Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) - Nerds protecting nonces

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

Funnily enough he has a thread here:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/thomas-kratman.25437/

Its deader than god and the OP sucks but still pretty funny.

Tom Kratman's writing is definitely for early 2010 /pol/ types, that's for sure. The Carerra series novels are impressively cringe but I suppose they'd appeal to a certain segment of /pol/tards. They do seem to sell well.

Dude also has a strange obsession with making Panama stronk and basically did the exact same thing when he wrote a book in John Ring's Posleen universe. At least he isn't into weird BDSM shit like John Ringo.

that being said everything Tom Kratman has ever written is still better than Battlefield Earth

 

[Mikoyan]

noped out of SFWA years ago because it's $100/yr for a message board social club online of wannabe authors

It's funny because they seem to play both sides of this wrong.

I know a small time writer who's told me he doesn't really see the point because the new requirements - which seem to be designed to limit the 'wannabe participation', mean it's actually hard for him to get in. Even with moderate amounts of success getting stories in anthologies, etc.

I told him he's better off self-pubbing or even just putting it up for free since he's not really in it for the money anyway. That and how he was irked at least one anthology editor told him 'yeah this is good but your serious sci-fi story needs a sex scene. And trim the serious parts to make that fit plz thx.'

 

[TerminalTryHard]

Imagine trying to tell someone to read something title Robopocalypse. If that's the best title they can up with you just know the book is shit.

 

[Dagobert]

Imagine trying to tell someone to read something title Robopocalypse. If that's the best title they can up with you just know the book is shit.

Robopocalypse sounds like like an Archie Sonic thing, not an actual book title.

 

[Big Nasty]

This is real Kiwi oldfag shit, but I think that John Ringo's books was a part of the inspiration for the Jace Connors character and "Tiberius Rising".

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Slightly off-topic but is there a similar list of pedophile authors to avoid in the Sword & Sorcery genre? I've recently picked it up again but all I know is that I need to avoid anything even tenuously related to Marion Zimmerman Bradely. I wouldn't think stories of physically fit men cutting their way through hordes of literal sub-humans would have a bad infestation of libshits like other genres, but then again no one expected the creator of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies to rape her own daughter.

I saw a vid on a Bradley book and have decided to not try her at all.

David & Leigh Eddings actually went to prison for child abuse, but beyond them and as you mentioned MZB I'm not really aware of any Arthur C. Clarke types.

Is Belgariad worth reading? I picked up some used set of omnibus volumes from the 80s and people keep shilling it to me.

Clarke: pederast
Asimov: dirty old man, son was a pederast caught with California's largest physical CP collection
Heinlein: still pretty skeevy

Bradbury seemed okay, I guess.

I keep hearing that Clarke's stuff is a big "maybe, likely, but not outright definitive". Asimov and Heinlein were dirty old men IIRC. Bradbury turned out alright. I'd still read all 4 of them though.

New wave was a mistake and destroyed science fiction...people literally put Samuel r Delany as one of their top fav Sci fi authors

I feel weird about the New Wave. On one hand, PKD alone makes it worthwhile. Then you add on guys like Lafferty and Ballard and Herbert. But then Delany just weirds me out. I can handle sex shit like Farmer or anyone in Dangerous Visions, but the amount of strange excessive shocking sex shit that Delany gets involved in is too much. I'll give Nova a try as it's the one Delany book that was before his weird sex/pedo phase that people recommend.

Book people really, really liked Dhalgren. David Bowie may even have been referencing it in the lyrics of Diamond Dogs. I've never read it, but it sounds like gimmicky artsy nonsense that makes nerds feel smart for finishing and pretending to understand it. I really don't know how many of the people who venerate Dhalgren and Stars In My Pocket... have also read Pig. Definitely some of them, and probably one handed, but I can see the genre cat ladies signing off on the surreal bullshit novels as being works of Black genius while having no idea what else he's written because they don't actually care about books that aren't "generic romance plot in outerspace." But it's undeniable that there's a norm of authors ignoring fellow scifi authors when they publish blatant pedo wank fantasies.

Last year I posted about Piers Anthony in this thread. While I rightfully called him a creep then, I really didn't know just how much of a pedo creep he is. (Still alive at 89, somehow.) This column from LitReactor, "Themes of Pedophilia in the Works of Piers Anthony" is horrifying.

I hear that Dhalgren's "american magical realism."

Piers Anthony's one of those I see a lot of stuff about but never got any recommendations on reading.

Nope. The march through institutions has been remarkably successful. The Horror Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America are perhaps not quite as bad as the SFWA, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially with the HWA re-doing the icky pooh Lovecraft statue to some sort of dildo looking thing. Oddly, the Romance Writers of America were possibly the last to fall.

On a lighter note:

4 Overrated Sci-Fi Classics (and 4 to Read Instead)

https://archive.is/XDOHE

"Don't read Dune, read N.K. Jemisin instead," the article.

These organizations made sense once upon a time, and then got subverted by retards.

There's one by the 20Booksto50K guy Craige Martellle called IASFA. They run random email promos for books and are just a facebook group, mostly. But then, SFWA isn't much more than just a facebook group at this point except you pay $100 a year for it.

Truth is these professional associations don't really matter anymore because anyone who does the math realizes it makes way more money to publish yourself than go through some middleman system. 99% of the books these days are sold on Amazon, so ironically "Getting into bookstores" is just a vanity press thing. It's the same for comic books I always tell it to people like this:

Your book is $14.99
Barnes and Noble bought that from a distributor for $7.99
The distributor bought it from the publisher for $3.99
After the $2 / printing costs you then get 30% of that for $0.60 royalty for the sale on the book.

On average they put out one book a year by a random author you're going to have to sell 130,000 to make a reasonable $80K a year living. That's an absurd number.

Publish yourself for $4.99 ebook on Amazon, take $3.70, you only gotta sell 21,000 books a year to do that which is very doable especially if you write fast and put out multiple books a year.

SFWA isn't renegotiating amazon contracts so what are they doing for anyone? Seems like they're just taking people's money to help Patrick Tomlinson sue alogs online and provide a forum to fret about how hard it is to write and make no money for people who have only made $1,000 in royalties in their fake careers.

If you want a group of writer friends to hang out with and keep each other on track for writing or talk about books you like together might as well just start a discord server with a few friends.

The one thing is that finding groups of writer friends that aren't radical shitlib midwits is gonna be hard.

It's funny because they seem to play both sides of this wrong.

I know a small time writer who's told me he doesn't really see the point because the new requirements - which seem to be designed to limit the 'wannabe participation', mean it's actually hard for him to get in. Even with moderate amounts of success getting stories in anthologies, etc.

I told him he's better off self-pubbing or even just putting it up for free since he's not really in it for the money anyway. That and how he was irked at least one anthology editor told him 'yeah this is good but your serious sci-fi story needs a sex scene. And trim the serious parts to make that fit plz thx.'

the gatekeeping is insanely incompetently done.


I honestly think we should get more people just shitting out anthologies of old public domain material in the way that Wildside Press does with its 99 cent megapacks.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Dude also has a strange obsession with making Panama stronk and basically did the exact same thing when he wrote a book in John Ring's Posleen universe. At least he isn't into weird BDSM shit like John Ringo.

I think its an obscure 70s-90s Army Joke the army had its jungle warfare school in panama for obvious reasons and so he holds an attachment to the place. Ringo makes light fun of this tendency.

 

[Fandom Pulse]

Tom Kratman's writing is definitely for early 2010 /pol/ types, that's for sure. The Carerra series novels are impressively cringe but I suppose they'd appeal to a certain segment of /pol/tards. They do seem to sell well.

Dude also has a strange obsession with making Panama stronk and basically did the exact same thing when he wrote a book in John Ring's Posleen universe. At least he isn't into weird BDSM shit like John Ringo.

that being said everything Tom Kratman has ever written is still better than Battlefield Earth

That's hilarious that Kratman has a kiwi thread, I would have never suspected. He's definitely in the boomercon camp like most of the Baen Books crowd but I like him better than most of them.

As far as finding non-shitlib authors there's actually a pretty robust group of decent ones to read out there but most are horribly inept at promotion and it's all so scattered and individualistic no one seems to be able to coalesce into a group because of rampant infighting and purity testing.

 

[King Dead]

Nope. The march through institutions has been remarkably successful. The Horror Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America are perhaps not quite as bad as the SFWA, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially with the HWA re-doing the icky pooh Lovecraft statue to some sort of dildo looking thing. Oddly, the Romance Writers of America were possibly the last to fall.

On a lighter note:

4 Overrated Sci-Fi Classics (and 4 to Read Instead)

https://archive.is/XDOHE

"Don't read Dune, read N.K. Jemisin instead," the article.

Jesus H. Christ, my brain hurts from reading that. If you're seriously trying to claim that fucking N.K. Jemisin is a better and more believable writer than Frank Herbert, you should probably just fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean, because it's clear you're too stupid to actually function in modern society.

I've read all four of those "overrated" classics and enjoyed every one of them. Stranger in a Strange Land is practically the 60's as a novel, exploring an alien free love perspective on modern society (of course the author is squeamish about the orgies, probably a zoomer). Rendezvous with Rama is about the mystery of the unknown, and the fact that you don't get all the answers only adds to the scale of how small we are in comparison to the rest of the universe. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is, frankly, a dystopian novel, so I don't really get why the author is complaining that a guy who lives in a shitty world has a bad personality. And of course, Dune is a masterpiece of science fiction, and just because it's a little dense to get into doesn't change that in the slightest (and it's not that hard to figure out, so I'm guessing the author is suffering from terminal brainrot).

Of the "better" ones, I haven't heard of two of them, one I saw on the shelf but thought the title sounded dumb, and one is...well, N.K. Jemisin. Everything I've heard from kiwis has made me steer clear; I think @Boston Brand may have detailed exactly why she's such a dumb overrated cunt in the past, but I can't remember for sure. All I know is, she screams whatever the equivalent of "diversity hire" is for the publishing business.

 

[Sam Losco]

Jesus H. Christ, my brain hurts from reading that. If you're seriously trying to claim that fucking N.K. Jemisin is a better and more believable writer than Frank Herbert, you should probably just fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean, because it's clear you're too stupid to actually function in modern society.

The author's bio:

Anne Mai Yee Jansen is a literature and ethnic studies professor and a lifelong story lover. She exists on a steady diet of books, hot chocolate, and dragon boating. After spending over a decade in the Midwest and the Appalachians, she returned to the sun and sandstone of California’s central coast where she currently resides with her partner, offspring, and feline companions. Find her on Instagram @dreaminginstories

Lot's of red flags and reasons to ignore any opinion she has.

 

[Monolith]

The author's bio:

Lot's of red flags and reasons to ignore any opinion she has.

"Anime Jansen"

 

[Fandom Pulse]

The author's bio:

Lot's of red flags and reasons to ignore any opinion she has.

Modern Journalism is all a circle jerk of access. Prop up NK Jemisin so NK Jemisin is an "expert" and "authority" > NK Jemisin then gives interview access to make the journalist a "respected journalist" and "authority" > Rinse, repeat, make sure every outlet is coordinated in the same stories. It's why I've been working my tail off to try to build an opposing structure for a few years.

All these people have created systems where it's all about clout and not making money though. They're larping as professionals all the way up the chain.

New happening: Worldcon banned the vice chair and hugo awards administrators of the last worldcon. No reason given, but the monkeys like Paul Weimer are gloating about keeping them out.

 

[Mikoyan]

Politics of the people involved aside, ghosting a con you've been banned from is always the gayest shit.

 

[Fandom Pulse]

Politics of the people involved aside, ghosting a con you've been banned from is always the gayest shit.

I don't think they banned him until he was already in Scotland, to be fair to him.

 

[Mikoyan]

I don't think they banned him until he was already in Scotland, to be fair to him.

Oh. That's fairly shitty of them.

The conventions I've been involved with have usually made damn sure any banees know in plenty of time.

 

[Harlan Wick]

Is Belgariad worth reading? I picked up some used set of omnibus volumes from the 80s and people keep shilling it to me.

It's not bad. It has an interesting take on fantasy, magic users, and overarching god prophecies. But the Belgariad saga drags and repeats himself in how the story is structured in later books.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

It's not bad. It has an interesting take on fantasy, magic users, and overarching god prophecies. But the Belgariad saga drags and repeats himself in how the story is structured in later books.

To be fair, things repeating themselves is kind of a big deal in the story.

The Belgariad is pretty good fantasy series. It has some neat worldbuilding ideas and since Leigh Eddings was a co-writer that was unacknowledged at the time, the female characters are pretty good.

And even though David and Leigh Eddings were convicted child abusers, I don't have problem with reading their books, since they a) got punished and, more importantly, b) never reoffended.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

And punchline for the funniest joke goes to...

the 2024 Hugo Awards

https://archive.is/wip/sx8zu

Seriously, WTF are these things? I actually attempted to read the first Ann Leckie book, but the xe/xem pronouns combined with the retarded plot of trying to assassinate a distributed intelligence AI by attacking it one place put me off to the point I had to nope out. The only other name on there that rings a bell is Paul Weimar (who won two this year) but him only because he's somehow been sucked into the Patrick Tomlinson drama. Will have to go through the YA nominees for amusement purposes. You know it will all be fags, troons or troons and fags.

I hate myself quite a bit, but not enough to actually sit through the livestream...maybe later. After my daily dose of black coffee and bitter angst.

 

[Fandom Pulse]

And punchline for the funniest joke goes to...

the 2024 Hugo Awards

https://archive.is/wip/sx8zu

Seriously, WTF are these things? I actually attempted to read the first Ann Leckie book, but the xe/xem pronouns combined with the retarded plot of trying to assassinate a distributed intelligence AI by attacking it one place put me off to the point I had to nope out. The only other name on there that rings a bell is Paul Weimar (who won two this year) but him only because he's somehow been sucked into the Patrick Tomlinson drama. Will have to go through the YA nominees for amusement purposes. You know it will all be fags, troons or troons and fags.

I hate myself quite a bit, but not enough to actually sit through the livestream...maybe later. After my daily dose of black coffee and bitter angst.

Yeah Leckie was the first major woke pronouns award winner so they gave her award for getting her award back then. Around 2014 they started turning The Hugos into the woke awards and nothing from that point forward is even readable let alone actually the best sci-fi out there.

Look up "If You Were A Dinosaur My Love" if you want to vomit.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Yeah Leckie was the first major woke pronouns award winner so they gave her award for getting her award back then. Around 2014 they started turning The Hugos into the woke awards and nothing from that point forward is even readable let alone actually the best sci-fi out there.

Look up "If You Were A Dinosaur My Love" if you want to vomit.

somewhere out there is an autist writing good sword and sorcery or Jack Vance-inspired stories, but we have to deal with these faggots getting the spotlight because of labels.