This makes for an interesting read:
SFWA eats their own: Mercedes Lackey is made Grand Master, banned from Nebulas on same day
The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.
According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”
Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.
As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray).
It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.
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