One of the members of my writing group recently posted on Facebook that for his birthday, he wants his friends to share their most controversial and/or hilarious “hot takes.” Here’s mine:
SFWA (The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association, or whatever the hell it is now) was founded by perverts and communists to purge the science fiction and fantasy genres of any authors who love America, believe the Bible, and oppose the genocide of the unborn.
SFWA was also created to suppress any stories that might challenge the philosophies of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Sigmund Freud, John Money, Michelle Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, and the Marquis de Sade.
Their ultimate goal was to prevent another George Orwell from writing a book as effective at setting back their political project as Animal Farm and 1984, and to make the world safe for the normalization of pedophilia.
TL;DR: SFWA was created by perverts and communists to ruin science fiction for anyone who isn’t a pervert or a communist, and they largely succeeded.
I don’t think it was created for that. I think the left did what they always do… take over something already created. Like education, Hollywood, the media, etc.
I used to think that way, but then I started reading all of the early Nebula Award-winning books and stories, and I started to notice some trends: namely, that the stories were super political or super pervy, and most of them really sucked.
So I looked into it some more, and I learned about the Futurians, a NYC-based group of young SF fans in the 30s and 40s that thought the mainstream club wasn’t communist enough, so they started their own group with the explicit goal of “actively work[ing] for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for [SF fandom’s] activities and existence.” By the way, that was Donald A. Wollenstein, founder of DAW books, which his daughter recently sold to the Chicoms—a fitting end, I might add.
To make a long story short, the SF fans in the mainstream club went on to become engineers and inventors and scientists, turning science fiction into science fact, while the Futurians went on to become influential authors, editors, and critics. SFWA was founded by Damon Knight (a Futurian) in 1965, and IMMEDIATELY the genre took a hard turn to the left. The 1970s was a really weird (and not in a good way) time for the genre, with some stuff that’s radical even by today’s standards, and I sincerely believe it’s because of the outsized influence that these communist Futurians were able to wield, with SFWA as one of their primary instruments.
It’s also telling that the genre turned again during the Reagan-Thatcher era and the fall of the Iron Curtain. From the late 80s through the early 90s, SF became a lot less political, and the quality generally improved. To me, that’s another piece of evidence that the SF genre was a major target for the communists and their fellow travelers, since why else would the biggest setback for the global communist movement also affect the trajectory of SF? Sadly, it only took them a decade or two to regroup under the aegis of cultural Marxism and recapture the ground that they had lost.
Wow, I had no idea. Seems you are correct, sir! 🙂