{"id":37690,"date":"2019-02-27T01:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T06:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37690"},"modified":"2019-01-27T08:37:53","modified_gmt":"2019-01-27T13:37:53","slug":"qotd-when-progressives-took-over-sf-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/02\/27\/qotd-when-progressives-took-over-sf-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the \u201cclimate\u201d but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of \u201cfurther left than thou.\u201d For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that \u201ca conservative\u201d was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened\/capable\/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.<\/p>\n

As for Libertarians, I will to my dying day cherish the dinner I had with my then editor to whom I was describing a funny incident at MileHi where for reasons known only to Bob, I found myself in an argument with someone who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. My editor perked up and (I swear I\u2019m not making this up) said \u201cOh, a Libertarian.\u201d At which point my husband squeezed my thigh hard enough to stop me answering. But yeah. That was a not uncommon idea of a libertarian. If it was completely insane and involved banning something, then it was a libertarian.<\/p>\n

I once overheard the same editor talking to a colleague and saying that if she got submissions across her desk and they were \u2013 dropped and horrified voice \u2013 somewhat conservative<\/em> she recommended they try Baen.<\/p>\n

Which the other editor (from a different house) agreed with, because after all, they weren\u2019t in the business of publishing conservative<\/em> works.<\/p>\n

This immediately put me on notice that in the field if you were a conservative (I presume libertarians were worse, or at least they seemed to induce more mouth foaming. And though I was solidly libertarian and \u2013 at the time \u2013 might have qualified as a Libertarian, I suspect if faced with my real positions they would have classed me as conservative, because my positions were self-obviously not left and that\u2019s all it took.) there was only one house that would take you, and if what you wrote\/wanted to write wasn\u2019t accepted by then, then you were out of luck.<\/p>\n

After that I lived in a state of fear<\/p>\n

I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was \u201cnot quite the thing\u201d or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a \u2013 dropped voice \u2013 conservative<\/em>. Suddenly that person\u2019s books weren\u2019t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you\u2019re seen with a \u2013 dropped voice \u2013 conservative they might think you\u2019re one too. And then it\u2019s off to Never-Never with you.<\/p>\n

I found a few other conservatives\/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.<\/p>\n

We did such a dance to test both the reliability and discretion of the other before revealing ourselves that we might as well have developed a hanky code. [Blue for true blue Conservative, white for pure Libertarian, red for the blood of our heroes, brown for OWL (older, wiser libertarian), purple for squishy conservative, powder blue for Brad Torgersen. (The powder blue care bear, with the bleeding heart\u2026 and the flame thrower.)]<\/p>\n

Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF\/F writer went on about Dean Howard, our next president<\/em>. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “Say Goodbye To The State Of Fear”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2017-03-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the \u201cclimate\u201d but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,53,41],"tags":[550,351,1020,85,134],"class_list":["post-37690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-libertarianism","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-progressives","tag-sf","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9NU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37690"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46668,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37690\/revisions\/46668"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}