Posted on 04/10/2015 11:37:27 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
"....The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate,Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.
Like sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space became a culture-war battlefield.
“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or quality,” Larry Correia, a New York Times-bestselling bard of monster stories, tells The American Spectator. “But most people buy entertainment because they want to be entertained. Many longtime readers fell away because they were tired of being preached at or having their values insulted.”..
[SNIP re skirmishes]
..Ray Bradbury, a storyteller less science than fiction, felt that his appearances in Astounding Science-Fiction,Weird Tales, Dime Detective, Planet Stories, and other pulps sitting at the unfashionable end of the newsstand led gatekeepers to unfairly block his entry into more respected publications. In the same month in which the Enola Gay exploded thousands of science fiction tales, Bradbury dropped stories on Collier’s, Mademoiselle, and Charm under a nom de nerd. They accepted,and he promptly revealed his identity. One senses a similar prejudice revealed by the Puppies from within the science fiction community towards its own not preoccupied with raceclassgendersexuality.
The Sad/Rabid Puppies movement imitates the science-fiction hero’s means of exposing institutional intolerance. One can’t rely on the good graces of snobs—literary,ideological, or otherwise—to gain a fair hearing. For example, those countering the discrimination of the sci-fi guardians now endure insults of “racist,”“sexist,”and “bigot” from the people who have already injured them professionally.
Beam me up, Scotty!
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Heinlein, Asimov, Clark........They can’t be replaced by PC wusses........
The swing to fantasy from hard SF reflects publisher preferences. Have you noticed how much fantasy has a woman as a lead character, often with non-traditional PC lifestyle choices?
There is good SF out there but you have to find it in self-published books now, or, if the author is lucky, under the Baen imprint.
I thought that surely The Spec would have a proofreader.
A twofer.
“woman as a lead character, often with non-traditional PC lifestyle choices”
Spiritual Babylon mother of Harlots....”her” influence is infiltrating everywhere...
The left literally ruins everything it touches. They aren’t progressive. They’re regressive.
Check out www.baen.com . They are still publishing good science fiction.
No surprise on this side that sci fi has become an instrument of hate for the left as they try to brainwash childlike adults who see their obvious lies and deceits. And their heros are hateful bigots.
It always cracks me up to see modern fantasy and science fiction movies where petite women take on and beat male attackers in hand to hand combat. There are men strong enough to crack skulls and knock other men out with single punches, and men who can grapple so hard as to break ribs. Yet, I’m supposed to believe that training can give a 120 lb woman a fighting chance (hand to hand) against a guy twice her mass. That really is fantasy.
[Socialist agenda—people forget some eastern European Jews were major advocates for this thing called Communism.]
That is true enough. And the communists have murdered over 100 million peoples in the 20th century and are increasing their murders in this century. Jews and Christians are their main targets as most conservatives know, they are the worst murderers on the earth. Their main purpose is the subjugation of the weak and foolish using the weapons of greed and slander to destroy all who love God, family, and their country.
As far as sci-fi goes, there’s “2001,” and there’s everything else.
Academic publishing can easily become groupthink, as citations build upon citations.
Rather than working with liberals to ‘be fair’ we need to set up our own publishing houses.
Think of it as ‘FOXNews’ publishing...it can be done.
“With your science background, you’ll find this interesting:
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/science-publishing-some-skepticism-required-180954871/ Thoughts?”.
Much of science is conducted on the “honor system”, assuming that scientists can be trusted to honestly report their results. Peer review is mainly to detect errors in methods or conclusions and to insure that the work is novel and worthy of publication. However that only works as long as people have morals. Decades ago one of my Professors received a paper for review that was submitted by an author in India that was essentially a copy of one of this early papers (only the names were changed). Years ago I received a paper for review that had large sections copied (without credit or permission) from one of my publications. More recently I have seen a trend (mostly from foreign students) working in US universities, where results are not reproducible or made up entirely. The students work here for 4 or 5 years, and either they get tired of it of the work is going nowhere so they make up results, publish them, graduate with a Ph.D., and go back to where they came from.
Years later the work is found to be useless. This was fairly common as people in my group were checking out what looked like promising technology published in peer review journals or thesis’. These days getting a job in a University depends on the number of publications so the honest students are at a disadvantage. No honest people, no honest science.
"We" already have....
I like to believe they are fearful of the vision of the future because people are compelled to deal with the potential consequences for their horrible decisions.
For example for 30 years environmentalists fought against desalination plants in California. They fought to "protect" made-up endangered species in favor over entire farming communities that sustained a significant amount of the California economy.
Now California after years of leftist policy under democrat tyranny is dealing with the consequences of incompetent management and idiot decisions with one of the most massive, destructive water shortages in recent history. The worst part being is none of this ever needed to happen.
Given the other ongoing depravities of the left, who knows what horrific future could be envisioned by the Sci-Fi community? Well, the left doesn't want to take that kind of chance with "creativity"...
Every screenwriter wants to be Joss Whedon and I think Whedon has a fantasy of being smacked around by small women. :-)
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer he was trying to turn stories of the waifish girl in danger on their heads and made Buffy superhuman, but that doesn't explain every other female character he has ever written.
Two of my favorite sf writers; the late Australian author George Turner’ Brain Child and Walter Jon William’s Days of Atonement.
Get a Kindle.
There are many self-published eBooks on Amazon in the “space opera” genre. Some are lame, but others are really interesting. They are inexpensive, too. $2-$4 is typical.
Drop me a line, and I wll suggest a few authors.
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