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.
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.
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.
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
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
