Navigating Woke SF, Part 4: Götterdämmerung

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation today, after his sexual harrassment scandal that has seen an overwhelming number of women come forward. As tempted as I am to dive into the politics of this story, I bring it up only to provide context for this:

Yeah, I’m cringing too.

For the last several years—arguably, since the Ferguson riots and President Obama’s pivot toward intersectionality, this country has been progressing steadily toward the woke moral panic that we now find ourselves living through. Unlike the Red Scare, to which it is comparable in both scope and severity, the threat posed by “white supremacists” and other villains of the intersectional left is as laughable and contrived as the term “Cuomo-sexual,” and will age just as badly.

To anyone who studies history, it is obvious that there’s going to be backlash against all the gaslighting and hypocrisy of the woke moral panic that is currently gripping our nation. All around us are signs that the tide is beginning to turn.

The first indication that caught my attention was the “woka-cola” scandal over critical race theory (CRT) in Coca Cola’s employee training. Instead of giving a token response, Coca Cola reversed the policy and fired the executive responsible for implementing the policy. The only reason a major coproration would do something like that is because the scandal was hitting their bottom line in a way that they could not ignore—and yet, there were no organized boycotts on the part of the conservative right. Just a lot of disenchanted consumers quietly saying to themselves: “I think I’ll get a Pepsi instead.”

There are other indications of a growing cultural backlash all throughout our society, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to viral videos of parents standing up to CRT in their kids’ schools. All of the organizations pushing the woke moral panic are little more than establishment astro-turf backed by corporate money, while the organizations pushing back are genuine grassroots movements—and they’re winning. All of the ground gained by the left during their “long march through the institutions” is about to be lost in a single generation, perhaps even a single decade. Public trust of established institutions is plummeting, and with every glaring instance of “sophisticated” woke hypocrisy, people are rejecting the establishment narrative, just like in V for Vendetta. Bollocks!

So what does this have to do with science fiction? In the second part of this blog series, I pointed out the following:

Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.

That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.

If I’m right and a major backlash against the woke intersectional left is brewing, then many of today’s most recognized and award-winning publications and editors are going to fall, or at least become relegated to a position of cultural insignificance. Indeed, we had an indication back in 2017 that this was already starting to happen, when it came out that China Mike Glyer buys traffic from Chinese bots to artificially boost the stats for his Hugo award winning site, File 770.

I suspect that these woke institutions within the SF field will try to maintain the illusion of cultural relevance for as long as they possibly can, much as ex-Governor Cuomo did everything he could to maintain the illusion of his fitness to hold office (even publishing a book about his leadership during the pandemic—talk about gaslighting!) until his inner circle had abandoned him, the Biden administration had called on him to resign, calls had come for his arrest, and the New York state congress had a deadline in place to begin the impeachment proceedings.

When the illusions fade and the gaslighting can no longer be maintained, there is going to be a cultural götterdämmerung—a “turbulent ending of a regime or institution.” Or perhaps the götterdämmerung has already arrived, and it ends when the illusions can no longer be maintained. Either way, it seems that the smart move is to reject these woke SF markets—or, as they so arrogantly put it, to “self-reject”—in favor of going indie, going with the semi-pro markets, and otherwise building an audience that isn’t caught up in all this woke madness.