For those who don’t know about the Attack Helicopter Story saga: Neon Yang and NK Jemisin harassed the writer Isabel Fall (a trans woman) for writing a queer mech story.
And harassment really dosen’t do it justice becuase Fall was hospitalized for severe depression, and from what I’ve read has stopped their transition. Primarily becuase of intense gender disphoria brought on by Yang, Jemisin and their cretinous followers saying Fall must be a cis-man for writing this story. They didn’t even read it, they just didn’t like the title and invented a bizzare conspiracy theory that claimed Fall was a neo-nazi. Afterwards both of them gave a really shitty WhatApp apology and moved on with their lives, so much so that apparently Yang now has the gall to do this shit.
Dumb question: does queer mech story mean like a specific thing I don’t know about or is it literally a story about like gay robots?
The CIA invented pills to give soldiers so they identify with their equipment to improve performance and to let them opress the global south better after global warming has fucked up everything else. There are some more plot points but I forgot. So the soldier loses their identiy and becomes one with their attack helicopter.
If people were cool, the first thing google would show you when you googled that phrase would have been a rad queer cyberpunk anti imperialist story
It’s because the PMC struggle for relative social status leaves no room for morality, or even self-awareness. One’s income and access to future opportunities (and ability to avoid falling into the working class) depends completely on controlling a share of a fixed-size pool of social capital, so social competition is ruthless, and there is no place for empathy or regrets.
Everything I hear about sci-fi authors make them sound like some of the shittiest people in any creative industry.
Is this just a case of mistaken identity? The title is “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter”, and I can see how somebody could automatically assume the writer is just a chud
Pretty much, the story went viral on Twitter and people just assumed it was mocking trans-people based on the title. On Clarkesworld where it was originally published, Falls bio just said she was born in 1988 and didn’t mention she was a trans-woman, and she had no other internet presence, which some took to mean she was fake.
However, if you actually read the story it’s unmistakable that she is trying to reappropriate a transphobic meme, and the story itself was an exploration of identity and expression and their weponization by the State.
And there were a lot of people online who appreciated the story and tried to defend Fall, which may have shifted the conversation if big names in the sci-fi world didn’t use their influence to rally an online hate mob. Like in her apology, Jemisin literally said she never read the story and just assumed based on the title.
Which, given she made her career by dismantling tropes and critiquing the insular and white-male-centric foundations of her genre, is depressingly hypocritical of her.
This story still enrages me so much. Fall’s story was astoundingly good; a blend of radical politics and queer expression in a hard SF shell that you rarely see. She was literally one of the queer pioneers into a side of the genre that had been frequently hostile to queerness. She should have won a Hugo and a Nebula for it.
I’ll never read Jemisin again after the shit she pulled, I regret every dollar ever spent on her books. What a monstrous cruelty that, which the particularly angry part of me can’t help but fixate on, cut down what could have been a NAME in the field. Utter disgust for these fuckers.
Any more info on Jemisin’s involvement? Specific tweets, etc.?
https://theoutline.com/post/8600/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter-moralism
This has some screenshots of her tweets
