And then, the social justice warriors took it all away.
This is a fantasy novel, and it wasn't supposed to be released until June 4, but now it may never be. Why? Because the author was forced to withdraw it after being shamed by a sea of losers who fancy themselves "warriors." Why? Here's Rod Dreher's explanation:
Very few people have even read the novel, but the mob attacked it as racist for a variety of reasons, one of them being that Zhao created a fantasy world where “oppression is blind to skin color” (this, from the press release). It’s a fantasy world, and people haven’t even read the book, but the mob was certain that Blood Heir is racist, and that its author — a young woman raised in Beijing, but now living in New York City — ought to be shut down.
Today, they got their wish...
They shamed Amélie so much that she decided to ask her publisher, Delacorte (an imprint of that little outfit called Random House) to pull the book. She says Random House agreed to this, but I wonder if they'll try to get her to reconsider; there's contracts involved, but most important, by this point Random House will have invested thousands upon thousands of dollars. Editors, designers, production people, marketers, advertisers -- they won't give back their pay. The thing may be already printed, but if by chance it isn't, the press time and paper and whatnot has been booked and paid for. Random House may not want to take a bath on this just because some dopes decided to go after another scalp.
Amélie wrote:
It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community.
Well, for what it's worth, here's my advice:
Tell them to pound sand, Amélie, and pound it hard. Then bark at the moon. The people gunning for you have not even read the book. They do not get a vote. They are not a "valued community." They are jackwagons and bullies.
Never, never, never, never apologize to the Twitter mob for something like this. They're not going to let you back in with your next book. You have a target on you now. They will be watching. That's what self-appointed Cultural Revolutionaries do.
Meanwhile, they're empowered to go find the next person they can ruin. And I do mean ruin -- they want to drive people to suicide, but they'll settle for you changing your name and leaving the country.
These are people who think the film Mary Poppins is racist now because Mary gets into blackface. Because she was inside a chimney. They get mad at old pictures of coal miners because the long-gone miners were in blackface. Because they were MINING COAL. These people are showing a rare combination of idiocy, ignorance, and viciousness. To hell with them.
Look, I've worked on a lot of these YA fantasy novels, and most of them are pretty awful. Soggy romance, tiresome and humorless heroines, meaningless action, improbable violence, boys who behave and think like no boy on earth has ever behaved or thought, and most of all, no matter what fantasy or SF world they are set in, a rigid adherence to the most asinine political correctness tropes going right now. However dystopic the world may be, to the SJWs they would be paradise, because every single thing they believe (at the moment) is believed by the good guys, and all the things that the bad guys believe are the things that average people believed about ten minutes ago, and the SJW heroes get to kill these bad people and win in the end. There's no mental exercise required for writing or reading these books, except for the laborious box-ticking.
I hope your book was better than that, Amélie, and if you had avoided bowing to their bullying, then it would have been. Believe me, the books I work on are not improved by political correctness. It only helps show how little depth the writers possess.
I don't fight publishers on this stuff, though; publishers are already encouraging political correctness as hard as they can, and they wouldn't listen to me anyway. This is more reason to think your book was in no way offensive to any progressive community, because -- and this is no small point -- Delacorte would have told you so. Everyone at Random House, I guarantee, believes in all the progressive things that the very people who attacked you believe in. Yet they saw no harm in your book.
If publishers want to publish crappy books that exist mainly to reinforce the tropes of Cultural Revolutionaries, I can't stand in their way; anyway, I believe in free speech.
Amélie, you ought to also. Write what you want. Maybe your next book should be The Pounding of the Sand or Bark at the Moon. You can dedicate it to the people who tried to destroy you. But whatever you do, stop apologizing. This is a free nation, or it will be as long as we are willing to fight the kinds of people who attacked you. They don't deserve your apology.
3 comments:
NEVER apologize to these types. It empowers them. Just when did my country go insane, anyway?
I was on board until I did some research and saw that she was framing her problems in terms of "Trump's America". She was on the side of the SJWs to begin with. She wasn't caving; she was going along with her own crowd.
Good question, Mongo.
That's an interesting find, Fiendish, and of course that's a sad attempt at blame-shifting. Looks like she's learned all the wrong lessons. You'd think someone whose family fled a Workers' Paradise would know better.
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