This BBC News story from Uganda reads like an archtypcal fantasy story.
The hero of the story commisioned a blacksmith to forge a special weapon with which to slay the beast. Then he and a large number of extras fought the monster for an hour and a half before finally killing it.
I’ve always assumed that the dragons of European legend were travellers’ tales of African crocodiles. Which would make Mubarak Batambuze a modern-day St. George.
The branch to Innsmouth had closed by the time of the events in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, but the Innsmouth Local still runs on the HO Scale Miskatonic Railroad, set in the 19th Century, with locations inspired by H.P.Lovecraft’s stories set in New England.
The centrepiecepiece is the splendid Victorian Gothic station of Arkham, modelled on the real-live station of Salem, MA (of witch-trial fame). Much like too much of the best Victorian architecture of Britain, it was demolished in the 1950s to make way for a car park.
Hat-tip to Kenneth Hite (who else?) for the link.
The lid has now well and truly blown off in the Requires Hate affair.
This blog post from Laura Mixon, wife of SFWA president Steven Gould lays out all the gory details, and the comments are very illuminating.
A critical mass of SF professionals are now concluding that the rainbows and kittens “Benjanun Sriduangkaew” persona was a fake construct, her apologies cannot be taken at face value, and the SF community has been dealing with a malevolent manipulative sociopath and serial abuser. More and more of her victims are coming forward.
One thing needs to be made clear. Requires Hate was not a critic. A critic is an important part in the cultural ecosystem who forms part of a feedback loop that serves to make art better. She did not do that; her aim looks as though it to make room for her own writing by destroying the careers of potential rivals. She was allowed to get away with it for so long because she appropriated the language of social justice.
Her abuse didn’t take place in a vacuum. To use a software analogy, her behaviour is a hostile exploit of a critical vulnerability in the subculture. In particular, the rules of etiquette surrounding privilege-checking and tone arguments that have become commonplace in social justice spaces. Yes, they developed for perfectly good reasons to give voice to the marginalised, but they’d calcified and become open to abuse.
Some conservatives had actually been pointing this out for years, but they’d been ignored, largely because they were conservatives.
In recent years the SFF world has been forced to deal with problems of old-fashioned racism and male sexual predators. A lot of measures such as stricter convention harassment policies have been developed as a result. The virulently racist Vox Day was expelled from SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) for breaching their rules once too often. But the next predator doesn’t necessarily look like the last, and Requires Hate came from the opposite direction from the way everyone was looking. Too many people appear to have been blindsided.
Requires Hate has been described as being as bad as Vox Day. But she is actually a whole order of magnitude worse than Vox Day. It’s true that Vox Day is a vile bigot. But at the end of the day he’s just an internet blowhard. I haven’t seen any accusations the VD has directly stalked or engaged in sustained campaigns of harassment against anyone. RH is everything VD is, including the bigotry, but she’s guilty of far, far more than that.
It’s not hard to imagine some people wanting to use this as an opportunity to settle old scores. But I hope that the SFF community as a whole can move on. It cannot become the inclusive community it aspires to be if it continues to tolerate witch-hunts, bullying and the sort of abuse we’ve been seeing. Those who were willing to tolerate RH as long as it looked as though she was in their tent pissing out are part of the problem and I hope that they’ll recognise this and make amends.
The community needs to reject the more extreme forms of identity politics that see entire demographics that historically made up a big part of SF’s core community as an enemy. There must be far greater emphasis on human empathy.
It’s hard not to draw parallels with ongoing trainwreck of GamerGate at this point. It’s all part of the same wider culture war after all, and people who should have known better helped to enable Requires Hate because she pretended to be one of their side. The parallels with both sides of GamerGate are left an an exercise for the reader.
It seems as though “Gamers are over” is the new “Rock is dead”. We’ve been hearing that rock is dead from people that have never liked rock in the first place, but rock has always refused to go away.
Despite the increasingly heated rhetoric, the culture wars across gaming and SF&F can only end with some sort of truce. A world where one “side” gains total victory over the other and all the things and people they don’t like are disappeared will not result in a healthy creative environment for anyone.
The music world has long since split into multiple overlapping tribes that, however grudgingly, allow each other to exist and don’t intrude in each others’ spaces. 30 years on, the only people who still care about the Punk Wars resemble those Japanese soldiers in the 1970s emerging from the jungle not realising the war was over and the world had moved on. The worlds of games and science fiction media needs to do the same.
This isn’t to say the doxxing, death threats, sexist harassment or abusive stalking we’ve been seeing is in any way acceptable. That needs to be called out, regardless of who is doing or encouraging it.
Although I have been a reader of science fiction for many, many years, my fandom is music. And I’m glad it is.
Until very recently there was a book review blog called “Requires Only The You Hate”. It’s stock-in-trade was vitriolic reviews of science fiction novels, typically denouncing everything as racist and attacking the author rather than the work. The same blogger was also a notorious troll, posting under a number of identities over a period of a decade, and behaving as a serial harasser to a significant number of people, the majority of them women. Had she been operating in Britain she would very likely have been jailed. Her behaviour really was that bad.
Now her identity has been outed as a new writer under the name of Benjanun Sridankaew, whose new persona as a writer is all sweetness and light.
The whole thing is detailed here, if you have the stomach to read it. It’s nasty stuff.
She has now posted a public apology, but in a situation like this an apology can only be the first step on a long road to redemption. You can’t just wash away a past that bad overnight.
Whether or not we will see similar apologies from any of those who have enabled and encouraged her reign of terror over the past decade remains to be seen, and it has to be said that the list of people listed as supporting her over her victims contains one or two of the usual suspects. These are some of the same names that showed up in the Jonathan Ross debacle, including the one responsible for driving Ross’ wife off Twitter.
But the biggest problem is the subculture she operated within. What sort of subculture considers what can only be described as dehumanising hate-speech to be acceptable provided the target group is more “privileged”? Yet this is precisely the set of values that have taken over a significant part of the SFF world in recent years. It’s stated goals are to promote inclusivity and social justice, but without a commitment to human empathy it’s devolved into a frighteningly authoritarian form of identity politics. It’s created a perfect environment in which an abuser can hide; all they have to do cite the correct buzzwords and they’re given a free pass. There are parallels both with the collapse of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, and the abuse scandals that have seriously diminished the standing of the Roman Catholic Church.
When the whole Vox Day/SFWA and Hugo nominations things blew up, I was shocked that even a tiny minority would support someone who’s a known homophobic white supremacist rape apologist. But seeing later dramas unfold I’m beginning to understand why a long-term online friend who I’ve always considered a liberal would claim in the comments on this blog to be rooting for Larry Correia and Vox Day for the Hugo awards.
What happens next will be interesting. When SF’s default ideology was a militaristic frontier libertarianism and most books were written by white men with engineering degrees, too many voices got marginalised, and that was not a good thing. But now you’re left with a feeling it’s gone too far the other way, and the scene has adopted a set of values that meant it was only a matter of time before it all imploded. It’s had its revolution, now it’s reached the stage of the revolution eating its children.
SF would be a lot healthier if authors could put whatever politics they liked into the actual books, but SF as a whole didn’t favour one ideology over another. There will always be cliques and partisan sub-fandoms, that’s just human nature. And sometimes they’ll fight and there will be drama. But the bigger cultural war needs to end in a truce with both sides acknowledging the other’s right to exist.
I am still glad my chosen fandom is music. Music doesn’t have this nonsense nowadays.
Gamergate’s complaints about agenda-driven reviews make me wonder how on earth gamers would have reacted had the video game press been anything like as bad as the “mainstream” British music press has been for decades. Have there been reviews remotely equivalent to Dave McCulloch’s dismissive one-star review of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in Sounds? Are there any gaming journalists as appallingly bad as Julie Burchill?
Some thoughts triggered by a Google+ thread comparing some gamers’ narrow definitions of what counts as a “proper game” with the state of literary criticism in academia.
A healthy artistic scene, whether the medium is music, film, visual arts, literature or games needs many competing schools of criticism, all championing different aesthetics. If any one school gets so dominant that they can make their aesthetic the default and set themselves up as gatekeepers, it’s bad for the health of the medium as a whole. It gets worse if that dominance becomes entrenched.
This has happened in the world of literature, where the “serious novel” needs to conform to such a narrow palette of tropes that it’s become a thing of parody. Rock and pop criticism has run into the same problems many times in the past.
What can or should be done about it is another question.
This is an insightful piece in TechCrunch about the #GamerGate controversy
Two sides have emerged, which believe in completely different realities. If you are to listen to the extreme of one side, you will hear that gamers are reactionary right-wingers who excuse harassment. If you listen to the extreme of the other side, every critic of GamerGate is a brainwashed activist who thinks liking Hitman Absolution or GTAV makes you worse than Hitler.
Holding up the extremes of both sides is a great way to avoid dialogue. It’s politics – not, as Tadhg Kelly suggests, in the sense of liberals versus conservatives, but in the more fundamental sense of “my side” versus “your side.”
Though I don’t share the author’s libertarian politics, having seen these same culture wars play out across the tabletop RPG hobby and Science Fiction fandom over the past two or three years, it’s very difficult to disagree with anything he says.
This is an issue where I’m unwilling to take sides because I believe both sides are wrong, and both sides have embraced the mistaken idea that these culture wars are a zero-sum game.
It is very difficult to tell whether We the People Fight Tyranny Game is intended to be a serious board game, or whether the whole thing is an elaborate parody of the world view of the all-American wingnut.
It purports to be both a “fun game” and an educational tool about American history, liberry and tyranny.
This is a sample of one of the cards in the game, which gives a flavour:
That one card really does speak volumes.
The website is filled with boilerplate rightwing screeds, but gives very little away about the gameplay. But it leaves the impression that the game is a cross between Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly, two of the very worst board games in all history.
So combne two games which put people off board games for life, then marinade the whole thing in heavy-handed ideological propaganda.
And you wonder why it looks like an elaborate parody.