I'm a white, male, aspiring SF writer, and all I see in the Sad Puppies is the death throes of an outdated culture. I'll be happy when this bunch of assholes is gone from the scene.
SF changes, and that's a great thing. I LOVE classic SF, read a lot of it, but there's no denying that socially it tends to be utterly backward. There are some fantastic exceptions (Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, for instance) but on the whole you can feel it in the SF that these white men were writing for other white men.
Today, the field is teeming with alternate points of view. I participate in workshops and frankly, the majority of rising SF writers are women. It's great, because these are women who approached SF from a deep love for the genre and are bringing their own experience to the field.
And the thing is, SF to me has always been about alternate points of view. I read SF since I'm a kid because I love seeing strange worlds through strange eyes. So why be close-minded about who brings in these points of view? It doesn't make sense.
It always blows my mind that a writer who purports to imagine impossible worlds has a hangup about putting a strong woman or a different culture in it.
I love Sci-fi that tackles social questions. My favourite sci-fi book is Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It changes very few elements of our society comparatively to other sci-fi authors but they have extremely large ramifications.
They still have computers but they are a chip in your head. Memories can be backuped and restored and making a full grown clone at any age is trivial. And the world is now post-scarcity and working in a reputation economy (you basically upvote people in your mind).
And this changes everything. Imagine that you can mentally IM with people (telepathy!), mentally Google anything, and mentally take notes of things you don't want to forget in a word processor.
Imagine that you lived something terrible and had the option to restore from backup before it happened. Imagine your relationship to danger if you can be brought back to life no matter what.
And imagine if the issues of karma systems like reddit's permeated all of society.
I'm a white, male, aspiring SF writer, and all I see in the Sad Puppies is the death throes of an outdated culture. I'll be happy when this bunch of assholes is gone from the scene.
SF changes, and that's a great thing. I LOVE classic SF, read a lot of it, but there's no denying that socially it tends to be utterly backward. There are some fantastic exceptions (Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, for instance) but on the whole you can feel it in the SF that these white men were writing for other white men.
Today, the field is teeming with alternate points of view. I participate in workshops and frankly, the majority of rising SF writers are women. It's great, because these are women who approached SF from a deep love for the genre and are bringing their own experience to the field.
And the thing is, SF to me has always been about alternate points of view. I read SF since I'm a kid because I love seeing strange worlds through strange eyes. So why be close-minded about who brings in these points of view? It doesn't make sense.
It always blows my mind that a writer who purports to imagine impossible worlds has a hangup about putting a strong woman or a different culture in it.
I love Sci-fi that tackles social questions. My favourite sci-fi book is Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It changes very few elements of our society comparatively to other sci-fi authors but they have extremely large ramifications.
They still have computers but they are a chip in your head. Memories can be backuped and restored and making a full grown clone at any age is trivial. And the world is now post-scarcity and working in a reputation economy (you basically upvote people in your mind).
And this changes everything. Imagine that you can mentally IM with people (telepathy!), mentally Google anything, and mentally take notes of things you don't want to forget in a word processor.
Imagine that you lived something terrible and had the option to restore from backup before it happened. Imagine your relationship to danger if you can be brought back to life no matter what.
And imagine if the issues of karma systems like reddit's permeated all of society.