppies is not about getting Larry himself the Hugo or getting any particular author the award (Sad Puppies 1 actually failed to get Larry nominated at all though it did get some of his preferences listed in other areas). It’s always been about proving that WorldCon is full of crap when they hold themselves out to represent all of fandom, about proving that there is a definite bias that has nothing to do with whether a work is good or not and everything to do with whether or not the author has the right skin color, the right genitalia, and adheres to the proper groupthink. It also has been a test as to whether or not WorldCon is really open to welcoming new members and new writers regardless of their skin’s melanin content, whether their genitals dangle or not, and what their political philosophies are. Based on the current reactions I’d have to say that Correia’s premises have been proven. WorldCon is not open to newbies of any kind who aren’t clones of their current members and the awards are biased to message-fic and it’s pretty clear that the author’s identity is far more important than whether or not their story is well-written and interesting.

So, back in 2013, Larry campaigned on his own behalf throughout January to try to get his own work on the ballot. He was almost successful (missing it by only 17 votes). Overall, there wasn’t much outcry over it and the first effort didn’t have a massive impact. Still, the idea caught on and began to generate buzz which culminated in Sad Puppies 2 which was a Much Bigger Deal and which will be the subject of the next entry in this series so stay tuned!

— G.K.

Sad Puppy image taken from Larry Correia’s site, Monster Hunter Nation

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Two

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Two

So, some of you might be wondering exactly how this whole thing got started. I posted a brief-ish history earlier. I’m not going to rehash all of that now. Instead, I’m going to focus on the three most recent events in this culture war. I’m not going to pretend to be completely unbiased in this but I am going to try to be fairly accurate. There is a lot of he-said-she-said to some of it so feel free to check out other summaries. Just be aware that everyone has their own agenda so take it all with a grain of salt (including this one).

The first of the three events to take place was GamerGate. Know Your Meme has a pretty thorough coverage of it so if you’ve got no clue what it is and want a play-by-play, I’d suggest checking it out. The long and short of it is that the whole thing started over a game developer (Zoe Quinn) who cheated on her boyfriend. Her boyfriend posted an expose of it showing that she’d supposedly slept around to try to get good reviews of her game. It morphed from a movement to improve ethics in gaming journalism to a big thing about feminism and gaming in general. The anti-GamerGater side (populated by Social Justice Warriors or SJWs) tends to think that gaming is sexist and that the tech sector is sexist. They think that the way women are depicted in games is sexist and that games should tell a more “socially just” message. The pro-GamerGater side thinks that games are fine and that if the antis don’t like them, they’re free to make their own games and see which sell better. The antis have, so far, managed to get some of the pro-GG groups like the HoneyBadgerBridage (a group of female gamers and game developers) thrown out of conventions because they “made the [antis] feel threatened.”

That’s the level of maturity we’re dealing with. The antis can’t actually argue anything rationally and can’t be bothered to make their own games with their own message. They want to force current gaming companies to make the games they think should be made and force the rest of us to play them whether we want to or not. And, when we say that’s stupid, we’re told we’re threatening them and harassing them and that we’re being sexist. We also get lumped in with the PUAs like Roosh (who isn’t actually a bad guy — I’ve talked with him and he’s nice in person) and some of the really crazy MRAs who do hate women which would be like us lumping the antis in with groups who want to raise all children as girls and kill or force all males to undergo sex reassignment surgery *eyeroll*

The next big event was ShirtStorm. Back in November, the European Space Agency landed the Philae lander on a comet for the first time in human history. One of the guys on the team was wearing a shirt that a female friend had made for him — the shirt was a bowling shirt that depicted comic-hero women with laser guns and tight outfits. He was interviewed briefly (he wasn’t the spokesman for the team or the team lead — the team lead was a woman, in fact). Rose Eveleth, a journalist for The Atlantic, managed to miss the big news item (the historic comet landing) and, in a stereotypically womanish manner, focus in on what the guy was wearing instead. She made a big deal about the shirt that caused the historic comet landing to be forgotten as everyone on Twitter got the vapors over the women on this guy’s shirt. She later claimed she was “doxxed” (meaning her personal information was posted and she was getting harassed at home) but there was absolutely no evidence this happened (whereas there was plenty of evidence that this happened with anti-GamerGate people). I personally spent the better part of four days checking the usual doxxing sites AND the deepnet/Tornet for any trace of it and there was nada. The only way I could dig up her info was to hit up a contact I have who can get that kind of stuff and all I asked that person was if they could get it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was “yes” but that does not mean Rose Eveleth was doxxed any more than it means that oh, say, the Governor General of Canada’s direct line (bypasses switchboard, bypasses secretary, no voicemail, rings through even if phone is turned off) was “doxxed.”*

ShirtStorm managed to die down with most of us women realizing that some women were never going to get the whole science thing because they just couldn’t be rational. I wrote my long series on ShirtStorm and Women In Science (Feminism Is Dead, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science?, Why Don’t Women Go Into Science? Part II, Women In Science Part III: Can We Force More Women to Become NTs?, Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?) and things seemed to go back to their uneasy truce where the minority of us wondered just when the majority of slavering crazed fems were going to find something to go batcrap crazy over again.

The third event is HugoGate or PuppyGate or whatever you want to call it. That really deserves its own entry — which it is going to get. However, I’m going to give it a quick rundown here anyway so here goes. This year was the third year that Sad Puppies ran a list of people they thought should get nominated for the Hugos. The last two years Larry Correia ran Sad Puppies — this year it was Brad Torgersen. Larry started it because he believed that worthy folks were being ignored or left off the ballot due to the authors’ political beliefs. He said that if any right-wing author got nominated, the Powers That Be with WorldCon (the group that owns and organizes the Hugos) would throw a fit of epic proportions. Thus far, he’s been proven right. The first two years, Sad Puppies wasn’t very successful but this year it was. There’s some argument as to why that is the case and I’m still reading up on it myself. However, the end result has been that Larry and Brad (who are really nice guys and good writers) have been slandered, libeled, threatened, and harassed. A lot of other good authors have been harassed as well just because they were nominated by Sad Puppies and some even felt they had to withdraw from being nominated. The PuppyKickers are threatening to vote No Award in every category where there are Sad Puppy candidates (I think) which would prove Larry’s point completely and would prove that the Hugos are pretty much worthless. The PuppyKickers claim that the Sad Puppies are all a bunch of white, sexist men who nominated nothing but white, sexist men even though SP3 consists of women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, gays (I think?), and people of all political backgrounds and nominated writers of all colors, genders, and backgrounds. Also now, according to the PuppyKickers, those of us who are sympathetic to SP are neonazis.

So you can see why some of us are finally getting a bit fed up with this whole thing.

In the next part I’ll do a more in-depth history of Sad Puppies so stay tuned!

— G.K.

*No, it’s not the Governor General and I’m not going to reveal whether or not it’s a government agency I could get access to or who my friend is or how I know them or what but, suffice it to say that just because this person can get their hands on the information does not mean it’s in the wild. This person once had a pepperoni pizza (paid for by an anonymous BitCoin account) sent to a friend of theirs who was in Israel and that friend, to this day, still has no idea who sent them the pizza. And no, my posting this won’t give the game away because that friend has no clue who I am or that I know this mutual contact.

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part One

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part One

But it has been burning for a while. I’m going to briefly (for me) outline the history a bit before diving into the most recent battle fronts in this long-running war.

Yes, I’m talking about the current online flamewar going on in the sci-fi/fantasy world. The latest salvo has been over the Hugos with Irene Gallo calling anyone who thinks Sad Puppies has a point a neo-Nazi (thanks, hon! By the by, I was born Catholic and my grandfather was part of the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach so I’m just thrilled to be called that) but it’s been simmering since at least the 1980s when the geeks and nerds decided to start building their own worlds and lives where they could do their thing without having to put up with the overculture’s bullshit. We went our own way, did our own thing, and left the rest of the world well enough alone.

Then, of course, the stuff we were doing started to catch attention and the rest of the world wanted in on it. We’re tolerant and magnanimous so we said “sure, c’mon. Join the Internet.” We kept doing our own thing, hanging out on our usenet groups, playing MUDs, building early websites, and just generally chilling. We avoided the screeching harpies, the Ivory Tower Intellectuals, the fashionistas, the HR drones, and the hippy-dippy crowds and kept playing video games, reading sci-fi and fantasy, writing, and just generally adopting an outlook of “let everyone do their own thing and just leave us alone.”

And that was fine for a while. We got to show off how awesome our little worlds could be with epic movies like Lord of the Ring, The Matrix and books like Harry Potter, The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and video games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, and more. Still, for the most part, we left the rest of the world alone and the rest of the world left us alone. We kept spinning great stories, kept telling them and retelling them, made awesome networks and used the tech that our fore-geeks had built into companies like Amazon to share our culture. We didn’t really care much what the rest of the world was doing because we were too busy wondering who was going to win the X-Prize, building spaceships and space-faring companies, talking about how we could make money mining Near Earth Asteroids, planning out how we’d get to Mars.

After all, the rest of the world had been telling us what we wanted wasn’t important and didn’t matter. We took them at their word and left them do their thing so long as they left us alone to think up things like how to colonize other planets, whether or not you could genetically engineer dragons so they’d be real, and when the Singularity might happen. In our world, we didn’t much care if you were male or female or some variant therein. We didn’t care if you were homo-, hetero-, bi-, or a-sexual. We didn’t care if you wore jeans, Armani suits, had tattoos and piercings, walked around in your pajamas all day, watched porn or thought that Clark was better than Heinlein. All we really cared about was “is your idea cool? Will it work? Can you prove it?”

We weren’t interested in trying to set up elaborate government programs to ensure that every company, game, book, movie, TV show, poem, or military unit was a perfect representation of the rest of the population. We thought that it was a bit silly to try to force people into jobs based on superficial (or superfluous) traits instead of whether or not they were interested, qualified, and could fit in with the rest of their team. We were willing to listen to arguments that perhaps the overculture discouraged certain people from entering our specialized realms (math, science, tech, and engineering). However, we recognized that interest and personality-type were the main drivers and the intelligence played a role in whether or not a person could get into the STEM fields. After all, if you hate math, you’re hardly going to be a great computer scientist. If physics bores you, a career at CERN is probably out. If you’d rather talk about your feelings, you’re probably not destined for the engineering world and if you think video games are for losers, I doubt you’re going to fit in well in a company like Blizzard or BioWare.

So, for the most part, we didn’t care that our subculture had more men than women. The women (like me) who were part of it had absolutely no real place in the overculture. We didn’t face a lot of sexism in the geek realms — the guys are glad to have us and appreciate the way our minds work. True, they can sometimes say something that results in them suffering a brief bit of foot-in-mouth but then, so can we. We know that guys like to look at attractive women (unless they’re gay in which case it’s attractive men).* For the most part, we don’t care. Their desktops and screensavers don’t bother us so long as the women are mostly clothed. After all, they’re not asking us to dress like that. The superficial doesn’t matter much to us — actions do.

At any rate, things were rocking along just fine until three events happened that showed us that no matter how magnanimous and forgiving we were (after all, we’d sighed and gotten over the September That Never Ended, we’d come to grips with the AOLers and Spammers, we’d learned to filter out the overculture and had even — albeit, with difficulty — forgiven them for cancelling Firefly). The first was #GamerGate. The second was #ShirtStorm. And now the last is the HugoSpat.

We didn’t start the flamewar but, bless your overbearing over-culture hearts guys, we think it’s hilarious when you try to flame people who invented fireproof armor, can calculate the burst damage for the best PVP firemage build, and build flamethrowers for fun.

You’re in our world now and here, we make the rules. That is why folks like Irene Gallo and her brethren are going to lose because — at best — we go back to ignoring you and doing our own thing. At worst, we show the rest of the marginalized in the overculture that they don’t have to put up with your shenanigans either. After all, we’ve already showed the RIAA we don’t need them to help us find great music. We showed the big TV companies that we can damned well do without them. The Big Five are learning that we don’t need them to control the book market.

Do you really want to join them on Ye Olde Dustbin of the Dinosaurs?

— G.K.

*Women aren’t as visually-oriented as men but we do like to look at good looking guys (if we’re straight) or gals (if we’re lesbians). However, rarely are we going to plaster the walls and our computers with fine specimens because we’re wired a bit differently when it comes to what we like to look at and display. *shrugs* Men and women are different and that is a Good Thing(TM).

Other posts like this:

No More Tor

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No More Tor

Update: I am aware that Tom Doherty issued a statement and that Irene Gallo (the one whose comment pushed me over the edge) has made a non-apology apology. Her doing that actually makes me angrier because she’s not sorry at all for what she said. She still thinks people like me (and John C. Wright, Jim Butcher, Sarah Hoyt, Cedar Sanderson, and Kevin Anderson) are neo-Nazis. When she can actually admit that maybe being to the right of Mao does not make you Hitler and can actually write a post that accurately describes the entire Sad Puppy phenomenon, I’ll reconsider my stance. Until then, I’m not going to contribute a wooden nickel towards her salary. Also, if Tor fires her, I will make my avoidance of their books permanent because that’s the only thing that could make me angrier — firing someone for their opinions.

I just want an honest-to-Bob real fucking apology and for her to learn to break out of her little bubble of a universe and make some truly diverse friends instead of the token-diversity she has around now.

I’ve intentionally not said anything about Sad Puppies or Hugogate or whatever it’s being called now because, honestly, I don’t pay much attention to awards these days. The Hugo winners have been books I find tedious and not worth the time for about the past ten years so I generally avoid them. I’ve started treating most “award-winning” books that way in recent years because “award-winning” is so often synonymous with “something a limousine liberal in Manhattan [who’s never come down from their fiftieth floor loft and who thinks they’re progressive because they have an Ecuadorean transgendered nanny and their dogwalker is gay] would find interesting when they try to show how avant-garde they are while drinking chai frappĂ©lattĂ©chinos with their lily white (and the token black) quote-unquote with airquotes friends.”

And since most of them can’t read beyond a sixth grade level, what they like is going to be something I’ll find puerile — perhaps juvenile, at best — with tortured language that thinks it’s academic and intellectual when it’s really just pretentious, tendentious, and fucking poor diction and a complete abuse of esoteric terminology.

Still, though, I’m sick and tired of being compared to the guy who caused over 70 million deaths in less than seven years just because I think that openness and diversity is a good thing. I think that anyone who likes science fiction and fantasy should be considered a fan and they shouldn’t have to pass any kind of ideological test. I think that an award that touts itself as “THE sci-fi/fantasy award from all fans” should be more open to those fans participating in the nomination and voting. Otherwise, it’s just another crappy award given by another group of CHORFs. I think that the Sad Puppies have proven their point in that the Hugos are meaningless and controlled by the publishers and not the fans.

If the PuppyKickers want to throw a fit because their picks didn’t win this year, that’s fine. If they want to change the way the Hugos are decided, that’s fine. But they need to act like fucking adults instead of kindergartners. Since they can’t do that, I’m going to do the adult thing and not give them my money.

Hey, I wouldn’t give my kindergarten-aged niece a cookie if she’d spent all day acting out — I’m not going to give a company that has its senior staff call me a Nazi my money, either. However, I don’t want the authors who are locked into a shitty contract to think it’s them or their work that has caused me to make this decision. So, I’ve started contacting all Tor’s authors to let them know that it’s not them — it’s their publisher. I started today with Brandon Sanderson who could easily strike out on his own and publish independently (face it, Tor needs him far more than he needs them). The message I sent to him (or to his assistants, rather), is below.

I just wanted to apologize for this. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Sanderson’s work ever since he started writing the Wheel of Time after Mr. Jordan died. When I heard he was going to be finishing the series, I bought the Mistborn trilogy and soon had every book he’s written. However, I won’t be buying (or borrowing or pirating because that’s wrong) his books published through Tor any longer.

Mr. Sanderson hasn’t done anything wrong — I still love his books and wish I had 1/100000000000000th of his talent. He’s not offended me or anything. I just can’t support a company that thinks that my friends and I are as horrible as the man responsible for upwards of 70 million deaths (Adolph Hitler) just because we think that more than a few dozen people should be allowed to decide who wins the Hugos.

If Mr. Sanderson changes publishers or goes indie, I’ll be happy to grab his books again. I love his work. I’m just not going to keep giving money to Irene Gallo and the Neilsen-Haydens so that they can call me and people I like (such as Sarah Hoyt, Larry Corriea, Cedar Sanderson, and Brad Torgersen among others) Nazis just because we’re not to the left of Mao and Stalin politically and think that it’s more fun to read books with great characters and a good plot instead of polemics that we might agree with but that tell us we can’t agree for $stupidreasons_like_kincolor_gender_religion_beingfromtheSouth.

Thanks (and sorry because I know he’s busy and doesn’t want to get dragged in to crap like this just because his publishing house is run by idiots),

G.K. Masterson

If, like me, you’re tired of the chattering classes calling you a Nazi while taking your money and laughing at you, then feel free to stop giving them your money. If you’re planning to avoid Tor, know that they’re owned by MacMillian who owns the following publishing lines:

  • Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    • Faber & Faber
  • Henry Holt and Company
    • Holt Paperbacks
    • Metropolitan Books
    • Times Books
    • Owl Books
  • Palgrave Macmillan
  • Picador
  • Roaring Brook Press
    • Neal Porter Books
    • First Second Books
  • St. Martin’s Press
  • Tom Doherty Associates
    • Tor Books
  • Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group
    • W.H. Freeman
    • Bedford-St. Martin’s
    • Worth Publishers
  • Hayden-McNeil
  • Nature Publishing Group
    • Scientific American, Inc.

Instead, might I suggest Del Ray Books, Wizards of the Coast, Baen, or indie books? Sure, Del Ray and Baen are owned by other members of the Big Six but so far they’ve managed not to have their spokespeople and senior staff insult anyone to the right of Mao and Stalin.

Just a thought.

— G.K.

More on this:

Holy Daikatana! An Update?

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Holy Daikatana! An Update?

Yeah, I know. I fell off the face of the Earth. In my defense — shit happened. Good shit, but shit nonetheless. Back on New Year’s Eve, my former employer pretty much told me that I could either go 1099 or be fired. I went 1099 and I’ve been setting up my business and trying to line up additional clients so that my current primary client (my former employer) isn’t such a dominant factor any longer. I’ve also been completely tied up with two other projects: The Watching Dead and Rooster and Pig. However, I’ve managed to get both of those whittled down to “acceptable levels of no longer having complete control over my life” and I’m making more money now that I’m on 1099 status (the getting to set my own hours helps beaucoup as well) which means that I might be able to actually start maintaining a presence here again.

 

Shocking, I know.

 

I do have some other pretty big announcements that will be coming out soon so stay tuned. Good news incoming, guys.

 

— G.K.

Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?

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Women In Science: Can We Create More Female NTs?

Ethically and legally? Probably not. But, if we’re looking at just “is this within the realm of probability with current technology” then the answer is “yes, maybe.” Understand, of course, that it’s not going to be something we could start working on tomorrow and that the suggestions on what to do range from mildly terrifying to downright scary. However, if your end goal is more women in science and you don’t care much about the means used to achieve that goal (which probably makes you part of the crowd clutching their pearls and fainting over a shirt), then consider this ground zero for your completely terrible campaign.


Even the Master is horrified by your callousness

The first thing we’ll need to do is figure out what determines and creates the different temperaments. There’s a lot of debate over this. Temperament does seem to be extant from birth and observable in infancy (though, again, that’s somewhat debatable). It’s unknown if temperament is genetic, if it’s encoded into a specific gene or series of genes, if it’s inherited but not genetic, if it’s a result of chemical washes in utero during fetal brain development, or if it’s just the result of something spinning the Wheel o’ Temperament and bam — you get whatever the arrow’s pointing to when you exit the birth canal. It could also be influenced by various environmental and nurturing factors in infancy. So, the first step is to:

  1. Collect several hundred thousand pregnant women of various races, age ranges, ethnicities, nationalities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic levels, and marital statuses. Note down who is who and then assign each one a random testing number so that a proper double-blind study can be done.
  2. Monitor maternal food and liquid intake and output, noting the times and frequency of hunger, elimination, and strange cravings. Also monitor maternal emotional levels and stress levels.
  3. Figure out a way to determine the exact hormonal levels being washed over the fetus in utero at each stage of pregnancy and note those down.
  4. If the mother chooses to breastfeed, continue to observe intake-output of maternal nutrients until the child is weaned.
  5. Test each child to determine temperament/personality type at an appropriate age (usually no earlier than 17).

That concludes the first part of this process. Once you’ve determined which children are NTs, go back over the data gathered earlier and try to tease out the commonalities in maternal (and paternal) traits. Did the mothers all experience similar hormonal washes during their pregnancies? Did they tend to eat or crave certain foods as a class? Note down all commonalities among the parents and prepare to proceed to the next step.

  1. Collect males and females with traits most likely to create an NT child (if there are any).
  2. Impregnate the females with sperm carrying only the X chromosome.
  3. Monitor each pregnancy to ensure that the proper foods, drinks, and in utero hormonal washes occur, terminating any that seem likely to be an non-NT temperament.
  4. Ensure that the parents use only child-rearing methods that were found in homes with INTJ children from phase one.

There, you should have a new generation of pure NT females now. Provided, of course, that temperament is determined this simply. If you repeat these steps over the course of enough generations, you might be able to extinguish all of the non-NT temperaments in the human race, leaving a world only of Rationals. Of course, at future steps, you will need to breed some male children (after all, it’s hard to reproduce sexually when there’s only one sex and even if you can, that has its own problems) but you should be able to figure out how to create male NT children and how to ensure that their children will be NTs.

Also, added “bonus:” you should be able to use the data from phase one to determine the commonalities for the other three temperaments so if you decided that one of them needed a greater population, you could selectively breed them.


And if we add more of this, we’ll get a batch of nice ESFPs…

Of course, if you actually try to do this, you’re probably a terrible person. You’re completely eliminating choice and freedom in mating and reproduction for both men and women but you will get more female scientists. If that is your end goal and you don’t care how ethically it’s achieved, then you’ll be okay with placing restrictions on humans having sex with partners of their own choice at times of their own choosing. You’ll get what you want but only at the price of virtually enslaving millions of women and making reproductive decisions on their behalf.

Which probably makes you a feminist and a social justice warrior but almost absolutely precludes you being a Rational.

— G.K.

Why Don’t Women Go Into Science? Part II

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Why Don't Women Go Into Science? Part II

Another reason that women aren’t commonly found in science is one that is really difficult to overcome. It’s not sexism. There’s no government program that can fix the problem. There’s no amount of social pressure that can ease it. You can shove a million girls into science and math education and you’re still not going to come out with a 50/50 mix in the scientist gender pool unless you start killing a lot of men.

The reason is temperament. As in the kinds outlined by Myers-Briggs. There are sixteen personality types and four temperaments. The four temperaments are SF, SP, NF, and NT. People who go on to become scientists will generally be of the NT temperament with the odd ball from one of the other three thrown in there (usually an ISTP or ISTJ). Now, out of these four temperaments, NT is the rarest in the general populace. It’s the second rarest for men and the rarest for women. Additionally, not all NTs are going to be interested in science and math. A good many will be interested in other things like law, writing, language, history, computers, etc.

NTs are called the “Rationals” because well…we are. I speak now as one of those rare evil unicorns (a female INTJ). We’re not touchy-feely. We don’t care how something makes you feel. We don’t care if it hurts your feelings or makes you unhappy. Your emotions are completely irrelevant unless, for some reason, we’re trying to subject them to testing or modification (like if we were testing psychiatric drugs). We’re not out to deliberately make you feel bad but we’re not going to sugarcoat things and if you can’t keep up with us, well, that’s your problem. Not ours. For those of us who have survived to adulthood and are at peace with being NTs (especially us INTs), we honestly couldn’t care less about the “in” crowd or what anyone outside of our extremely small circles of acquaintance — friends — family “feels” about anything.

That, of course, is part of why we’re drawn to science and research or other cerebral areas like law or writing. Even those of us who don’t go on to become scientists tend to appreciate the field and keep track of research that interests us. Science fits nicely in with how our minds work. It’s abstract. It requires careful thought. It seeks to tease meaning out of what seems, to most people, to be random noise in nature. It’s about looking beyond the surface and figuring out the deeper meaning of things. It’s something you can do on your own. Science doesn’t care about who has the fanciest title. It doesn’t care about who’s the oldest, the youngest, who went to the “best” schools, whose father is related to someone important, or if you look like a runway model or a run-over armadillo. None of that matters in science. The only thing that matters is the continual search for the answer to the greatest question ever asked: “Why?”

The most famous scientists in history weren’t part of a “team.” They were individuals working on their own. They communicated mostly with other like-minded sorts. They didn’t check opinion polls. They didn’t listen to tavern gossip. They couldn’t have told you if a woman’s dress was from Paris or London or one of the Jovian moons. And they gave us things like the Laws of Motion. Perturbation theory. The law of gravity. The theory of evolution by natural selection. Calculus. Geometry. Telescopes. Genetics. AC power transmission. They bequeathed to us the modern world and all of the mini-miracles we up-jumped hairless great apes take for granted every day. They gave us the tools to survive and thrive. And, for the most part, the non-Rationals have treated these great personages like crap. Many of them died penniless.

Now, set aside thoughts of utility, prestige, success, wealth, or recognition of any sort. How many of you can confirm that you are non-Rationals (having a non-NT temperament) and would be perfectly happy sitting alone in your office doing nothing but reading technical books and developing theories with nothing more than your brain (no computer simulations)? How many of you would be perfectly happy to stand in front of a whiteboard with a marker and run through decades’ worth of accumulated knowledge to try to tease out an equation that would define how silicon-based proteins might fold? How many of you would be content to sit in a legal library working on a treatise about the evolution of marriage as a legal institution?

Remember, you’re doing this alone. You don’t work with other people. You’re not soliciting opinions. You’re not even really interested in finding out what anyone thinks about what you’re doing. You’re working your ass off out of pure curiosity. You might never accomplish anything. Your work might sit on a shelf for five hundred years, unread. You might die poor and friendless, your passing noted by nothing more than a hasty engraving of your name, date of birth, and date of death on a charity marker. You’re not guaranteed anything — money, success, status, respect.

Nine out of ten of you will not be interested in this at all. You’d want something practical. Or concrete. Or that let you work with people. Or that involved something physically tangible. And that’s fine. But that means that you’d make mediocre scientists at best. You haven’t got the makings of an Einstein or Newton in you. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Out of the one of you left, for every three of you, one will be a woman. It’s not because women can’t do the things that men do in science — it’s because most men can’t do the things that scientists do and it just happens that, by nature, there tend to be a few more men who can do it than there are women.

And, none of those women is going to give a damn what shirt some guy was wearing. They’ll care more about that guy landing a probe that is sending back valuable information on a comet. They’ll wonder if they could get a probe on another comet and if it would be shorter to do that in order to get information on Kuiper Belt Objects than to wait for Voyager (or a similar probe) to get out there. Pictures on a shirt won’t interest them at all because they have their minds set on more interesting and enduring matters instead of that petty kind of gossip columnist tripe.

— G.K.

Why Don’t Women Go Into Science?

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Why Don't Women Go Into Science?

This is one of those questions where the answer is going to take a good bit of explanation because it’s a multi-part problem. One problem is that scientists tend to focus on abstract problems and theories — especially in disciplines like physics and astronomy. They are looking for patterns that are damned difficult to detect and that requires a kind of mind and intellect that is rare among men and rarer still among women making scientists a minority among the human populace.

And if there’s one thing that humans love to destroy, it’s a minority population.

We’re social creatures (for the most part). We enforce conformity through social norms, laws, mores and folkways, ostracism, shaming, and praise for good (conformist) behavior. That means that people who do not observe and obey those norms tend to be punished early on and taught not to express those non-conformist behaviors and to suppress their native values in favor of what society values.

Now, society’s values aren’t always good things when it comes to scientific and technological progress. To break mankind out of the Neolithic took visionaries and inventors who had the personal fortitude to ignore the social shaming conventions (gossip, peer pressure, ostracism, etc) and move forward into a direction that the Neolithics had never considered. That’s hard for anyone, male or female. But, it happened. Some crazy fool invented writing. Some other crazy fools figured out how to heat metal and hit it so that it developed into a certain shape. Other fools figured out how to sharpen it. Some fools figured out how to use sand to make a road and suddenly a bunch of fools could talk to other fools faster than ever.

And, of course, these fools let the Neolithics they’d dragged kicking and screaming out of the caves have access to these cool things and what did the Neolithics do? Use them to beat the ever-living crap out of future visionaries. But still, visionaries who could take the beatings were born and continued to pull the rest of humanity forward even while the gifts they left behind were used to discourage more of their kind from expressing their own visions.

See, visions are okay — so long as they fit to cultural norms or what the Neolithic elites want. So, today, that means that walking around the Vatican topless is fine — it fits what the elites want. It means that wearing a dress that resembles something out of Picasso’s nightmares is fine (but men had best stick to suits that make them look like tall penguins or else). It means that peeing in a jar and dropping a cross in it is fine. See, avant-garde is cool. Worship of a time period from a half-century ago is cool.

But putting a probe on a comet is so not cool. Especially if you don’t look like David Tennant or Thomas Hiddleston (who are acceptably good-looking male representations of “okay geeks” that the elites will tolerate so long as they genuflect before their Neolithic masters and don’t do anything too geeky). Especially if, like most visionaries, you don’t pay much attention to the fashion dictates of the day and instead wear things you think are cool or that a friend made for you. If you insist on being below average in looks, nerdy in fashion, and brilliant at science, your historic achievement will be overlooked by the Neolithics in favor of what you were wearing.

Because, you know, that’s so much more important than learning more about our universe.

Now, everyone’s sensitive (on some level) to that kind of social pressure. Women, on balance, are more sensitive to it (or rather, more women possess temperaments that allow such tactics to work — the rest of us who don’t have those self-isolate anyway and usually discount what the Neolithics say about anything). So, when an entire generation of girls sees a scientist getting ripped to shreds over his shirt after he’s just landed a freaking probe on a comet, those girls are going to say “hey, obviously all this stuff that feminists have been saying about how we shouldn’t judge people on looks or their clothes is bull. If I were to make a historic discovery, those same people would be more concerned with what I was wearing and how I looked than they would be with the implications of my discovery so why should I bother?”

So, congratulations, Rose Eveleth, Chris Plante, and Arielle Duhaime-Ross and others of your Neolithic ilk. You’ve just done more to discourage girls who have native scientific temperaments (NT females) from bothering to tackle difficult subjects because you’ve shown that, once again, achievements matter not at all to you flea-bitten primitives — it’s how you look and what you wear.

— G.K.