So our old friend Vox Day – the proudly bigoted science fiction/fantasy writer and self-professed expert on all things “Alpha” – is in the news again. This time, it’s not for declaring most date rape imaginary or writing a racist diatribe against a fellow author. Nope! It’s because another of his literary efforts, a novelette entitled Opera Vita Aeterna, just got nominated for a Hugo award.
In other news, apparently it’s not that hard to get nominated for a Hugo if you have a coterie of hard-core fans who are perhaps still pissed that you got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and you suggest on your blog beforehand that it would be cool if they voted to nominate you.
Anyway, there’s already plenty of discussion of the news amongst the science-fiction set, most of them understandably displeased that a racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole got a nomination. Here’s a bit more about the racist attack on black fantasy writer NK Jemisin (and misuse of the SFWA Twitter account) that got him tossed from the organization. If you’ve never seen what he wrote about Jemisin, I’ll just quote some of the more memorable passages again here, because, wow. I’ve bolded the best — that is, worst — bits:
It is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not… The laws [Stand Your Ground Laws] are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.
If sales of his novels ever dry up, Vox could definitely get a job as a speechwriter for the KKK.
On Bibliodaze, Ceilidhann is blunt:
There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come straight from the mouths of slave-owners.
John Scalzi takes a more conciliatory stance, writing that
the Hugo rules don’t say that a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit can’t be nominated for a Hugo — nor should they, because in that particular category at least, it’s about the work, not the person.
But he also goes on to note (hint hint, nudge nudge) that the ballot for the actual award includes a “No Award” option in each category, and that if enough people choose it,
it is possible to rank a nominated work below “No Award” if, after reading the work in question and giving it fair and serious consideration, you decide that it doesn’t deserve to be on the ballot and, say, that its presence on the ballot is basically a stunt by a bunch of nominators who were more interested in trolling the awards than anything else. Just a thing for you to keep in mind when voting time rolls around.
GeekFeminism makes the same observation, going on to note that in 1987, “No Award came in ahead of L. Ron Hubbard’s Black Genesis.”
If anyone is still trying to make up their mind about Mr. Day/Beale, here are some quotes from him taken from my previous posts about him here. I’ve bolded some of the most, er, contrarian bits. Click the titles for my original posts, which provide more context and links to the posts in which he said these things.
Women working is worse than rape:
The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so. The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse. Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized. Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable. History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted. Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.
[I]n light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.
Acid attacks on women may be worth it if they discourage female independence:
[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability.
We should emulate Iran by throwing women out of much of higher education:
[T]he Iranian action [restricting many fields of education to men only] presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.
For the rest of my posts on Vox Day — including the one in which he explains that his orc and troll fighting game won’t have any women in it, because that wouldn’t be historically accurate — see here.
EDIT: Added links to first paragraph, reworked third paragraph and added links, removed a link that was problematic.
Never heard of this dudebro. Don’t want to read his work either.
“God, could Vox be any more disgusting?”
Nope.
Vile Voxy is a frequent commenter on another über-misogynist blog, justfourguys.com (which you may want to add to your Boob Roll, David).
Vox Day Valentine’s greetings card:
“To a lovely daughter on your 14th birthday:
Violets are blue
Roses are red
If you ever wanted an education, sweetie, the Taliban would be perfectly justified in shooting you through the head.”
Thanks, Lady.
It is somewhat hard to fathom that Vox et al. have human mothers.
As a mother of grown (and good and decent) men, I can only imagine what a terrible blow it must be for a (decent) mother to realize that her son is a misogynist of the lowest kind. That is, if the mothers ever learn of it, as those guys’ online (and off) activities are most likely not something they like to discuss during family gatherings.
To my daughter on her wedding day
Roses are red
I hate you
Cheat on your husband and I’ll help him throw acid in your face
It’s for society, honey
You’d understand if you’d gone to college
Hahahahaha!!!
Your loving father
@ emma
Maybe he’s an android. It would explain the complete lack of empathy.
@cassandrakitty
Maybe. There is a Wiki entry on him (tx, Lady), in addition to one about his daddy (“Occupation: Businessman, Inmate”), complete with a photo showing an emotionless mug with empty eyes. So yeah, maybe he is an android.
@ Cassandrakitty… oh lordie, I just choked on my toast. Thank you.
I just looked at his Wiki page. Mother of mammoths! He’s younger than me!
Now, this sounds very ageist, doesn’t it? I think because when I was a young thing and frisky and went on marches and helped tear down the wire at Greenham Common and reclaimed the night, all that good stuff, I thought this kind of crapulous toadspawn was on the way out, and that by the time I became a creaky old bat with arthriticky knees everyone who thought that way would be buried at crossroads with stakes through their hearts.
Gosh I was wrong.
I have lovely young relatives who are growing up with this kind of stuff all around them, and it’s going to damage them all.
Dude has shark eyes. Yikes.
Supporting member for $40 you say …
I’ve been way too fascinated by this brouhaha than is healthy for me. Basically, the SF world has a cadre of permanently aggrieved right-wing writers and fans who feel insufficiently appreciated by the liberal-to-moderate side of the industry. The division isn’t entirely political; they also tend to be proponents of old-fashioned pulp writing and dislike this newfangled trend of literary SF with stuff like characters and themes and writing that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. At any rate, voting crappy self-published ebooks by white supremacists into the Hugo nominations is their way of sticking it to the liberal eggheads in the biz.
This reactionary tribal-marking isn’t new. Samuel R. Delaney describes being the target of similar griping at the Nebula Awards back in 1968 (to understand why he attracted such vitriol, it may help to know that at the time he was the one of the few prominent black authors in the genre):
My novel won—and the presentation of the glittering Lucite trophy was followed by a discomforting speech from an eminent member of SFWA.
Perhaps you’ve heard such disgruntled talks: They begin, as did this one, “What I have to say tonight, many of you are not going to like . . .” and went on to castigate the organization for letting itself be taken in by (the phrase was, or was something very like) “pretentious literary nonsense,” unto granting it awards, and abandoning the old values of good, solid, craftsmanlike story-telling. My name was not mentioned, but it was evident I was (along with Roger Zelazny, not present) the prime target of this fusillade. It’s an odd experience, I must tell you, to accept an award from a hall full of people in tuxedos and evening gowns and then, from the same podium at which you accepted it, hear a half-hour jeremiad from an eminence gris declaring that award to be worthless and the people who voted it to you duped fools. It’s not paranoia: By count I caught more than a dozen sets of eyes sweeping between me and the speaker going on about the triviality of work such as mine and the foolishness of the hundred-plus writers who had voted for it.
As you might imagine, the applause was slight, uncomfortable, and scattered. There was more coughing and chair scraping than clapping. By the end of the speech, I was drenched with the tricklings of mortification and wondering what I’d done to deserve them. The master of ceremonies, Robert Silverberg, took the podium and said, “Well, I guess we’ve all been put in our place.” There was a bitter chuckle. And the next award was announced.
It again went to me—for my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .”. I had, by that time, forgotten it was in the running. For the second time that evening I got up and went to the podium to accept my trophy (it sits on a shelf above my desk about two feet away from me as I write), but, in dazzled embarrassment, it occurred to me as I was walking to the front of the hall that I must say something in my defense, though mistily I perceived it had best be as indirect as the attack. With my sweat soaked undershirt beneath my formal turtle-neck peeling and unpeeling from my back at each step, I took the podium and my second trophy of the evening. Into the microphone I said, as calmly as I could manage: “I write the novels and stories that I do and work on them as hard as I can to make them the best I can. That you’ve chosen to honor them—and twice in one night—is warming. Thank you.”
http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html
You forgot the cheesy artwork! The SFF reactionaries do love a woman who has for some reason decided that a furry bikini would be the perfect thing to wear while climbing a mountain during a snowstorm
Eww eww eww eww eww. I’m sorry, I have nothing more coherent to say except that I have never been ashamed of being a fantasy nerd until now. Just the thought of being (even so) tangentially related to this guy makes me want to reconsider my life choices.
@ cassandrakitty
That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading a comic book I was, up until then, really enjoying. The other reason was that a war goddess was wearing massive heels as part of her everyday costume.
Cover proposal: Art
Background: mountains in deep snow drifts, ice blue sky
Foreground: female with helium-filled breast balloons bigger than her own head wearing a fur bikini straddles a dead mammoth, her lips snarling in a way that definitely suggests she’s at least 3/7ths savage, and her thighs splayed in a way that would be anatomically impossible in a biped.
She’s clutching a simple but effective and skillfully-designed weapon which she clearly has no idea how to use, and with the other manicured claw, warding off the fine specimen of homo sapiens sapiens – a clench-jawed manly fellow with piercing blue eyes, buzz cut, and a hint in his ancestry of da Vinci, Salk, and that white guy who invented coding – who is standing his ground in defence of his property.
Title: The Mammoth Stealers
@Shaenon
What you say about the divide in SF makes sense and I’m sure is accurate, but I also suspect there is more to it than that. Other factors are needed to explain the disparity noted by Rich Johnston between the big community reaction to the proposal of Jonathan Ross as host and the muted reaction to Day’s nomination for an award.
I’m not a big fan of Ross and have found some of his stunts distasteful, but he is a feminist, has reached out to the LGBT community and the worst of his behaviour is better than any random sentence taken from Day. But it seems Ross is more controversial to the Hugo’s than Day.
I don’t know much about the SF world, but I do know other geeky communities and one problem they have is an unshakeable belief that they are marginalised outsiders, regardless of how mainstream they actually have become. That might explain why the outsider Day is getting an easier ride than the mainstream Ross. But, as I said, I don’t know this community well and I could be wrong.
@wewereemergencies
I wonder what you would say about the story of Starcraft. There you have Sarah Kerrigan, the main antagonist of the series, become “infested” and she turns into a monstrous figure that is still supposed to be attractive with feet that resemble high heels.
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080517080550/starcraft/images/2/2a/InfestedSarahKerrigan_SC2_Cncpt1.jpg
If the blurb for Games of Bones (Or is it Throne of Bones?) is to go by, then his ‘writing’ is just one massive hodgepodge of ripped off LoTR, GoT, and some sprinkling of re-imagined history with misogyny and racism for shits and giggles. It seems to appeal to the crowd lost in the fantasy of a dominant White Man being handed thrones and power and virgins just for being a Manly White Man because biotruths, with feminists are evil unlike that Eowyn or Galadriel, and with the darker races ‘properly’ given attributes from disproven psuedoscience of the 18th century.
Fortunately, there is more than enough quality writing in fantasy and science fiction to satisfy my thirst for reading without having to cross this bullshit. Rereading Tolkein for the umpteenth time is a better use of my time than reading the amazon blurb.
Yeah, fantasy definitely has the downside of being male-oriented. I used to be a HUGE fantasy nerd – well I mean I should define that I’ve always been into softer stuff. I loved humor fantasy for years – Piers Anthony, Terry Pratchett, and Robert Asprin. But in general from what I’ve seen from my older sister and dad’s book collections male writers are the majority.
If you are into young adult novels Tamora Pierce is really good writer.
Wow. How is this individual’s existence even possible? Was he raised by monsters in some dark dungeon, subjected to daily torture and dehumanization?
It’d be nice if it was as easy to diagnose as that, wouldn’t it?
All I can think of now is the poem “All There Is to Know About Adolf Eichmann” by Leonard Cohen.
There you have Sarah Kerrigan, the main antagonist of the series, become “infested” and she turns into a monstrous figure that is still supposed to be attractive with feet that resemble high heels.
Did this come out before or after the movie Species (which does much the same thing with its female creature)?
Sorry about the quote fail. Still getting used to tags here.
Buzzgums:
This really tells you all you need to know about the mindset of reactionary anti-feminists, doesn’t it? They hate the idea of feminists having a platform SO MUCH that they would rather rally around a man who condones shooting schoolgirls and acid attacks.
Sarah Kerrigan dates to the original Starcraft from 1998, but I think the high heels date to the (much inferior) sequel from 2010/2013.
1968 at the Nebulas, eh. They must have needed a whole fleet of ambulances for the 1969 Hugo awards ceremony. There’d have been a veritable epidemic of apoplexy when Le Guin won with The Left Hand of Darkness.
a) She’s a woman.
b) It was about an entirely novel view of sexuality (among other things).
Pearls being clutched and fainting couches galore for that devastating thumbing of the nose at the potboiler manly conqueror of worlds unseen brigade.