Oh. Tom Doherty, No!*

[davidgillon]

This blew up at the start of the week, but I haven't had the energy to write about it until now.

Apparently a couple of months ago Irene Gallo, Tor's Creative Director, noted , on her own, non-company, Facebook page, how glad she was that Tor would be publishing Kameron Hurley's The Geek Feminist Revolution, and especially because it would make the Sad Puppies sadder.

Someone asked her who the Sad Puppies were, so she explained, not unreasonably that:

There are two extreme right wing to neo-Nazi groups called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in SF and Fantasy. They are unrepentently racist, mysogynistic and homophobic. A noisy few, but they've been able to gather some Gamersgaters around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year's Hugo Ballot.

Apparently the Puppies pitched a shitstorm about it last weekend, calling for Tor to sack Gallo. A weekend which curiously just happened to be the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend - that would be the same organisation that expelled Rabid Puppy guru (also noted racist, mysogynist and homophobic Neo-Nazi) Theodore Beale (aka Pox Dei, sorry Vox Day) over his use of the organisation's twitter feed to direct appalling racism towards Afro-American writer N K Jemisin**. Which would have been more of the usual really, but for how Tor responded.
 

On Monday Tor publisher Tom Doherty didn't tell the Puppies to take a flying f*ck, he disciplined Irene Gallo, for something said on her own Facebook page. Nor did he discipline her in private, in accordance with every principle of good leadership, he did it in public, through an open letter on Tor's website, throwing one of his own people to the wolves, er Puppies. Nor did he leave it at that, but he felt compelled to defend the Puppies as pro-diversity because they had some authors from diverse groups on their slates.

Do we really have to explain sub-text to the publisher of Tor? Do we really have to explain how the Puppies dressed up their slates with tokenism?

Apparently we do.

And then just to make things perfect, John C Wright, Tor author and recipient of _6_ Hugo nominations courtesy of the Puppies turned up in the comments to protest that it is a lie he is an unrepentant homophobe, and he could prove he wasn't a homophobe because {several hundred words of extremist homophobic rant deleted}.

Needless to say I'm seriously unimpressed with Tor in general, and Tom Doherty in particular.

OTOH I was impressed by Chuck Wendig's I Stand By Irene Gallo. Amongst other points he notes that Doherty said precisely nothing when Jim Frenkel's years of sexual harrassment of female fans while attending cons as a representative of Tor came out, but now he's oh so anxious  to discipline Irene Gallo in public.

The Gawker also has a reasonable summation of the clusterf*ck.

America's Largest Sci-Fi Publisher Gives in to Reactionary "Sad Puppies"

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*



*In the anti-mysogynistic tradition of 'Oh, John Ringo, No!'

** As I came across it while checking links etc, Amal el Mohtar's*** complaint leading to Beale's expulsion from SFWA can be read here, be warned it has all the evidence you'll need to realise just how horrendous Beale's views are, and that calling him a neo-Nazi is only the half of it. (This is a man who calls Anders Breivik a hero, that would be the same Anders Breivik who murdered 77 people in Norway, 55 of them teenagers).

*** One more reason to like Amal el Mohtar's work :)

Comments

[davidgillon]

Just came across a bunch of industry reaction (universally Oh, Tom Doherty, no!) gathered at http://www.dailydot.com/geek/tor-tom-doherty-irene-gallo-sad-puppies/