Gatekeepers
It is with a sense of sorrow that I regard the burning rubbish heap of what were once the most successful and beloved franchises, across multiple genres, in history. Not one has been spared.
Lest any man accuse me of exaggeration, allow me to quote my own list of recent debacles, which include such properties as
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi,
- Star Trek: Discovery,
- Terminator: Dark Fate,
- X-Men: Dark Phoenix,
- 007: No Time to Die,
- Men in Black: International,
- Charlie’s Angels (2019)
- Captain Marvel (2019)
This is not to mention girl-type Doctor Who, and girl-type Ghostbusters (2016), and girl-type super-shows, such as Supergirl on the CW or Batwoman — who is a black lesbian, which is a triple word score in Victimology bingo.
Some observers add girl-type Mad Max: Fury Road to the list and some do not, but I have not seen this film and express no opinion. I have also not seen girl-type Ocean’s 8, nor the girl-type remake of Lord of the Flies.
Nor do I play video games, so I am blissfully unaware of what has become of Mass Effect, Mortal Kombat, Battlefield, Assassin’s Creed or Last of Us, but I have been told they live up the high standards set by Depression Quest.
Girl-type Thor is slated to appear in the next round of Marvel movies, or so rumor says. I am not sure about Kamala Khan, girl-type Hulk no longer called She-Hulk, or girl-type Captain Marvel. Please note that not one of these characters wears a name she made famous. All are borrowed.
And in print, we have the entire slate of Hugo-winners for the last five years running, and Nebula winners for ten years running, not to mention the entire work product of Marvel Comics, and most of DC.
I do not list here any rumored attempt to reimagine Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a politically correct mire of diversity hires and sexual peccadillos, in an attempt to “Martinize” the work, as I have not seen it, and will not.
But it is all rubbish. Those who claim to like this dreck, then again, there are no doubt art critics who thought hanging a toilet bowel in an art museum was art.
It is meant to be rubbish; it is by design. It is not an accident, and oversight, or a mistake. Anything profound must be made profane.
The comedian Evan Sayet can actually explain the why and wherefore of this, and all without cracking a joke. See here.
Many attempts have been made across many years by powerful editors, publishing houses, and so on, to shape public taste one way or the other by the famous gatekeepers of social engineering.
I submit that the fantastic stories and adventure tales of other worlds have been with us always, but that the particularity of the modern day is that such tales, like the fairy tale before them, was the attempt by modern materialists to exile such things away from the mainstream.
The peerless Dave Wolverton has an essay (see here) explaining the background history of how fantastic adventure stories and weird tales were harassed away from the mainstream.
He explains:
The postmodern literary establishment grew out of the philosophies of William Dean Howells (1837-1920), the “Father of Modern Realism,” who was an editor for The Atlantic Monthly from 1866-1876.
He claimed that authors had gone astray by being imitators of one another rather than of nature. He proscribed writing about “interesting” characters–such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth.
He decried exotic settings–places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where “nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story.” He denounced tales with sexual innuendo.
He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the “common man,” just living an ordinary existence.
Because Howells was the editor of the largest and most powerful magazine of the time (and because of its fabulous payment rates, a short story sale to that magazine could support a writer for a year or two), his views had a tremendous influence on American writers.
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The long and the short of it: the early socialist gatekeepers were harpies, despoiling the feast and spoiling the fare.
The muses fled the dry and barrens lands of polite society and fled to the least place least expected: the popular pulps, printed cheaply, beloved by the common man.
You see, apparently to Howells the Common Man was unfamiliar with the plight of the Common Man, and had to be informed. The Common Man himself, in the meanwhile, wanted to read about Rome or Tibet or other uncommon things, Atlantis or Barsoom, Conan or Doc Savage.
When, after STAR WARS, fantastic stories became respectable again among polite society, the gatekeepers and mavens of political correctness descended on the genre, and sought at first to mimic and mock what they could not comprehend, then to destroy it.
I do not doubt that most, if not all, such gatekeepers have a sinister motive, for nearly all are some variation of progressive or socialist, and always have been, all the way back to the days of H.G. Wells.
Or they are things worse than Wells. Sexual perverts haunt the field.
Marion Zimmer Bradley and Arthur C. Clarke spring to mind, and Robert Heinlein preached homosex and polygamy and incest with his usual avuncular nonchalance. George R.R. Martin elevated rape in fantasy adventure stories to a new level.
They are not alone. A gnostic writer named David Lindsay in 1920s invented a third positive sex, neither male nor female nor any combination thereof, long before critical gender theory was popular.
His fellow gnostic John Crowley in the 1970s invented a new sexual perversion for which there is no name: having pedo-incestuous necro-sodomy with the ghost of one’s own dead underage son — unless that scene was meant to be symbolic or surrealistic, in which case he merely symbolized or surrealized a new sexual perversion.
The idea of a Time Traveler sodomizing himself in his own past-future as an old lecher eager for youthful buttsex, or a committing a sex-change operation on herhimself in the womb before birth to a younger version in order to travel back and have have transgenderified ambisex with himherself also needs its own vocabulary of the unnatural, but this had to wait for David Gerrold also from 1970.
He was the chieftain of World Con where the puppy-kickers formally expelled science fiction from the science fiction genre, declaring it to be a political convention serving the Almighty Anus whose image was held up for adoration during the convention. I wish I were kidding, or, rather, that it was funnier.
So these are the ones the gatekeepers promote.
Other perversions are less popular. John Norman was long ago dropped from Ballantine and Daw, and scorned by the self-anointed elite, but seems to be soldiering on in the small press, as his 36th Gor book comes out this year. As best I can tell from this distance, same self-anointed elite praises the Fifty Shades of Grey novels and films, and no publisher scorns them.
But at least the bondage fetishes of male-feminist William Moulton Marston was quietly ushered offstage and forgotten, after Frederick Wertham publicized the nature of what the publishers of the day were promoting to children in his oft-reviled work SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT.
And yet, despite all the applause and awards showered on the homosocialists and their kindred, something decent remains and revives and spreads.
Larry Correia, who writes books that are popular and successful, at once moving and fast-moving, all about gun-toting monster hunters, film-noir X-men, and demonslayers with haunted swords, him they trample and despise.
For I also note that some of the greatest works in the field are done by men like Gene Wolfe or JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis, who either break the old definitions of the genre, or create their own.
So, yes, the gatekeepers have no track record of ever being anything but the enemies of virtue, reason, beauty and goodness; and yes Fredric Wertham was right.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
