Posted on 12/29/2013 6:42:11 AM PST by Wonder Warthog
I have been down with a nasty cold for the last few weeks. The good side of that is that I have been catching up with my reading, which included the last couple of issues of "Analog...Science Fiction and Fact".
I was reading along and enjoying the stories, until I got to "Not for Sissies" by Jerry Oltion in the March 2014 issue, at which point my jaw dropped. This story is nothing more than gay pornography. The first line is:
"Nathan was eating breakfast in the kitchen when his husband, Greg, announced that he was going to die."
And it goes downhill from there, into more sexually graphic imagery than I have ever seen in Analog, even for heterosexual couples.
Analog has just gotten a new editor. I cannot imagine Campbell, Bova, or Schmidt approving such an inclusion.
Sorry to read this, I was a long-time subscriber myself but left several years back when the story selection did not suit me. As I age, I like longer stuff - a common trait as I hear. Still, as you say, this is not something that would have passed muster in the old days. I do recall R.A.H. mentioning that J.W. Campbell had a very victorian lady who was easily offended and that he’d put in one or two items just for her to red-line. For this, she would probably have gone super-sonic!
I get it that most writers, even Sci-Fi are left of center. I have read many of Oltion stories in Analog and most of them are good.
Here was the kicker for me - the story concerns suicide and a short discussion that may prevent it. There was no need to bring in a same sex "couple" for this story. To me, it reads like Oltion took a find & replace and switched the names of the spouse from Nancy to Nathan.
If this is editor Quachi's attempt to bring in new subscribers by appealing to a younger audience, it simply does NOT work, outside of NYC, San Fran and Hollywood.
BTW, the reader forums at www.analogsf.com are down due to technical issues.
A large number of FReepers have or have had subscriptions to this fine magazine in the past.
But the Warthog is correct - this is not the magazine that my father handed over to me when he was done reading them.
Besides the climate change propaganda - hey we get it. Climates change. But do not think that humans are solely responsible for the change except in local instances (I am thinking of Communist issues such as the slow death of the Aral Sea). And never think that our contribution to climate change is much beyond a minor pinprick.
At least ‘Analog’ sounds like it makes more sense having gay crap than ‘Astounding.’
Dianetics passed fairly quickly, at least in Astounding. Can’t see the homo stuff going away, at least in the near future.
Freegards
I gave up submitting stories to either rag. I self-publish on Amazon now.
In the recent past, you could make a few dollars selling to the magazines, but these days you have to ask, do I want my name associated with this publication>
More and more, folks are saying - no.
It seems like every few months there is some scandal with these social justice warriors in the various sci-fi/fantasy groups being outraged with something one of the older writers/editors said or did. The newer writers that publicly reject a lot of this stuff are completely HATED by these people. John C. Wright is who I am mainly thinking about.
Freegards
I gave up on ANALOG in the 1990s. And occasionally, I run into authors I read there, like Maya Bonhoff and David R. Palmer, on FecesBook.
The first is a hard left-surrender monkey pacifist, and the latter is a smug hard-left partisan, forever prostrating himself at the altar of the One.
Their books went into the fireplace.
At least, hanging with the Baen Books crowd, I don’t need to HIDE my conservatism. . .
When I was a kid, my parents paid for my “membership” in the Science Fiction Book Club. I got dozens of memorable SF books from that source through the years.
Then, when I was in college, I noticed that the tenor of the books seemed to be changing. They seemed to be becoming more sexual in nature, and much if not most of that was homosexual. They weren’t pornographic, if memory serves. It was more that they introduced dialog between characters that concerned homosexuality, and some relationships between men that were ambiguous as to the degree of sexuality involved in them. Perhaps if I read them now there would not be any ambiguity; they may only have seemed ambiguous because I was too naïve to understand them.
It could have been that I was becoming more aware of the homosexual movement (this would have been in the mid- to late-1970s). It could also have been real - an actual change in emphasis - and one can speculate on the reasons.
Perhaps the SFBC got a new editor or editorial board. Perhaps their membership numbers were declining and they decided to go in a new direction in order to reach a wider audience.
Anyway, those “new wave” SF books were not as interesting to me, and I lost interest. When my parents asked me if I was still interested in it, I said no and they dropped the subscription.
I remember thinking “what does this sex stuff have to do with science fiction?”
We simply must understand that the tail is wagging the dog here and all it takes to stop this nonsense in its tracks is to stand up and declare that we are not going to stand for it anymore. It worked when they tried to shut down Chik-Fil-A last year and it worked again when they tried to get Duck Dynasty off the air.
I'm basically a let and live type of guy and it really doesn't concern me what consenting adults do in private, however, I detest the "in your face" attitude that these homosexuals have and their need to prance about in parades and such and allow their sexuality to define who they are. There are millions of heterosexuals who do not go around defining themselves as such. They simply go about their business and define themselves on what they have accomplished in life, not about who they decide to have sex with behind closed doors.
Somehow the world has produced a great body of literature over the past thousand years or so without having to resort to sexually graphic and pornographic content. It's placement in science fiction can only be gratuitous because sexual acts cannot possibly add to a science fiction story - or any other work of fiction. If a person wants to be titillated and sexually aroused through fiction, there's plenty of dime-store novels and magazines in adult bookstores to meet that need.
Concur. But there seems to be a subset of SF writers who apparently feel it necessary to introduce "gayness" throughout their stories. I quit reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's stuff because of it. But I never expected it of Analog, which has forgone graphic sexuality for as long as I have been reading it (forty years, off an on...much more "on" than "off").
The climate change stuff Analog pushes actually makes a bit of sense, as it describes a possible future (no matter how unlikely). The "queerness" is simply gratuitous, and totally unnecessary to pretty much ANY SF storyline.
Yup. I never bother to comment, no sense in stirring up anything that can hurt sales. So, went my own way, just Amazon and me. I control the content, covers, marketing and everything else.
And keep 70% of the sale price, so I can price my stuff lower as a result. Win-win. Who needs paper?
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