On the anniversary of 9/11, author Elizabeth Moon wrote a blogpost that started out sounding like a decent essay on citizenship and responsibility but quickly devolved into what can best be described as Islamophobia. This makes me sad on so many levels, because I'd always seen Moon held up by writers I respect as being a bastion of intellect and common sense in troubled times. I was looking forward to reading her books, especially Speed of Dark, which was recommended to me by several people I respect. Now I think I must apply Cat Valente's fuckmuppet principle. (It goes without saying that I disagree with the sum total of Moon's post, and fully support the building of the Park51 cultural center in its currently planned location.)
Several other authors have written profoundly important essays on their reaction to Moon's post, and I want to recommend these four especially:
Dissimilation by shweta_narayan
...the native peoples had the most troubles with the immigrants... by sanguinity
Non-violence for thee but not for me by sajia
(hat tip to both delux-vivens and asim for the links)
As usual, I agree wholeheartedly with the ever-wise Woodrow Hill, in his posts here here and here. I'm still torn on whether Moon should remain as Guest of Honor at Wiscon, as I feel her comments go directly against the grain of everything that convention stands for (though the tradition has been to have two GoHs per con, I think Nisi Shawl could GoH Solo quite handily), but I do hope that if she's kept on, we can use the occasion of her appearance as grounds for a lot of discussion and education, and have emailed the ConCom with that same request. Without an apology, I can't see myself sticking around for her GoH speech, though. Which is, again, a pity, because last year's from Mary Ann Mohanraj was one of the most memorable speeches I've ever heard in my life.
Dang, SF. Get it together.
I was really astonished by that post when I saw it last week. It really does start out sounding reasonable and then slips off the rails into crazy town.
Making my opinion of her all the worse, I just finished reading the full, 1,ooo+ pages of The Deed of Paksenarrion and I HATED it. It too starts out in a fairly reasonable manner and then veers off on a long slow decline into horrible.
Yeah, the only writing of hers I'd ever read were the two books she wrote with Anne McCaffrey, but I literally haven't read those in twenty years, so I have pretty much no recollection about the books other than that they focused heavily on cryosleep. I *was* really looking forward to Speed of Dark, which is supposed to be one of the few well-written SF books with a credible autistic character. Oh, well. Guess I'll spend the same few hours I was going to devote to that book on reading one of the other highly-recommended books in my stack.