Author John C. Wright goes off on an anti-homosexual rant

John C. Wright is an author I'd never heard of until I opened Songs of the Dying Earth last month. His story in the collection is entertaining and vaguely amusing, and when I heard some good things about his Golden Age trilogy of novels I resolved to pick them up at some future point.

After this blog post was brought to my attention (by a rather horrified SF editor), I decided to drop that resolution.

The post starts off with Wright complaining about the problems of tokenism in fiction, the politically-correct demand that every book or TV show has a gay character or some other minority in it. He was skirting around something beginning to be a point there, although it's a dangerous game to be getting into as based on that logic, why bother having any black or Asian characters or smokers? Therefore, QED, having an all-white, all-straight cast should be totally believable, even in a futuristic setting (when demographic logic tells us the overwhelming majority of the world's population will be non-Caucasian). The only problem with that is that reading an SF work set in the future where the entire cast is white would be pretty ludicrous and send up the bullshit flag pretty quickly unless there was some overtly convincing reason why this was so.

Where the blog posts enters a more disturbing arena is where Wright basically outlines his views on homosexuality. In effect, he equates it with bestiality, necrophilia and pederasty and as being considerably worse than incest. He states that it is a sexual-psychological malfunction and is contributing to the 'moral decay' of society. It's nonsensical hate-speak, plain and simple, particularly unwise when espoused by a new author who is trying to build a career and fanbase in a genre which has a lot of LGBT readers.

This does potentially lead down the road of, well, do an author's personal views matter when all you're really concerned about is if their books are any good? And I would say yes, since the buying reader is contributing to their lifestyle and enabling them to go on doing the things they want to do. As such, I am not inclined to give money or publicity to someone who indulges in hate-speak and takes such an obsessive interest in what goes on behind the closed doors of his neighbours (seriously, what is up with that?). In addition, there is way too much good stuff out there to read, so removing his books from my 'to read' list does reduce the pile somewhat as well, which is an acceptable situation.

Wright's mistake here was that the more profitable career-path is to establish yourself as a huge, best-selling author first and then make the crazy ultra-con statements that alienate most of your fans but simultaneously bring in the extremists who'll keep your sales ticking over later on. He went down the bile-rising route way too early (the Internet's current reaction to the controversy: "Who the fuck is John C. Wright?"). Maybe it'll blow over and people will forget about it and he can go on to have a huge successful career, but this is going to be one of those things that's going to keep coming up in the future.

Interesting rebuttal of the original post by Hal Duncan, for those who have an afternoon free to read the whole thing ;-)

And another from Catherynne Valente.

DC turns down a new SANDMAN series by Neil Gaiman

As you may or may not be aware, the World Science Fiction Convention is taking place in Montreal this weekend. Neil Gaiman is one of the attendees and although I'm not there (due to destitution) a few of my friends are and have reported back on events so far.

Gaiman revealed that last year, to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Sandman, he offered DC Comics a new six-issue mini-series set just before issue #1 of the main series. The story would explain what Dream was up to just before his imprisonment, something he'd promised to explain for years but never gotten round to.

DC were, of course, very excited. Sandman is one of the biggest-selling comic books in history, and over 10 million copies of the graphic novels have been sold to date. Sandman is an enormous commodity and Gaiman has been fairly reluctant to do anything more with the character and story since the main series ended in 1996. However, he'd promised his fans he'd tell this story one day and he thought the anniversary was a great opportunity to do it.

Everything seemed set, but when it came to negotiating the contract DC seemed puzzled. They already had a contract, the one Gaiman signed in 1988 when he was jobbing and poor almost-unknown author.

Gaiman and his agent were a bit bemused by this. The multi-million-novel selling, multi-award-winning, New York Times-bestseller-list-topping 2008 vintage Neil Gaiman was under the impression that he was worth a bit more these days. A new Sandman comic would be, without question, the biggest-selling comic of the year for DC (and probably the biggest-selling comic of the year full stop).

He wasn't asking for the moon on the stick, but he was certainly expecting a bit more than what he was making in 1988. But DC were adamant, and in the end the project didn't happen. Because DC didn't want to shell out a bit more money.

I could be wrong, but I believe this is the single most idiotic decision I've heard a comics company in the middle of a recession take so far. A new Sandman comic would be a licence to print money. The only thing that could be bigger is if Moore suddenly announced he was doing Watchmen II.

So, they're making a movie based on ASTEROIDS

Is this what Hollywood has now been reduced to? Making movies about a small triangle (likely to be played by Shia LaBoeuf) shooting large rocks (likely to be played by Dwayne Johnson) into little rocks (Warwick Davis?) whilst a random spaceship (Scarlett Johansson?) flies past letting off the odd pot-shot.

I always felt the narrative was compelling enough to survive the transition to cinematic form.

There. Is. No. Story! Why would you have a 'four-studio bidding war' over this? Why? WHY?

Where will the insanity end? No, wait, we've already been there. But expect to see Uwe Boll's Paperboy, Quentin Tarantino's Pac-Man and Pixar's Frogger on their way in the near future.