Thread by @jessnevins

Of course (rolls up sleeves, takes off watch and earrings) what makes the Old Guard hate the New Guard isn't just loyalty to Asimov, Clarke, etc.

I see some of the Old Guard's online conversations, you know. Names you'd recognize.

It's not loyalty that motivates them.

They read the New Guard in bad faith. Their interpretations are deliberately hostile. They let their resentment at fading away and their growing irrelevance become the lens through which they read the New Guard. Reading as an act of grievance.

Most of all, it's wounded amour propre at women and BIPOCs taking their place. They are incredibly offended if you point this out, but when they think no one is watching the masks slip.

Sexism and racism and white privilege. That's ultimately what motivates them.

And, really, what they want, the Old Guard, isn't imaginative futures or predictive wizardry or even the comfort of old familiar writers. They want their power fantasies. They want to hold and point and shoot the blaster and be lauded for it, as in the Old days.

Superhero writers at least acknowledge the root of the genre, and question and critique and modify and subvert the genre's assumptions. The Old Guard can't bear to do any of that, because it means questioning their core selves. (I'm tempted to drag in Kristeva here).

My point, and I do have one, is that you cannot reason with the Old Guard, because SF isn't fiction, to them. It's a shield against women and BIPOCs and everything else they find threatening. It's their stuffed animal, their Binkie.

Pity them, if you can manage that. But fight them and crush them everywhere, because they *will* do the same to us if they can. Someone whose reaction to Ng's speech deservedly winning its award is "nausea" and spluttering fury is an active threat. Treat them as such.

Postscript: hahaha, I DID IT! My very first "you're a race traitor"!

I've been working so hard toward this moment, you've no idea.