Posted on 05/24/2022 10:54:16 AM PDT by texas booster
I once found woke ideology perfectly summed up by conservative commentator Jon Gabriel:
a religion with many paths to damnation, but none to redemption.
No matter what trails you blaze, what ground you break, how stanch and formidable an ally for The Cause™, you will eventually face your unpersoning at the hands of the Neojacobins. Just ask SFWA’s most recently appointed Grand Master, Mercedes Lackey.
One can hardly imagine an author that could serve as a more suitable avatar of science fiction and fantasy’s leftward arc over the past 40 years than Mercedes Lackey. The protégé of Marion Zimmer Bradley is largely credited for introducing mainstream fantasy’s first openly gay hero, Vanyel Ashkevron in 1989’s Magic’s Pawn, the first book in her The Last Herald-Mage trilogy.
While that series of novels put the issue front and center, she’d woven sympathetic character treatments into prior stories set in the world of Valdemar. What she built in those books would eventually span a truly epic length of dozens of novels over the course of thousands of in-world years. From the series’ debut in 1987 to its most recent entry, Into the West (set to be published June 21 of this year) Lackey’s work has never strayed from its humanizing and loving portrayal of LGBT characters.
She has been rightly held up as a pioneer in the genre and a champion for those who sought out representation of that sort. Hers was not merely low-grade erotic lip-service, either. It was quality fantasy writing that stood the test of time.
Then she misspoke on a panel.
On May 21, Lackey was appointed Damon Knight Grand Master at this year’s Nebula Awards. It’s the highest honor SFWA can bestow to one of its member authors; with it, she joins the ranks of the likes of Gene Wolf, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock and William Gibson just to name a few.
The same day, she was speaking on a “Romancing Sci-Fi & Fantasy” panel during which she gave praise to fellow Grand Master Samuel Delaney, who is black. While the exact context, tone and manner of what was precisely said is not known, at some point Lackey, 72, referred to him as “colored”, as opposed to the currently acceptable term of “person of color”.
Regardless of how it came across, it seems there is virtually unanimous agreement that there was no malice behind it.
The fallout was predictably swift and naturally, unforgiving. After a groveling apology by SFWA, they further stated that online access to the panel was shut down, Lackey was to be removed from future panels, and they were conferring with other panelists as to how they would prefer to proceed, as well as offering to “edit out” the offensive slur.
With one single instance of an unintentional misstep, a 40 year legacy was set ablaze.
And like any true show trial, it didn’t stop with her; Lackey’s husband Larry Dixon (@LarryDixonTGK), a celebrated artist and author in his own right who was also attending, suddenly found himself persona non grata:
I read a free verse poem written by Moira Greyland, daughter of Marion Z. Bradlee.
It was titled ‘Mother’s Hands’
It was devastating and terrible.
I won’t print it here. Too sad.
Very nice. Thanks!
I finally dropped Analog in the early 2000's, after realizing that they include a story for the oldtimers, some decent science fact ... and 100 pages of drivel.
Also, for writers:
If you’re reading this and were thinking about joining SFWA, you might want to take a moment to give the IASFA a look; you won’t have to surrender any sensitive info beyond an email address, membership is free, and they have lots of resources to help indie authors market themselves and get their stuff out there.
Not a big fan of sci-if but anyone who is identified as a protege of Marion Zimmer Bradley is someone I couldn’t care less about. Her and Breen were filth.
Heinlein is turning over in his grave.
After all, who wants a story of a self-involved aware piece of gay trans software ...
I enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke in my youth. He wrote some great stuff. Turned out, he was gay, which is why he moved to Sri Lanka. It was easier to be gay there than in Britain at the time.
But Clarke kept his sexuality out of his stories. He wrote about hard science, and his stories were intriguing.
If he'd been young today, he might have filled up all his novels with gay themes, and he would have written crap.
That was a good time travel novel. Yes, the gay bits were discomforting. But it being 1973, it was incidental to the overall story.
Yet they allow the writer of “Hogg” to be on the panel. Need to know how leftist a group is, check their hypocrisy first.
“with it, she joins the ranks of the likes of Gene Wolf”
I think the author meant Gene WOLFE.
It seems to me that many of them went to California to support themselves as writers or artists in one way or another, got into drugs and "alternative lifestyles" of various types. Due to competitive pressures within the SF publishing marketplaces, they migrated to ever more "sketchy" subject matter ("sketchy" being one of the very few neologisms I like), and pumped it out to their largely youthful audience.
I don't think they necessarily did this because they wanted to "poison young minds," although some of them probably thought they were striking a blow against the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex by doing so, back during the Vietnam-Watergate era.
I think most of them just did it because those lifestyle choices were ones they were making personally, and they were just writing about what they knew.
Some of them (like Philip K. Dick) were actually mentally ill. Dick perhaps made himself mentally ill through massive drug ingestion, I don't know. There were others who went this route.
Some of them were just nasty.
Some of them thought they were experimenting with forces that would unleash the next level of human evolution.
Some of them were just cynical and needed to make their next buck.
I have doubts about Heinlein too, I'm sorry to say.
He was real tight with Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard for a while.
True. I liked Heinlein very much, and I think he made a huge contribution to SF and to cultural life in general.
But I think he was "out there." My affection for him causes me to be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least on most things.
especially when the people referred to are not african americans unless they emigrated from africa and became a US citizen. If they were merely born here, they are americans. Period. Idiocy to act otherwise.
What turned me off was that I got the distinct impression that he was trying to sell me something. I don't remember the details (49 years ago) but that's the aspect that creeped me out at the time.
Diverse sexual attitudes I had already encountered, and mostly ignored. I'm thinking here of parts of Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, and parts of Samuel R. Delany's Nova, but there were others besides those.
“Some of them (like Philip K. Dick) were actually mentally ill.”
That is certainly true by most definitions of the term.
In my opinion he was the best of the best—he saw stuff that nobody else could see—well beyond the capabilities of any “normal” person.
His stories were written from the point of view of an average citizen who is suddenly confronted with a crazy universe that gives no quarter—that fits today’s world perfectly.
The details were that every time he went back in time, he split off from himself. And these other selves also time traveled. So there were many of himselves out there. He met some of them, and slept with them.
Essentially, he was having sex with himself. He said that since he knew what he liked, his two selves making love (or several in an orgy) could satisfy himself.
Very weird. But also inadvertently revealing, in that homosexuality is, in a sense, a form of self-love.
Interesting, never thought of that, but it makes sense.
Just looking at the title of the novel, I realize that his working title was probably "The Man Who F***ed Himself," but his editor at the publishing company put the kibosh on that, so he changed a few letters of one word.
FWIW, he was raised a Calvinist, yet had a fascination for Jewish mysticism. This is especially evident in The Divine Invasion, in which a black character is a reincarnation of Isaiah, and he's studying a 3-D Torah.
True. Harlan Ellison also explored that domain.
The counter-culture was very strong back then, although more "in-the-closet" than it is today.
Now the "counter-culture" has become the culture, and we are the counter-culture.
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