Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.
From a White Rose resistance pamphlet (1942)
I am happy that Dale Price is back to blogging on a fairly regular basis since it gives me a renewed opportunity to steal borrow blogging ideas from him. He turns his attention at his blog Dyspeptic Mutterings to the insane purge going on within science fiction fandom of anyone who has political beliefs that do not coincide with the politically correct bromides du jour:
Orwellian group-think comes to real-world science fiction writing.
A little recondite, but instructive: the Hugo Awards and SFWA are the latest (if minor) institutions to have succumbed to the left’s jackbooted tolerance enforcers. The issues have risen to the attention of USA Today, so it’s newsworthy instead of merely nerdworthy.
Larry “Monster Hunter” Correia explains part of the problem (the Hugos) in a link within the USA Today column.
Finally, Sarah Hoyt (not exactly a charter member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy herself) and John C. Wright both lower the boom.
Go here to view the comments that will no doubt be piling in. I have been reading science fiction since I learned to read more than a half century ago, and it is beyond shameful that a genre that prided itself on being tolerant and free thinking is now in the grip of a poisonous political orthodoxy. John C. Wright, who Dale links to, says it well in his resignation post to The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:
Wonder if the trolls will hit this post, too.
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I’ve started reading scifi at the age of 7,almost 8 decades ago, entranced by the cover showing a bosomy heroine being threatened by a reptilian alien (Amazing Stories). I stopped 10 years ago when the political correctness virus infected the genre. One has to go back to authors like Robert Benson, C.S. Lewis, and Walker Percy, who surmounted the conventions, and then of course there is a Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, the sf hymn to Catholic faith.