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Appendix N Really is Provocative – castaliahouse.com

Appendix N Really is Provocative

Wednesday , 22, February 2017 9 Comments

Used to I’d know if I was on the right track because I’d start getting a lot of flak. Not anymore! The low grade hostility and the suppression fire of snide remarks, sneering, and pedantic nitpicking just don’t cut it anymore. When it was just a collection of blog posts, the other side could still dismiss what I was doing as being a “mostly harmless” exercise in digging up obscure facts related to the origins of tabletop role-playing games. But now those blog posts have an awe-inspiring cover by Scott Vigil, a thrilling introduction by John C. Wright, piles of rave reviews, and the completely unexpected distinction of having risen to the #1 mark in the Literary Criticism category 0n Amazon. And that changes everything.

So what do they do now…? Normal people on the edges of the discussion notice Appendix N and then have honest questions about what it is and why it matters. Then I either comment or else link to their stuff in my own affable way. And then…? Crickets. A couple weeks later I come back to check up on why a normally hot topic is strangely cool and then I get the rest of the story: I’ve been unfriended, blocked, or else the blog post has been taken down altogether.

Here’s the comment that most recently triggered this behavior. It was in response to a guy that asked point blank why Appendix N was provocative:

Science fiction and fantasy before 1940 was essentially Christian and Western. The post-christian stuff is synonymous with the field for even the most zealous reformers today. The old stuff is now largely unimaginable to most creators as a comparison of contemporary works to C. L. Moore’s material makes evident. The transparent and aggressive subversions of Le Guin, Zelazny, and Moorcock are equally unimaginable today, however. The thing they were battling simply doesn’t exist! You can see a lively pluralism during the seventies as the culture war played out. The consolidation of key gatekeeping positions circa 1980 sealed the deal, however. Colleges indoctrinate students to more or less recoil in horror at anything from before 1980. Surveying every single review of the classic works that I can find, you can see Appendix N transition from being synonymous with the field in the science fiction and fantasy encyclopedias of the seventies to people pretty much ritually denouncing them. (You know the litany.) There were exceptions, but the old school game blogs had an entirely different ethos from the wider science fiction and fantasy scene. But even relatively open minded game bloggers were silent on the things that make Appendix N most controversial.

Man, I wonder how those game bloggers knew to never ever go near certain topics, even to acknowledge them as an open question…? I wonder how a subject that is utterly engrossing and which is relevant to anyone creating games and stories with a fantasy or science fiction theme could be off limits for so long? The reaction to Appendix N is actually the answer. The informal suppression and shunning that you see going on was surprisingly effective at stopping everyone before me. It really works! Journalists intrigued by the awesomeness of Leigh Brackett quietly stop digging when they come across Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Scholars enchanted by “Radium Age” science fiction quietly abandon their book projects for the flimsiest reasons. It happens all the time but you’d never know it. The people you trust to keep you informed on this sort of thing all folded in the face of whatever modern day Wormtongue it was that put them on notice.

It’s bizarre– like something out of the Old Testament or even a Philip K. Dick novel. But people really can’t talk about this stuff. The thing is… the people that mocked Appendix N Matters are the reason why Appendix N matters. And they are legion.

9 Comments
  • Santa says:

    Will ‘Appendix N’ be offered in physical format?

  • icewater says:

    And your book still sells far more than their works of criticism and author biographies that are hyped to no end on every single one of their blogs and sites, launch with audiobook versions and are instantly nominated for awards…

    It’s increasingly pointless, really… They are basically locked in this ever tightening bubble, and are are talking at others who are locked in it. And as more and more people are reading this, discovering suppressed classic authors and under the radar new ones, they will be receiving less and less genuine new blood.
    Let ’em be locked in their hermetically sealed word – their “placid island of ignorance”- then. Populace is growing ever older, ever more sickly, and there are rumors of black hole forming at its core.

    • deuce says:

      “And your book still sells far more than their works of criticism and author biographies that are hyped to no end on every single one of their blogs and sites…”

      Exactly. Yet, they somehow found Aramini’s massive book on Wolfe (an author many Regressives don’t care for) simply not worth reading and unsatisfactory.

      http://www.castaliahouse.com/?post_type=download&s=wolfe

      “One rule for thee, and another rule for me.”

    • H.P. says:

      There are #131 works of SFF criticism outselling The Geek Feminist Revolution at Amazon right now, but The Geek Feminist Revolution is the only one being praised and promoted at Tor.com, the Barnes & Noble SFF blog, etc.

  • deuce says:

    Is English a second language for Perez? Does he not realize what the primary definition of “provoke” IS?

    https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/provoke

    Obviously, APPENDIX N is “provocative”. We can see the reaction all over the Net. It seems the other side is spiraling into nitpickery at this point — as usual.

  • Rod Walker says:

    Nor is it just in the SF/F field. The James Bond novels sold something like 100 million copies worldwide, and while RW is not sure, he thinks Mickey Spillane sold upwards of 225 million copies over the course of his lifetime.

    The “official” critics hated those books, but many millions of people disagreed with their wallets.

    RW thinks that the collapse of traditional publishing’s gatekeeper function will help lead to a resurgence of fiction that doesn’t detest Western civilization.

    • deuce says:

      DR would agree with Rod Walker.

      Fleming was influenced by the pulp writers like Sax Rohmer and some of his stories even appeared in the man’s adventure pulps.

      Spillane was called the “master of pulp fiction”. He actually started his writing career in the comic book field.

      People are tired of boring, preachy anti-Western crap.

  • john silence says:

    You aren’t allowed to be provocative, because that is what they use for self-praise. Provocative, controversial, transgressive, risky, brave etc, etc… Go to TOR blog and see how often you saw those or related terms in relation to this or that. That’s how they congratulate one another. They’re never any of that, obviously, but they’ll ever be LARPing brave lil rebels, even when they have been in control for decades.
    So they ain’t giving you the right to be provocative. That would be a genuine controversy too, in this case. They’ll try to ignore this, regardless of its traction and the size of its readership.

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