Any political differences I might have with the Puppies, any feelings of dismay I might have about the racism and homophobia and sheer unpleasantness displayed by some of them, are secondary.
What really infuriates me most is eighty years — eighty goddamned years — of SF writers and fans trying to persuade a skeptical and often contemptuous world that this is not a field of crap, jumped-up “Buck Rogers stuff,” as it’s so often been called, but a field of literature, material that was stylistically and thematically and conceptually ignored at the world’s tremendous loss, a fight that was led on the page by Campbell, for God’s sake, by Bradbury, for God’s sake, by Heinlein, for God’s sake, by Pohl for God’s sake, even from time to time by Harry Harrison for God’s sake, and in popular culture by Serling and Roddenberry for God’s sake, all that before we got to the likes of Vonnegut and Ellison and LeGuin and Silverberg and Russ and Malzberg and Tiptree and Brunner and Delany, with the occasional cruelly overlooked master like Kit Reed, and others, for God’s sake, all of them hammering hard at the limits of what this field was allowed to do, and what it was allowed to say, all of them breaking barriers and shattering ceilings, often in the face of tremendous opposition, while permitting the grand old adventure stuff to continue to flourish, until we have room for both Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman, for everything from Kim Stanley Robinson to China Mieville, for Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin, all those good folks, after which we not only enter the zeitgeist but take it over, decades later, whereupon the Puppies come along and say, “NO! IT WAS NEVER ANY OF THAT GOOD STUFF! IT WAS ALWAYS *JUST* ROCKETSHIPS AND DRAGONS! IT WAS NEVER ANYTHING BUT PLAIN FICTION FOR PLAIN FOLKS! ANY PRETENSIONS OF ANYTHING ELSE ARE JUST AN ABERRATION OF THE LAST FEW YEARS!”
*That* is conniption fodder.
Comment By: Mountain Jane Laurel
May 28th, 2015 at 9:19 am
You do realize that Scalzi only got that lucrative contract to show the rabid/sad puppies who’s in charge. It has absolutely nothing to do with talent. It’s all a huge conspiracy.
Comment By: Greg Cox
May 28th, 2015 at 10:18 am
Amen.
Comment By: Ann Cohrs
May 28th, 2015 at 12:22 pm
<3
Comment By: Robert Reynolds
May 28th, 2015 at 9:39 pm
Thanks for this. It reminded me just why I love reading science fiction. I still my copy of Crazy Akhbar (sp?) I bought long ago. I may just dig it out and read it again in the near future.
Comment By: Mad Professah
May 28th, 2015 at 10:52 pm
very impressive. But you are not a Jedi, yet.
Comment By: Tony Cullen
May 29th, 2015 at 1:21 am
Thank you.
Comment By: Connor Cochran
May 29th, 2015 at 2:51 am
Amen doubled, tripled, and written in big white letters in the sky.
Comment By: R
May 29th, 2015 at 8:41 am
80 years? And how many more years of sucking up did you expect before they let you join the cool kids club?
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
May 29th, 2015 at 10:41 am
I’m not exactly sure what point you think you’re making here.
“The cool kids club” is, here, the world.
Comment By: Tuomas Vainio
May 29th, 2015 at 1:22 pm
I have to excuse in advance for any possible harshness of my words, but I would recommend you growing that metaphorical spine. Whatever you value, and its value to you, is dictated by others only if you allow them. So stand bravely behind what you enjoy, and disregard the snobbish scoffs filled with empty pretence.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
May 29th, 2015 at 5:01 pm
Not the point, of course. I’ve been reading SF for forty years. The point is, having achieved what it has achieved, in large part by the efforts of such trailblazers, it is now being inundated by supporters who think those trailblazers were an aberration.
Please don’t critique points that haven’t been made, and address those that have been.
Comment By: Laura Resnick
May 29th, 2015 at 2:57 pm
I have spent much of my life around sf/f people. And it cracks me up every time I see a Puppy try to apply the phrase “cool kids” to sf/f.
I can scarcely fathom how incredibly sheltered, narrow, and isolated someone’s life is, that they would see -anyone- in the sf/f world as “the cool kids.”
What next? They’ll look at a bunch of 6-week-old kittens and talk about the scary ones?
Comment By: Galen Strickland
May 29th, 2015 at 3:00 pm
Make that at least 85 years. Anytime someone tells me that SF never has or never should strive to be more than just entertainment, I point them toward Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, written in 1930.
Comment By: Karl Johanson
May 29th, 2015 at 4:16 pm
What’s crappy about Buck Rogers?
Comment By: Janis Ian
May 29th, 2015 at 10:20 pm
Hey “R” – since apparently you can’t afford or don’t qualify for a full name – in case you didn’t realize it, Adam Troy’s already in the cool kids club. Just not yours.