Daddy Warpig's been on a tear at the Castalia House blog lately. I'm not the only one to notice, and he's right to be pissed. Even the Supreme Dark Lord mentioned it in a Darkstream over this past week.
Here's the killer point of his latest post (as of this one):
There’s a sickness in SF, it’s very nearly terminal, and Doctor Warpig is in the house to diagnose the disease and prescribe a cure.
Some of you may be in denial: “Science Fiction is NOT a ghetto! It’s not struggling. It’s just as popular as anything else!” Let’s put it to a test. Take these three books:
The Three Musketeers. Alice in Wonderland. Treasure Island.
You’ve probably heard of them. And movies and TV shows based on them. And allusions to them. EVERYBODY has.
Now name some post-Pulp prose SF works of equal or greater stature in popular culture. Spoiler alert: You can’t.
(Bold emphasis is mine.)
Say it with me now: Politics is downstream from culture.
Warpig's right to be passionate about this, because not only do we now know what the problem is, we also have the data to back it up (see the above linked blog posts; they have data on publishing trends), and because we know how this came to pass we also know how to unfuck (and uncuck) SF/F as a category. Bring back everything that got excised in the first place!
We're not going to fix the politics without the foundation of a culture to support the shift. That's why all of the SocJus Death Cult crap in genre fiction, gaming, etc. matters: they're weaponizing elements of the culture to normalize their degeneracy, as we see time and again when we hear the testimonies of people coming to our side after swallowing the red pill. We cannot sustain a politics of courage, loyalty, and honor without a culture that promotes and rewards it. We cannot sustain a politics of nationalism, sovereignty, and independence without a culture that celebrates it- and the SocJus Death Cult's masterminds know this.
While the major institutions will take time and severe measure to bring back into our hands, popular entertainment is far easier to disrupt and dislodge. (Yes, they know this too; that's why they did it.) Therefore it's far more friendly to decentralized efforts to do so, and we are in just such a position at this moment.
But to be successful, you have to know what to hit, where, when, and how to do so for best effect. That's what is valuable about Warpig's blogging at Castalia House right now: he's breaking down (backed up by others following his lead) how we got into this mess, when, where, and by whom- and, therefore, who succeeded those bad actors in turn (i.e. who we're taking on now). For any Narrative Warfare campaign, as with any form of war, knowing your enemy is fundamental and Warpig pointed out that enemy in plain language.
If you are at all serious about unfucking and uncucking what you hold dear, this needs to be done: review, assess, name, blame, and shame- and then go after them by cutting them off, and then cutting them out by replacing them with superior alternatives. If they value their fortunes (if not their lives), then they will adapt or they will be destroyed. Tor delenda est indeed.
Well said.
ReplyDeleteAnd the SJW death cultists aren't the only obstacles to be overcome. There's a surplus of moderate "allies" whose incessant tone-policing and purity spiraling are siphoning away much-needed energy.
Just think of how much more opinion leaders like DW, Jeffro, Jon Mollison, P. Alexander, Nathan Housley. et al. could achieve if they didn't have to deal with hecklers who are suffering too much cognitive dissonance to acknowledge the sorry state of sci-fi and too afraid to do anything about it.
Tone policers in F&SF seem to be the equivalent of cuckservatives in politics in some ways: 1) they still want to be liked by the SJWs who are in charge of the mainstream mess of the current state, and 2) they don't want to admit that what they've known as "their" F&SF is part of anything but the "Golden Age" of F&SF writing.
ReplyDeleteThey somehow think it speaks to their own self-worth rather than not knowing what they don't know about Pulp History, so they find themselves on the SJW side of the argument at least some of the time.
But as always, as we must note, Tor delenda est.