Larry Correia won’t be one of the guests when the Origins Game Fair takes place June 13-17 in Columbus, OH. Shortly after publicizing that Correia had been added to the lineup, John Ward, the event’s Executive Director, received so many negative social media comments (on Twitter, particularly) that he announced Correia’s invitation has been rescinded.
Ward wrote on Facebook:
I want to discuss our invitation to Larry Correia a guest at Origins. By all counts he is a very talented author.
Unfortunately, when he was recommended I was unaware of some personal views that are specifically unaligned with the philosophy of our show and the organization.
I want to thank those of you that brought this error to our attention. Origins is an inclusive and family friendly event. We focus on fun and gaming, not discourse and controversy.
I felt it necessary to recend [sic] his invitation to participate in the show. I apologize again to those of you that were looking forward to seeing him at Origins.
John Ward, Executive Director
Many of the critical tweets mentioned Correia’s history with Sad Puppies.
Correia subsequently responded on Facebook with a statement that begins:
So I’m no longer the writer guest of honor at origins. My invitation has been revoked. It was the usual nonsense. Right after I was announced as a guest some people started throwing a temper tantrum about my alleged racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever (of course, with zero proof or actual examples), and the guy in charge (John Ward) immediately folded. He didn’t even talk to me first. He just accepted the slander and gave me the boot in an email that talked about how “inclusive” they are….
His statement also says “none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic.”
BEFORE AND AFTER:
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Cat Rambo has tweeted about the situation, showing empathy for Correia’s situation:
https://twitter.com/Catrambo/status/996169360912732161
Origins didn’t handle the situation properly, but the biggest mistake was making Larry Correia a guest of honor in the first place. He has the career accomplishments for such recognition but his long history of abusive behavior online would reflect badly on any con that associated with him in such a prominent way.
Correia has shown through the venomous invective on his blog and his campaign to sabotage the Hugos that he has contempt for SF/F fandom. His incredibly childish and vicious posts targeting Mike Glyer are a sore spot with me in particular. I would never invite him as a guest to a con.
This makes me wonder if the Origins Game Fair organizers have been living under a rock these past four years or if the gaming world is so separate from greater SFF fandom that they really had no idea.
Nonetheless, one might expect that the organizers would google potential GoHs and thus would have found that Correia is highly divisive person and that there are probably quite a few people who won’t attend an event, if he were there.
But first inviting people who are known to be highly divisive and then uninviting them just looks bad, whether it’s Jonathan Ross and the Hugos at Loncon, John Ringo at Con Carolinas and now Larry Correia at Origins Game Fair.
Yes, absolutely we can’t find anything racist from Correia. Man, don’t these people remember that their nonsense is well documented and recorded?
I don’t like voting slates to cause a leaning in a vote where the personal vote is supposed to have meaning for the voter. I particularly dislike it when neo-fascists rig votes for a disruptive political agenda (and I do not mean Mr. Correia when I write this). I wish the whole Puppy kerfuffle, both kinds of Puppy , had never happened.
But…
As I maintained in a similar situation in St. Louis a few years ago, it is rude and insulting: to invite someone to be a convention guest; have that someone accept and make travel plans, move work aside, alter family commitments, feel ego-buoyed by the attention; to publicize the appearance of that guest; and then publicly rescind the invitation. It’s the equivalent of a slap to the face.
It demeans the meaning of “Guest of Honor” to remove that invitation. How can a convention committee really mean to honor someone, if the “honor” means so little that it can be [*snap*], recalled, just like that. Who can ever trust this convention committee’s word again that they truly mean it to be an Honor to invite someone to be a Guest-with-a-capital-G?
Mr. Correia is a well-known professional writer with many books to his credit; his works are definitely in genre and in sub-genre; he has a strong personal following of people who like and admire his work in particular; and so far as I am aware from my limited viewpoint, has never exhibited negative or inappropriate behavior at a convention or to any convention attendees.
So there was a tweet-mob — so what?
This was wrong, this was wrong, this was WRONG!
And cowardly.
Mr. Correia is owed an immediate public apology. Any expenses he has incurred to this point need to be reimbursed. Whether Mr. Correia is willing to accept it or not, the offer of Guesthood should again be extended, and sincerely this time.
Promoting neo-nazis for the Hugos is racist, how ever you choose to frame it.
His blog is full of abusive behavior towards other people. He likes to rage and make things extremely personal in his insults and has done this for years. I don’t know if this was a factor in the decision by Origins, but conventions don’t generally want that kind of trouble.
Is no due diligence done when selecting a Guest of Honor? While I don’t believe he should have been invited in the first place, the disinvite reflects badly on the event runners.
David K. M. Klaus: so far as I am aware from my limited viewpoint, has never exhibited negative or inappropriate behavior at a convention or to any convention attendees
So you’ve also been living under a rock… or do you think it’s okay for someone to be as racist, sexist, and offensive as they want, as long as they don’t do it at conventions? 😐
I’m unwilling to accept that the way someone acts online has no relevance to who that person is. Maybe Correia is nothing but sweetness and light to all when he attends a convention, but we all know what he’s thinking and what he’s willing to write about after the fact. I wouldn’t be too happy with a convention lining up a GoH who might set an internet mob on attendees. (Like, you know, the internet mob going after Origins right now. Or the internet mob he set on Worldcon.)
I’m sympathetic to the inconvenience and embarrassment that this may have caused Correia, much as I dislike his actions over the past couple of years, but Origins should never have invited him. As it is people who dislike his abusive behaviour towards fans and other writers will remember he was invited, and fans of his will remember he was disinvited. Reinviting him would only make it worse.
Writing and acting are two different things. People who don’t like his personal writing can avoid interacting with him to the best the convention scheduling and physical layout enable them. If his personal writing is so dis-likable some are upset by it (I don’t read his weblog), then perhaps he shouldn’t have been invited at all.
Many people hold sometimes strong, sometimes disagreeable, sometimes childish, sometimes insulting opinions on any number of topics and still are popular writers within the field. Take a look at issues of the fanzines Outworlds by Bill Bowers or The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review by Richard E. Geis from the ’70s to see a lot of that. Yet the participants were still regarded as good choices to be convention guests. Perhaps the convention committee should have taken all his writing into account when inviting him. It would seem though, that they did not.
I am not omniscient, so perhaps there is an account of his bad actions somewhere or other, if such ever occurred. It’s entirely possible as all kinds of accounts of people’s behavior can miss my attention.
But if Mr. Correia doesn’t treat people badly, if he lives up to the normal expectation of proper behavior and demeanor in public, once he was invited, unless there was a threat of physical violence to someone suddenly discovered on that weblog, what he writes on it shouldn’t be a reason for his invitation to be rescinded.
The test of the First Amendment is that even speech and writing which turns your stomach is the right of the speaker and the writer. And while the First Amendment isn’t involved here, as no government is involved, the spirit of that is something basic to our culture, both mainstream and our own sub-cultural backwater.
Regardless of anything short of threats of or actual personal violence, having issued the invitation and offered the Honor, the convention committee should have kept their collective word. That’s what the Good Guys do.
One of the fans of Correia, who engaged in a multi-year campaign to cheat people into Hugo nominations and trophies which they hadn’t earned, is defending him on Twitter as “someone who thinks that things should be earned”. I got a really good laugh out of that. 🙄
David K. M. Klaus: I am not omniscient, so perhaps there is an account of his bad actions somewhere or other, if such ever occurred.
So you missed the entire multi-year saga of the Sad and Rabid Puppies. Hmmm… not speaking up without first educating yourself is probably a good idea.
JJ: Whether we like it or not, he can write what he wants. It’s called Freedom of the Press. If he doesn’t treat people this way, once invited, accepted, and publicized, that’s too late for the convention committee to change their minds. They should take proper precautions so that nobody’s inappropriate behavior be tolerated, and live with the consequences of their decision and actions.
Meredith: Don’t forget the internet mob which started this whole mess. Internet mobs can come from all kinds of political and/or personal directions.
@David K. M. Klaus
I consider a multi-year campaign to destroy a shiny fandom thing + bonus abuse of multiple fans and other authors a series of acts rather than just writing, personally.
You’re correct that it would normally be wrong to rescind a GoH invitation. In this exceptional case I think it would be more wrong not to – but it would certainly have been better to have never extended an invitation in the first place. Unfortunately, in the absence of a time machine, their options were limited.
And JJ, I know all about the puppy stuff. I have been a friend of Mike’s since before he began publishing File 770, and have been reading it since he paper-mailed me the first issue twenty years ago.
Meredith: I consider a multi-year campaign to destroy a shiny fandom thing + bonus abuse of multiple fans and other authors a series of acts rather than just writing, personally.
Exactly. Orchestrating a multi-year attack on an institution of fandom was way more than just “writing whatever he wants”.
And hell yes, I hope that a whole lot of other cons are watching and learning the lesson “we don’t just invite someone who’s been suggested as a Guest of Honor, we actually research the person first and find out whether they’ve got a history of being a bad actor and making racist and sexist comments”.
The con really fell down on this one. It’s not like ten minutes of reading Google results wouldn’t have told them all about Correia’s past actions. Due Diligence, people!
David K. M. Klaus: And JJ, I know all about the puppy stuff.
… but don’t have a problem with it. Thanks for making that clear.
There’s a difference between having an insulting opinion on a topic and insulting people. Correia directs profanity and rage at specific people. That was what crossed the line for me, personally. It has nothing to do with him being provocative on political topics or any other hot-button subject.
Go read his posts about Glyer and tell me that’s the kind of person you’d make a Guest of Honor at your con.
David K. M. Klaus on May 14, 2018 at 6:47 pm said:
That works both ways, you know. Correia absolutely has the right to write whatever he wishes. Other people have that exact same right, and the right to not associate with him. I agree the con screwed up. But disinviting him is just as much their right as writing all those horrible things is Correia’s right.
@JJ
David made it pretty clear in his opening paragraph that he didn’t approve of the Puppy stuff. I disagree with his description of it as just “writing”, but you’re not being entirely fair when you say that he must not have had a problem with it.
The con messed up here substantially. If you inviting somebody as a Guest of Honour then you surely should know something about them other than that they write books or like tabletop games. If you are going to invite Larry Correia then you are inviting Larry Correia and all that that entails.
Hugos, Gamergate and any personal animosity aside, he’s a guy with loud opinions who will express them – and if that’s what you want for your con then I guess he’d be a great person to invite. If you want a lack of controversy then I can’t imagine why you would invite Larry C.
Correction: Forty years ago, 1978.
ConTroversy – The Controversy Con also sounds like a great name for a convention that only ever invites guests that people have huge problems with.
@Camestros
You’d need to be a special kind of ornery to accept an invite offered on those grounds!
This is what people meant 3 years ago when they said the Sad Puppies were permanently damaging their careers. They can split hairs all day long about whether they said sexist/racist/homophobic things or actually hold sexist/racist/homophobic beliefs. Personally, I think some of them do, but maybe not all of them. Doesn’t matter in the end.
Because what they all have, and repeatedly show, is a disdain for a huge swath of fandom (perhaps a bigger swath than they thought), a vicious joy in being insulting to people they feel offended by, and zero respect for norms, decency, graciousness and other hallmarks of civilized society. And they deliberately encourage and cultivate similar attitudes in the fans who are loyalists to them.
My personal point of view (and I am pretty sure I’m not the only one who feels this way) is that I genuinely don’t care about their politics or their justification for the destructive path they took. They showed a tremendous amount of disrespect to the fan community at large and spent a crazy amount of time and effort being personally insulting and shitty to a lot of individual people. I find that loathsome. I don’t want to spend any money on any of their work ever again; I don’t want to read their work. Larry C. might write the next Ulysses or Foundation trilogy at some point in his career but it doesn’t matter. I’ll never read it, and I won’t miss it. There is more awesome work out there than I can read in this lifetime.
He created a personal dislike in me that actually WILL prejudice me toward him and his creations forever after. My politics are nothing like his; my world view is not his. But I bought and read (well listened to, it was an audiobook) at least one of his books in the past and minus the Puppy furor, would have read and considered any of his work that was nominated or recommended for nomination in the future. Not anymore.
I want nothing to do with him or any of the Sad Puppy types in any venue, ever. I don’t want them to not have a career. I wish them all the success they can have in the niche they walled themselves off in. And if they are one of a big list of guests or panelists at a large con like Worldcon or Dragon*con, I would still go to the con if I could, and just avoid anything with them involved.
But a smaller con with Larry or anyone similar as top billing, as THE reason to go? Nah. But they did that to themselves, they made themselves toxic to me and a lot of other fans. And I would tell a con organizer so, if it made the difference between me deciding to go or not go, or cancelling plans that I had previously had.
That said, con operators need to do their homework. I don’t feel particularly sorry for Larry, he brought this on himself by alienating so many fans out there. I don’t think he will ever quite understand that though, I’m sure he sees it as some sort of social justice shunning crusade. But for any organization to invite someone, have the invitation accepted, and then revoke it on the basis of information that was widely known and available beforehand is not a good look.
And good lord, those professional martyrs in the puppy brigade do NOT need another cross to nail themselves too. They are already unbearable. Don’t give them actual justification for their pity parties.
I think that is a decent argument about Larry C *attending* a Con but the question here is whether he should be a headlining Guest of Honour. The question isn’t just ‘will Larry cause trouble at the con’ (probably not) but ‘is Larry a good brand for our con? Will he bring more attendees than he will discourage?’
There is also a very reasonable concern cons should have about guests who bad mouth conventions AFTERWARDS (people can probably think of another person as a relevant example). As far as I’m aware Larry C was well behaved and pleasant when he attended Worldcon as Campbell Award nominee – but that doesn’t mean he didn’t create issues for the con in the long term.
Having said all that, I still think the con haven’t treated him well. It’s not hard to find out what Larry thinks – he’s not a shrinking violet.
David K. M. Klaus:
There was a time when conventions thought this was a good idea on how to handle assholes and abusers. That time isn’t now.
Why? Why should something that doesn’t apply in any way be basic for what it doesn’t apply to?
Why? Why do you not accept the rights for a convention to change their minds at any time? Does people organizing a convention not have the rights you want Correia to have?
The free market has spoken.
Having him as a random attendee would maybe be okay, but making him a GoH says the con thinks he’s a draw for their audience. Obviously the backlash shows that he’s an anti-draw for their audience, and would cause them to lose money. As a businessman, I’m sure Larry understands that idea.
That said, who are these dumbasses who don’t bother to do a quick Internet search before they invite someone as a guest?!?
So much what JJ and cmm said.
These guys poisoned their own futures within fandom through the whole Puppy debacle. They built their own doghouse, and now they get to sleep in it. It’s ridiculous for them to start clutching their pearls and proclaiming how shocked they are that fans actually remember what they did and what they tried to do.
And absolutely, the concom should be ashamed of themselves for not thinking this through long before they made their selections public.
@David:
If you’re going to invoke the First Amendment, yes Correia has the right to say whatever he wants, and the concom have the right to invite, or not invite, whoever they want. “This person is an honored guest” and “We realize we made a mistake, and do not want to honor this person by making him a guest of honor” are equally entitled to protection as free speech.
Also, Origins Game Fair is not an arm of the government, which again means that a First Amendment argument is irrelevant.
I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether I agree with the decision–but they have the right to make it, just as they had the right to invite Correia in the first place without asking for my input.
I’ve talked to Larry Correia once on line. I stated that ‘The Scarlet Letter’ was horrible on his blog, and I was quite honored to have this excellent author agree with me. Its one of the nice things about the Net. You can actually talk to folk who you’ve read their books.
I saw him once sitting back, his leg stretched out because it ached, chatting with a bunch of fans for one of those author meets at Constellation in Huntsville. Despite being surrounded by people who I had some reason to suspect were liberal, he and they were being charming, all smiles. Perhaps its a Southern thing….manners. I didn’t hear what he had to say because I had other things to do.
I’ve ran Champions, Mage, Vampire, judged in a Larp, Multiverser, and D&D *published two settings for that last. I’ve GMed at many cons, including DragonCon where one year I was signed up to run five games. I gave a speech. My first D&D was 2nd Addition. So, while I’m no where near midlist, I’ve been around.
You guys have embarrassed yourself. As they would say in a LitRPG novel…You have suffered a -5 to your Global Reputation.
As to Nazi….please.
As to Sad Puppies, he proved his point. There were certain Others who were never going to get the reward they were due because of bigotry. Some denied this, so he showed it to be true. QED.
rcade:
>There’s a difference between having an insulting opinion on a
>topic and insulting people.
Yes, there is, and there was plenty of both in both of those two Hugo-winning fanzines I cited. And yet participants still were invited to conventions without anyone being concerned that the riot squad might need to be called.
People have the right of non-association just as much as they have the right to freely associate. In The Olden Days, people snubbed each other at conventions, or made decisions to not attend if that fugghead X was going to be there. But nobody got chucked out of a convention guesthood already announced because they had a potty-mouth, held grudges, or wrote fanzines while drunk.
Look, as I said, I don’t read Mr. Correia’s weblog, so I don’t know what he writes there — if his writing is racist, sexist, or full of personal invective, then he shouldn’t have been invited. But he was. In this aspect, if they were unfamiliar with his weblog, it would appear that the convention committee didn’t perform due diligence. Now, decent manners dictates that the convention committee, having issued the invitation and offered an Honor, takes responsibility for that decision and follows through with it. That’s what convention committees which are made up of people who themselves aren’t racist, sexist, or full of personal invective do. They rise above it, do the right thing, and keep their given word.
@David —
You keep conveniently ignoring the fact that Correia was the inciting factor behind the whole Puppy movement. This isn’t just a matter of being rude on a blog — it’s a matter of being the founder of a determined, multi-year campaign to destroy the most revered awards within sff fandom.
I think it’s quite reasonable for fans to be incensed about such a person being named GoH at any con.
And again, I think we can all agree that the concom screwed the pooch on this one (yes, I see what I did there).
@Eric Ashley
Read any good books lately?
@Eric Ashley
If you’re referring to this:
I believe Hampus was referring to Correia’s early promotion of VD, not to Larry himself being a neo-Nazi. I do think that neo-Nazi is a fairly accurate label for VD.
“Ha ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well-known are these: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, or invite and then dis-invite a Portuguese Mormon as a convention Guest of Honor!”
.
Yes, we were more tolerant of provocateurs back then. We were also more prone to letting harassers and sexual predators continue to be a part of conventions. Was that era of fandom more tolerant of ideas or less aware of people who made conventions miserable for others?
I don’t think a 1970s fanzine editor who wrote abusive things about other fans could do as much damage as someone like Correia can today by hurling vicious insults around. He has a lot of fans. Some of them take that kind of attack as a call to action against his targets.
Conventions don’t want to be a place where people angrily confront each other. Correia’s history of angering people is not going to be welcome at many cons.
Once Correia was invited and announced, there was nothing the con could do that wouldn’t be wrong. Keeping him or dropping him are really about equally bad. Both can really only make the con look bad.
I’d have a lot of sympathy for their problem, if not for the fact that Google could have saved them from making the original mistake.
Correia also created his own problem, with his multi-year campaign to reduce the Hugos to a marketing tool for him and his friends, fueled by racism, sexism, and political and cultural resentment, making it a new battlefield in the culture wars.
He has a first amendment right to free speech and free association.
So does everyone else.
In the olden days, people who had a history of problematic behaviour were still invited to cons and those who’d been on the receiving end of that behaviour could either suck it up or stay at home. And if some folks were effectively driven away from their local con (because that jerk was always there) or from cons altogether, then tough luck.
In recent times, however, we have sen people, including some big names, who have a history of problematic behaviour get disinvited, because those who’ve had negative experiences with them are no longer willing to stay quiet about it, but make their views heard. And it’s not just rightwingers and people affiliated with the Sad and Rabid Puppies either, no matter how much they want to make this about politics. The person Fourth Street Fantasy disinvited is a very vocal leftwinger, for example.
As for Correia, I have no idea if he has ever displayed problematic behaviour at a convention. However, he not only pissed off much of fandom with the Sad Puppy campaigns, he also has a history of launching nasty personal attacks on people who dare to disagree with him and sendings his trollish followers their way. He also tends to punch down, i.e. he is polite to writers who outsell him and nasty to everybody else. I’ve been on the receiving end of one of his attacks, which was a large part of the reason why I did not go to Loncon in 2014, in spite of having bought an attending membership, because Correia and some of his pals were up for Hugos (that was the year the Sad Puppies first made waves) and I did not want to run into any of those people. And there are many people, including Mike, whose experiences with Correia have been much worse than mine.
No one is due a Hugo or any other award. You win a Hugo, because the majority of Hugo voters believe that your work is the best among the candidates in that particular year. Name recognition helps – witness the lackluster Doctor Who episodes who still make the ballot, because there are a lot of Doctor Who fans – but in the end the work that wins is one that the majority of the Hugo electorate agrees is good.
Besides, Larry Correia did get nominated for the Campbell Award under his own steam (ditto for fellow Sad Puppy Brad Torgersen who got nominated for the Campbell and a Hugo under his own steam), so enough members of the Hugo electorate once thought his work was worth nominating. However, he did not win and decided it had to be because of his politics (rather than because Hugo voters liked Lev Grossman’s work better) and embarked on a multi-year campaign to attack the Hugos because of that perceived slight.
@Eric Ashley
Your opinions are fine, as long as you understand that they’re just yours and you don’t try to make others pretend you never expressed them. Larry’s – he’s expressed them publicly, they’ve been rejected just as publicly by a lot of fans, and he’s expecting to get treated as though he never expressed them in the first place.
(I disagree with you about The Scarlet Letter, but that’s fine. Like many works of fiction, it’s not for everyone. It’s also lost on most people under the age of 30.)
I agree that Origins dropped the ball and handled this poorly. This is a PR disaster for Origins for the timing alone. 4 hours from announcement to booting him is terrible optics.
Taking LC’s perspective for a moment, I feel for him. Being unexpectedly booted from a con after all the plans made is a terrible way to doing business and if it happened to me I’d be mad too. The big difference between LC and myself is that I have empathy for my fellow humans and he…seems not to.
On top of that, despite also identifying as one of the Progressives that LC regularly compares to fascists without evidence, I’m a Capitalist. If LC and his fellows want to write their assemblyline/workmanlike ammosexual gun porn or book shaped political soapboxes they title as “Real Sci-Fi” and make a living off of the royalties that let them gloat about the difficulties of buying a new house on the side of mountain because they want a shooting range, they hate HOAs and they think the suburbs of Utah have too many people….all the power to them. That’s their business.
But every single time you say or do something in the age of the internet, the internet remembers. The internet remembers every time he has called anyone who identifies as a liberal and/or a progressive a fascist or some acronym he or his buddies just made up. The internet remembers every time a mass shooting happens LC talks about his experience with guns and his old gunstore(which failed as a business BTW), calls Gun-Free Zones a joke and cites evidence that has been debunked or is highly suspect. The internet also remembers every time he has gone after John Scalzi out of sheer jealousy that people like him more.
The internet remembers when LC started Sad Puppies because he thought people were mean to him and he wanted to “Thumb Liberals in the eye”. They remember when he brought in VD because he wanted to further that goal. The internet remembers when his slate was voted below no award not just because he was gaming the rules but because his slate was made up of his friends’ work and that they are all objectively not Hugo-worthy. The internet remembers everytime he celebrates his books being on the NYT bestseller list…for a week.
The internet(as well as this poster) remembers the part of MHI Book 1 where his main characters have a conversation on a SLAVE PLANTATION about how “Racism is over” and has been since the 60s, modern Civil Rights activists are just whiners and that the family who made their fortune lynching Vampires in the deep south(I seriously doubt they were lynching just vampires) didn’t have money five generations back so they earned what they have and don’t have to give it to no moochers.
The internet remembers in Grimnoire where he took an entire chapter to demonize FDR and how it featured a character depicted as morally superior as someone who had inherited his wealth and multimillion-dollar business from his father without actually working…in the 1930s where there are bread lines of starving unemployed people around the corner and this guy is complaining that his taxes are too high and the New Deal is dumb and so are their initiatives to employ said starving people so they can build needed infrastructure and you know not die. (There are more examples, even a racist one but I’ll stop.)
The internet remembers when he rejected the idea of a spectrum of Sexuality and Gender in favor of a judeo-christian heteronormative binary. The internet remembers when he said he had diversity because his family watches Japanese movies while eating Indian food. The internet remembers a conversation he had on the internet with a “Scumbag” where LC was the only one swearing and using derogatory terms despite claiming he was the better person.
The internet remembers every single time Larry has showed himself as having the thinnest skin on the internet whenever someone says something bad about him.
If I had one wish for this situation it is for a comprehensive numbered, ordered list (with sources & citations) of every terrible thing LC has said and done that I can point to whenever someone asks…because there are so many…
I would compile such a list myself by datamining his blog, his social media, transcripts of interviews and his books themselves, but I do not have the time, energy or brainpower to do that. But I do have enough to write this post, so it’ll have to do even if it doesn’t make it out of moderation.
If I had another wish it would be for Larry Correia to seek professional help and to rethink how his approach to business strategy and marketing. In the long run, using internet outrage as publicity doesn’t work. Every single time he blows his top he keeps his audience but he will never grow his audience, which is terrible business sense.
Meredith, I’ve probably read more books than you have, and I’ve possibly written more books than you have (unfortunately I don’t have Mr. Correia’s skills.) My current favorite thing is my KU subscription.
If you want some recommendations, I’d be happy to give some. I currently have out on my KU account the following:
Johnny Came Home//The Seventh Kevin//Faithgirl//The Sovereign Road//The Secret: A Christian Supernatural Thriller//Eyes of Elisha//The Pandora Codex//The Log of the Gray Wolf//The Lost Starship//Chronicles of the Mercy-giver.
Not all of these are good, but most are readable and interesting. But if you want a Best Ten list I can probably come up with something.
Jayn, Vox Day regularly refers to Stormfronters as ‘Fake Right’ and ‘Alt-Retard’.
Thank you for clarifying that. I’m okay with Hampus’ standard for himself as long as he extends it to Arthur C. Clarke fans, Samuel Delany fans, and Mercedes Lackey fans, all writers who I suspect have done far worse things than have others think that they thought a racist thought. I myself don’t want to read any more Clarke than I have (Songs, Childhood’s End, and Rendevous) because I suspect he is a contemptible person.
This is a bunch of malarkey. Correia got angry about finishing last in the Campbell Award voting in 2006. When he got home from that Worldcon he posted thousands of words on what a positive experience the con was. Only later did he became retroactively bitter and spin a fake new tale about how he was persecuted for his political beliefs so he could justify his self-aggrandizing Sad Puppies campaign.
Authors who are persecuted “due to bigotry” don’t get a Campbell nomination at all. Correia took one of the highest forms of praise a new author can get in SF/F and turned it into a grievance he has nursed for years.
PJ Evans, I do not think Mr. Correia is trying to make others forget what he said. His views are within decency, and Origins has embarrassed themselves. I suspect he’d like to be treated like a bestselling pro, instead of having a Scarlet Letter hung about his neck. This overreaction is shameful.
As to TSL, I had to read it in high school. I still doubt that I’d like it, but undoubtedly that made it worse.
Dear folks,
Those of you who have worked on concoms or been involved in choosing a GoH will know all this and may skip this post. For the rest…
OGF fucked up royally. “Didn’t do their homework” is a gross understatement. Because here’s the important thing — a synonym for GoH is “Featured Entertainer.” Really. GoH are never chosen simply because they have done deserving work in their field; they are chosen because (1) they will draw in numbers of attendees of the sort the convention wants and/or (2) they will entertain the attendees of the sort the convention wants and provide them with an enjoyable experience. Ideally both.
There are lots of entirely worthy authors and artists out there who will never be GoH’s simply because they can’t satisfy #2. It’s no discredit to them as an author or an artist.
Note the phrase “attendees of the sort the convention wants.” To think of extreme end cases, I can come up with a couple of authors who would be good guests of honor at either Wiscon or Libertycon. Not many. There are a whole lot more who would be a good GoH for one or the other.
When you’re looking at a list of possible GoH’s, you look really hard at the entertainment factor. That automatically means looking at their past performances, at their reputation, whatever you know about the kind of people they draw in and how they perform at a convention. Failing to do that is far worse than merely not doing your homework, it’s blowing off the entire class, all semester. It is incompetent.
And, yup, it happens.
(And a PS to Eric — regardless of all of the above, Correia’s views are not remotely within the bounds of decency, unless you really are a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit. You’ve made your point, you’re just repeating yourself and digging yourself deeper. Give it up. Stop trying to defend someone ‘s assholery, and stop trying to play “whatabout” like you invented the game and nobody else has caught on. You are not winning.)
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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Wow, everyone wants to reply to me.
You love me, you really love me.
rcade, I’ve experienced bigotry in the things related to fantasy. I’ve heard it. Its one of the ways the PTB keep out unwanted ideas. Your sort aren’t acceptable. You can ask Sarah Hoyt about it, if you like. She speaks on it regularly on her blog.
Cora, yes, some people are due certain rewards as a matter of decent behavior. If certain Others are not getting their due, then inquiry into why needs to be made.
And he refers to the child murderer and terrorist Anders Brevik as a hero. That he calls other extremists rude names doesn’t make Vox any less of an extremist and one who sees murder as a legitimate tactic against moderate left wing views (eg he defends Brevik on the grounds that the children he murdered were associated with a political party that supported mainstream immigration policies).
Having said that Larry isn’t Vox. His past support of Vox was more a toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance rather than ideological alignment. But morally, his behaviour boosting Vox is no different than boosting a supporter of ISIS.