Worlds & Time

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Stross and Scalzi Are Wrong

Right now there are five blogs by authors that I heavily follow right now: Scalzi, Stross, Wheaton, Gaiman and Duncan. While there are a lot of other authors that I like that have blogs, those are the blogs that I find interesting in and of themselves and post updates regularly enough for me to keep track of them on a regular basis.

The other thing is that I usually agree with them on stuff.

Not on everything, true, but often. And when I do disagree with them, it's usually an issue of personal taste.

The last couple of weeks though, the science fiction annex to the blogosphere has been a place where I can't seem to find a position that I agree with (excepting the dust up about the Kindle2 text to voice thing).

That GRRM thing though? I didn't even have to go read what GRRM said before I knew I vehemently disagreed with Scazli and Stross about it.

Yeah, people were rude. And they were bugging him (and, personal confession here, I bugged him about it one time in person under the mistaken impression that he'd find it funny. I apologized at the time, but I don't think he believed me).

But there are a lot of circumstances around what GRRM did that make Scalzi and Stross just plain wrong about what they said. Dealing with upset fans who you've misled (inadvertantly or not) is one of those things that you will have to do if you are a popular writer with lots of fans who has decided to provide easy access to himself online.

Further, there's been a huge kerfluffle about other stuff. Which I am not going to talk about. And do you know why? Because it scares me to talk about it here.

That's saying a lot. I've talked about being gay here without reservation. I've talked about being an atheist. I've talked about my problems with jobs. I've talked about being depressed and all sorts of other stuff without much regard for boundary. But there are very few subjects which I will not discuss out of fear.

Sides are being taken. People are angry. And while I have an opinion on the subject it's obvious at this point that it would be detrimental to my future plans to express it.

It's not my opinion that would get me in trouble. In fact, I've talked about this subject in previous posts. It's being involved that is a bad thing right now. Your associations are being held against you in a way that is making me uneasy.

I know how paranoid that sounds, but I've seen how far some of the people arguing are willing to take themselves and it's too far. These are people that I thought would be serious and reasonable but they're seriously unreasonable instead.

As such, I'm not going there, nor am I going to link to it or cite any of the participants by name because I don't want to associate myself and I know how easy it is to follow a link back to it's source.

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