Thread by @jessnevins

As far as I know, mystery fandom--mystery fans--don't tell you that the only way into the genre is through Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, though of course fans of both want you to read the works of both authors.

New romance fans aren't gatekeeped w/Georgette Heyer & Barbara Cartland, though if the newbies haven't read either they'll be told how good both authors' works are.

Nobody in horror tells a new arrival that if they haven't read Oliver Onions or W.F. Harvey they aren't real fans

Over in the mainstream/realist genre (yeah I said it), reading mainstream authors from the 1930s will get you laughed at by fans of, oh, Franzen.

It's only SFF in which the genre's founding fathers (never the founding mothers) are used as clubs against new fans.

In their way, the SFF gatekeepers are the equivalent of the Lost Cause Southerners: clinging for dear life to this fantasy construction of the past that is at angle to the real thing, making secular saints of white men of reprehensible moralities and behavior.

What SFF needs more of are the SFF equivalents of those historians (like William C. Davis) who've done good, influential work in refuting the myth of the Lost Cause.

But even if there were such people, would the SFF gatekeepers listen? Probably not.

Let's look at Campbell, for example. He gets all the world's praise for his influence on science fiction. But during the 1937-1945 period there was more sf written outside of ASTOUNDING and the sf pulps than there was in ASTOUNDING etc. Much was garbage; some was very good indeed

There were professional writers--& very good ones--who constantly wrote science fiction in the general (non-ASTOUNDING/non-sf) pulps. There were many talented amateurs. The quality is on par with what was in ASTOUNDING. But none of these writers ever submitted to ASTOUNDING. Why?

Because Campbell's editorial style was seen as heavy-handed and unpleasant, and because Campbell's philosophy of sf, that it should show the “consequences of scientific development in terms of the changes
occurring in society," was not the sf these other sf writers wrote.

Campbellian sf looks quite restrictive and even stunted when you read the sf that was appearing in the other pulps & the mainstream magazines at the time. These sf stories were all over the map philosophically and aesthetically, and ranged from far-future adventure to social sf.

Those non-ASTOUNDING stories represent different paths that the genre could have taken. Campbell choked them all off, and left only one way to go. And, yes, the genre flourished--but no one ever thinks a bonsai plant is as healthy as one left to grow on its own. What's more--

if not for Campbell, the eternally bruised egos of the gatekeepers thanks to childhood mockery of their chosen genre *wouldn't exist*.

In the 1930s science fiction had a choice: to emphasize mainstream sf (the type in mainstream magazines) or embrace pulp sf (in the sf pulps).

Mainstream sf was treated with about the same level of respect as mainstream mysteries. SF, thanks to Campbell, went the pulp route, with the result being a conflation of "that Buck Rogers stuff" with all sf. (Mysteries made the same wrong choice, and paid similarly for it).

Now, bullies are gonna bully, whatever happens. But the intellectual bullies & gatekeepers of the 1940s & 1950s & 1960s, the librarians (hi, y'all!) and high school teachers and college professors, wouldn't have been nearly so awful had sf not gone pulp.

(I realize this is the literary version of Respectability Politics. But I think I'm right about mid-century cultural acceptance of sf, darn it).

So Martin's speech wasn't just racist, transphobic, sexist, and deliberately offensive, although God knows those are enough to earn him a good shunning. It's that he left out all the authors and stories and history that gainsay his preferred version of the genre's history.

Martin gave the sf equivalent of a Lost Cause speech, with Campbell standing in for Robert E. Lee.

Don't let people like Martin tell you what the history of your genre is.

One last thing (apologies for thread length).

We know (thanks to sales data) that the sf pulps sold very well in places like Harlem and Chicago's South Side. We know Black sf fans not only existed, but had clubs. We can be sure that a certain % of those fans wrote for the pulps

The truth is that today we know nothing about 95% of the writers of the pulps. Even in ASTOUNDING there are authors about whom no one knows anything.

Received wisdom as propagated by the likes of Martin is that the genre was written by white men and a handful of white women.

Was it, though? *Really*? Nobody can be sure, because nobody knows for sure.

Now, me, I think that there were plenty of Black (and Latinx and Asian) fans who submitted to the sf pulps, either under pseudonyms or their own names. I think a number of them were published.

Probably at the same rate that whites were published.

I know of no easy way to find the facts about these authors. But we have their stories. They can be read & considered & analyzed. We can find queer themes in stories that eluded previous generations of readers, for example.

Martin would have you believe the history of science fiction is written, and, surprise, it's a shower of white male mfers.

It's not. The history of sf is wide-open--undocumented--uncharted. Heavily white? Maybe. But just as likely to be populated with BIPOCs as just whites.

The history of the genre isn't the story of white male writers. It never was. It's the history of all of us.