The Fangirl

Author Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote a great piece on Tor.com called Post-Binary Gender in SF: Introduction. In it she calls for "an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories." It's a really fascinating article, I highly recommend reading it. 

Unfortunately, MacFarlane's article upset fellow author Larry Correia, who felt the need to post a detailed rant about how such excessive demands would destroy the very foundation of the Sci Fi genre. *heavy sigh*

Here is one of the more choice quotes from his rant:

"If you can’t stomach the comments long enough to hear what a typical WorldCon voter sounds like, let me paraphrase: 'Fantastic! I’m so sick of people actually enjoying books that are fun! Let’s shove more message fiction down their throats! My cause comes before their enjoyment! Diversity! Gay polar bears are being murdered by greedy corporations! Only smart people who think correct thoughts like I do should read books and I won’t be happy until my genre dies a horrible death! Yay!'  (and if there is beeping noise in the background, that’s because they’re backing up their mobility scooter).

 

So let’s break this pile of Gender Studies 101 mush down into its component bits and see just why some sci-fi writers won’t be happy until their genre dies completely."

I'm not going to link to his rant, because I don't want to give him any hit counts. However, Jim C. Hines posted a fabulous dissection of Correia's ignorant foaming, called Fiskception: Dissecting Correia's Critique of MacFarlane. It's long, but well worth the read, as is the Bibliotropic post Why I Selfishly Want Gender Diversity in My Reading. I really love how these, among many other authors and voices in the science fiction community have use this very negative situation to shed even more like on the issue of gender diversity.

There's not much else I can add to this other than that I will never read any of Larry Correia's books, and that while gender diversity is very unlike to destroy the science fiction genre, flagrant displays of ignorance and bigotry has been know to destroy more than a few authors' careers.