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This cannot possibly be a reference to comfort girls? The sex slaves used by the Japanese army during WWII, right? They’d never say something that obviously insensitive. Right?

Collateral Damage

Should this absurd non-controversy gain traction, it’s not at a stretch to imagine that the recently optioned TV rights to her Valdemar series could be put in jeopardy. It was announced by Deadline Hollywood back in March of 2021 that Radar Pictures, the studio behind the recent Jumanji reboot had acquired the small screen rights and was assembling a who’s who to cast, write and produce it. Lackey was quoted as being “nearly breathless with excitement” about the prospect of seeing her life’s work adapted by a major studio.

But shows have been cancelled over far less, and there are few individuals less daring and creative than studio executives. Could this derail prospects for the show as well? Time will tell. This year will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. It will be notorious as a year in which shameful conduct was on display that marred the organization’s biggest event.

But that shame belongs entirely on the head of SFWA.

For those that enjoy science fiction of our youth, well, there are still Half Price Books used bookstores around.

Modern science fiction has little appeal to me anymore.

There was a time that a major award printed on a book cover almost guaranteed that I would buy and read a novel. Those days are long, long gone.

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.

As we now know, Ms. Bradley and her husband were accused of child abuse by her own daughter. Read more here is you have the stomach:

Marion Zimmer Bradley: It's Worse Than I Knew

The entire book and entertainment scene has passed over into the hands of the devil.

And the SFWA has not been about science fiction for a long time, to their own detriment.