Jedediah Smith

I cannot fathom what any writer would join any of these so-called professional organizations. The World SF Society. The Horror Writers Association. The Mystery Writers of America. Or the worst of the bunch, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. All of them, seething pits of politics, infighting, nepotism, favoritism, and political correctness.

Writers write alone. If you have the respect, love, and support of your fellow writers, you’re a hack. If you get money in the form of grants, fellowships, awards, scholarships, etc, you’re a leech and a hack. Disgust, rejection, and hate are the correct tender to earn from such organized mediocrities.

The World Fantasy Convention used to give a bust of H.P. Lovecraft as a trophy to their award winners. Then they decided he was too unsavory. Forgettable people who will never write a memorable word saw fit to judge him, to cancel him. Would you really want an award from such people?

Now here’s George R.R. Martin being shunned by Worldcon because he hurt some sensitive types: “Martin was accused on social media and elsewhere of erasing the accomplishments of authors of color, glorifying authors and editors with regressive beliefs, mispronouncing lots of the names on the ballot, making off-color jokes, taking way too long to give his remarks, and generally doing a bad job as host.”

Uh huh. This from the people who kept writers off their ballot because the host of their convention, Communist China (you know, those stellar humanitarians who murdered 2 million people during the Cultural Revolutions – just one of their captivating performances), found their writing offensive.

I’ll give Paul Willis, just a fella who commented on the above article, the final word on this: “Reading Hugo or Nebula award winners used to mean you were virtually guaranteed a great story. Now it’s the opposite. The level of woke, preachy DEI story lines in the award winners is enough to make you retch.”