The one danger of online fiction · 4:36pm Apr 24th, 2016
I'm a big advocate of online fiction. "Print must die," I say.
- Selling people books printed on paper disconnects reader and writer, both by preventing them from talking to each other, and by separating them into two discrete classes (published writers, and readers).
- Printing books require capital, which makes a few people gatekeepers, fashion-setters, dictators of what gets written.
- Online fiction can be animated, hyperlinked, multi-media, interactive.
- Books are cheap enough to read, but still too expensive to try out, use only parts of, or to collect as references. I can only afford to buy about 3 times as many books as I can read. Most of that money goes to rich people who own publishing houses, not to authors. Online books should mean more money for authors and readers. (It might not work out that way.)
Most people think the big danger of online fiction is that it will exclude poor people. This sounds plausible. But e-readers are cheaper than televisions, and ~every poor family in America that has electricity has a TV set. I've been in hand-made shacks in China with dirt floors, and they all had a TV set, with jury-rigged wires strung around the inside. Billions of poor people across the globe have a cell phone.
What I wrote about in "How intelligent search makes extremists more extremist" is the real danger. Every genre has some ideology. Science fiction and fantasy are relatively ideology-heavy. But there's enough variety that you'll find Robert Heinlein on the same shelf as Ursula LeGuin. But when fiction is online, one of the first things the recommendation engines will pick up on is ideology. And the "search" interface may have one checkbox for liberal, and another for conservative.
We could design a recommendation engine to throw out the components of preference it finds that align with political and other prominent ideologies.
The defining features of Christian fiction are nothing but ideology, so there's no way to give a "Christian" shelf or search checkbox without enabling people to filter out all other ideologies. I know lots of people who have a very strong preference for Christian fiction, and if they read non-Christian fiction, or let their kids watch non-Christian movies, they must be screened first for objectionable content. But those people have already opted out of the world of ideas anyway.
Yeah, I know: I read the Inferno and Purgatorio because I'm not interested in ideas. But then I'm just an engineer.
(See kids, this game is called nerdminton: we knock the snark back and forth between us using our backhands
)
Okay, seriously: your post, in its substance, has a point--but then how do you account for groupthink and radicalization before the advent of search engines? Because if Yeats was lamenting it in verse I doubt we can blame it on Zuckerberg.
I think what we're seeing is that AI is just like any other tool: it allows us to do what we were gonna do anyway, only faster and easier. This is still a problem--because as with all tools there are unintended consequences of doing something faster and easier--but that problem is one of degree not kind.
Reminds me of somepony I met at some Christian thing who only listened to Christian music, and said his standard for everything in life was that he "wouldn't do anything if it didn't glorify God".
I barely resisted the temptation to ask him how he goes to the bathroom.
3892972
I wouldn't have.
And now thanks to you, I have the greatest and most terrible images in my head.
3892983
"This is God's deuce."
Well, if you count the back-catalog, anyway. For modern printed works? Not so much. *cough* Hugo Awards debacle *cough* I'm just glad that so many of the classics are showing up online, be they legal versions or not.
Been that way for years in the Science Fiction and Fantasy world. Insert my rantings from "Fifty Shades of Landfill" here, pointing out why so many non-extreme-left mid-listers are singing the praises of Amazon e-books over print publishing. I lean left myself, but (IMO) the modern right-wingers write better stories, or at least make the anvil-dropping entertaining.
I'm really not sure if that is a danger inherent to the medium through which we consume fiction. How much did people discover fiction with different ideologies back before the internet? As far as I remember one choose a book based on reviews, past experience with the author and word of mouth. There was a limited set of people who bought and read everything they could put their fingers upon, but I dare to bet (not huge sums, let's say a beer) that there were not that many of them.
All the others received their fiction already filtered in some way or another.
Back in the days when J2ME featurephones were a thing, there have been programs that would compile ebooks into J2ME applications with a built-in reader. Most of the phones of that era are in a landfill somewhere, even in the poorest countries, and more modern devices don't even need that. So poverty isn't really a factor here anymore.
The biggest danger of online/digital fiction is that there's way too much of it. It isn't even that the search is biased, it's the fact that very often, you don't even know what to search for and why.
Question: is it possible to actually buy most e-books yet? En masse?
And let me be very specific about that; when I buy a dead-tree book, I own the damn thing. I can do whatever I want with it. It will always work for me; I can leave it on a shelf for fifty years and take it back down and open it and it will still function. I can sell it to a friend. I can burn it, although I would never burn a book. (I feel weird about disposing of books in any way even when I've had to.) Nobody can come into my house and say "sorry, we've decided we don't want you to have this book after all" or "we've discontinued support for the specific model of eyeball you have."
In the past, I've flirted with buying e-books, but my standard basically amounts to "I give you money, you give me a DRM-free ePub or PDF file. This will complete our transaction and I never need to see you or deal with you again if I don't want to."
And that's almost never been possible. They've been in proprietary formats. They've been bound to specific devices. I'm willing to buy an e-reader for portability and functionality, but I'm not willing to buy one whose purpose is "your e-books are tethered to this device and only this device. You can't move them to a different digital device." So I haven't bought anything.
And then after awhile I just stopped paying attention.
I dunno. It might just be me. It took me a long time to get used to buying games over Steam. I was like "no, fuck you, if I'm paying for a video game I want a piece of physical media that will remain in my position." I've largely gotten over that, but with books it feels different.
So legitimate question. Can I buy e-books en masse these days? Or is it something only a few publishing houses and authors are doing? Because I don't know.
3893032
The magic of electronic formats is your ability to alter them. Software like calibre lets you back up your books, strip off the DRM, and otherwise render the EULA null and void. I've bought a few books from Amazon, and despite the Terms and Conditions, I own a copy of each of them.
3893013
My question:
Is whether all this interaction will lead to the death of "death of the author." 'Cause that just seems to me like a recipe for zombies and vampires and other undead monsters getting involved.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding things again...
Mike
3893046 I don't feel like I should have to jump through hoops of dubious legality in order to get something I buy into a usable format, tho.
Depends. I've always loved R. A. Lafferty. Turns out everything he's done, especially the wildest most psychedelic stuff, is mystical Catholic ideology and very serious attempts to inspire and reach out to people through the medium of fiction. If I followed the breadcrumbs I too might have discovered some rather astonishing trains of Catholic doctrine.
It never did me the least bit of harm, and has inspired me through the years. I'm still me, it's just that my world is a lot richer because Lafferty put so much heart and soul into lighting up my imagination.
Now, if online computer stuff had labeled all of that 'Catholic Psychedelicism' from day one, I might not have gained as much because the computer and its categories would be dictating how I could approach the work: in a way that Lafferty himself never intended.
Why is the bit about separating them into two discrete classes bad? I'm guessing the implicit hierarchy?
And why should readers and writers want to talk to each other anyway, at least in some way that couldn't simply be done by shooting off an email? What about print makes emailing someone harder than it would be otherwise?
Human minds seem to require gatekeepers to function. People can't sift through anywhere near as much information as is currently available. If it's not going to be book publishers, who actually provide a concrete good (the actual book, made of real paper and ink) in addition to their gatekeeping, then it's going to be electronic gatekeepers who specialize in nothing but matching people to ideas they already like, and who will become very coldly and mechanically efficient at their task.
The "world of ideas" is for most users a drug, and a sterilizing drug at that. The readers of Christian fiction will have more children than them.
3893089
Speaking as a Catholic, allow me to say that you absolutely should do this for the entertainment value. Our doctrine is a two-thousand-year old Frankenstein's monster and it is by turns hilarious, terrifying, outrageous, and very occasionally actually uplifting.
There's some batshit stuff in there. The Gnostic schisms alone, I mean, that is a rich vein.
3893032
Most places besides Amazon use the epub format (as far as I can tell) which works on just about every device. If you go to, for example, Smashwords, you can download epub or pdf versions of what you buy.
As for Amazon books, you give up one convenience (format that only their app/devices use) for a whole lot of other conveniences. Heck, amazon ebooks are better than Steam games in most respects for the ease of use factors. The kindle app works on nearly everything and as the other person said, with a bit of hoop-jumping you can easily strip the annoying stuff off.
3893110 Lafferty's all about Teresa of Avila, if I remember correctly. To the point of shout-outs in the actual books, and chapter headings that may be literal quotes from her writings.
It reads very much like R. A. Lafferty and fits perfectly with his aesthetic.
3893032
This is one of my main issues as well.
Add the permanence of the book, you can't edit it without anyone noticing unless you are meticulous in the extreme.
In digital formats people could go full 1984, and revise and change the words in every single text when they fall out of favour.
Yes you could have countermeasures for this but can they be fully trusted?
Me being a slow writer/reader:
As for if you can buy DRM-free books.
I think smashwords are DRM-free, not too sure of how much of their library is anything of interest.
Calibre has a user-plugin, not part of the official release, that removes DRM. Worked for me with kindle books I have a Kobo to read on.
This makes me wonder if someone reacted the same way when bookstores grew large enough to have genre sections.
3892991
I guess I'm not with it enough to be aware. I haven't noticed.
3892972
3892983
3892987
Praise the Lord and pass the toilet paper!
3893032 I buy lots of e-books from Amazon, but only because I can still strip the DRM with Calibre.
Amazon keeps forcing updates of its reader--that's another scary thing about DRM; about once a year, I go to read a book with the Amazon e-reader, and it will refuse, and say, "You must install a new reader [to read your old books that the same old reader can still read, but we won't let you." So sometimes I can't even read my books unless I have an internet connection. Someday that new update will no longer support my OS or my hardware, and people with DRM will be told they have to upgrade to Windows 14 to read their books. What I'm more worried about is that someday the DRM stripper will stop working.
3893212 Doubtless it would have if it could have. But did that happen? Was there a time when librarians and booksellers didn't order books? The Library of Alexandria had some kind of organization to its shelves in Roman times, because certain authors were lost entirely because their shelves burned.
3893323
Let's put it this way. Last year, Tor Books' creative director and several senior editors were repeatedly calling anyone who found recent years' Hugo winners to be skewed too far to the left "nazis". Including, by name and even to their faces, some of their own contracted writers, whose books they personally edited and (nominally) promoted.
This was not seen as particularly noteworthy, and was swept under the rug after a notpology from the head of Tor. Said notpology was only issued after a letter-writing campaign, and nothing else ever came of it.
3892969
See, that's interesting. There's clearly a 'Christian' genre in America[1], and just as clearly it is something other than 'artworks inspired by Christianity.' I mean, the notion of describing the Divine Comedy as 'Christian literature' or Matthäus-Passion as 'Christian music' in the American sense of 'Christian X' causes my eyes to cross. It seems wrong. Not that I deny the ample and riving influences of Christianity on the two artworks above, it's just not... that sort of 'Christian.'
I wonder if it is merely an impression or it actually means something and there's a sensible definition to separate the two...
[1] There's a Christian bookstore in the city I live in. I've been in it. It contains nothing but devotional literature. There aren't any novels in it or anything. Lives of the saints, bibles, concordances, cross-references, and all that stuff. Which rather makes sense to me, really.
3893323
I am very much not with it myself, but in the newer SF I've read, I've noticed a greater-than-usual influence of contemporary American ideologies. Except I guess 'The Expanse.' I cannot figure out what the authors political slant is at all. I figure that's a good thing.
3893489
Hint from a native: "Christian" when used by itself, is not a catch-all term over here. When an American says "Christian," they most likely mean Fundamentalist Christian. If they mean Catholic (or other traditional sect) they'll say so. Ask an American Catholic if they're a Christian, and most of the time, they'll say no. Ditto Mormons.
3893442
This is flatly untrue. She did not refer to "anyone" who found recent years Hugo winners to be skewed too far to the left as nazis.
What Irene Gallo did was refer to the Rabid and Sad Puppies groups as neo-nazi groups.
That's possibly over the top when it comes to the Sads, although given some of the bullshit I've seen from Correia and Torgersen there's a case to be made, but it is 100% goddamn true when it comes to the Rabids. Theodore Beale is a nazi, straight up. In fact comparing his ideology to that of National Socialism might actually be unfair to National Socialism rather than the other way around. The Rabid Puppies were explicitly organized around the idea that black people aren't human and woman are only barely human.
The fact that her company was in a business relationship with some of those people is irrelevant to the fact that she was right unless she somehow violated their contracts, which, as far as I can tell, she did not.
3893212 Yes. Definitely.
3893536 Sad Puppies started their campaign from the position that the Hugos had become an ideological monoculture - which is true. They have, and they've tended to create a particular trajector for speculative fiction that is - IMO - not conducive to the perpetuation of the craft in any meaningful sense.
The Rabids, meanwhile, are the literary equivalent of /pol/ latching onto that campaign for the lulz. Don't make the mistake of judging the former by the latter, because the latter is about as representative of the whole movement as a tassel fringe is representative of a table cloth.
Ah, but who defines what constitutes an unacceptable component? How do you keep they system's creators and maintainers from slipping their own biases into the system whether subconsciously or deliberately?
But let's say you do manage that. You have a crew that can be relied upon to create a completely objective system. How do you keep your customers and suppliers from bringing their biases in with them? Because both are going to try, not on purpose but, they will try.
How? Well, intelligent search engines work on one of two primary methods. Making suggestions based on correlations between either products or customers (the the technical terms escape me, I'm working off an article in a tech mag from some months ago). These are already present on Fimfiction in the Similar and Also Liked lists on the sidebar. (At least that's what they appear to be, haven't seen the backend, haven't asked knighty. Going on assumptions.)
Product focused systems seek to provide products that match the characteristics (tags) of products you have already bought (read/liked/whatever). This is what drive sites like Pandora and the Fimfic Similar lists. If you asked a Product system for recommendations after reading Past Sins it would try to find other Sad, Dark, Slice-of-Life AU stories with Twilight, an OC, Nightmare Moon, and the CMC. Fimfic suggests a bunch of Nix fics by other authors with similar tags.
Bias in Product focused systems will come from the suppliers. As you seek to provide ever more accurate results to your customers you will have to add more and more tags to your products so you can filter down to the most appropriate results. As this process continues you will have to contend with the fact that just because you aren't filtering for politics, most people's politics are based upon other characteristics of their personality and philosophy. Such that you will soon find your results segregated almost as effectively as they would be if you had just left the political filters in place. Like how Friday's blog showed that while book reviewers do not deliberately discriminate in their work one can fairly reliably guess the gender of the author based on what sort of story they wrote.
Customer focused systems suggest things based on what other customers similar to you have bought in the past. This is what drives things like Amazon's "customer's who bought this also bought:" and Fimfic's Also Liked lists. If you asked a Customer system for recommendations after reading Past Sins it would try to find the stories that were liked the the larges number of people who also liked Past Sins. Fimfic suggests all of Pen Stroke's other Nyx fix.
Customer focused systems themselves are inherently unbiased. However the customers providing the data for those systems are biased as hell. Birds of a feather will shop together and in short order you'll have the system helping to maintain a bunch of little ideological ghettos.
So that's you challenge, to keep not only the system from separating people but to stop them from separating themselves. The only solution I can come up with is to keep the ideological tags hidden from the users and use them to drive an internal affirmative action algorithm that occasionally inserts opposing viewpoints into peoples results. A solution which I expect would be neither popular nor practical. It would also be rather hypocritical.
Of course I may be allowing perfect to be the enemy of good in this situation. Without knowing how much bias exists in existing systems it's hard to say how much of an improvement you'd get and whether it'd be worth it or not.
------------
3893032
Have a look at gog.com. No DRM, you can download a .exe installer and store a copy of it for later. Catalog is heavy on older games tweaked to run on newer systems but they're getting more new stuff and working up an equivalent to the steam client for those who want that functionality.
gamersgate.com is supposed to be similar but I haven't used it.
3893578
I did not mean to impugn the character, or general worth of people based on what they like. I apologize if this is what you got out of my comment: clearly my writing was unclear.
I was merely considering how odd the term 'christian' is in modern parlance and how it clearly has extra baggage, and how I picked this baggage up without considering it, merely from context. It's used in a very specific way and I picked up on it when learning the language. After all, bad or good, 'christian fiction' somehow doesn't mean the Divine Comedy in my head even though if I consider the words in isolation, of course, what else could it be but christian fiction? But you wouldn't expect it in a Christian bookstore? Or would you? Because, of course, I've never clapped my eyes on one of those and so all I have is what I got from trying to absorb the anglophone weltanschauung by way of osmosis.
As for me, personally, I try not to judge on taste. I mean, I for one, have utterly atrocious taste and so if I was inclined to throw stones I'd be put off by the difficulty of finding a window to open in the glass walls of my house. Ahem.
That all said, reading your comment, I was struck by a possible Devil's advocate (I represent Mr. Louis Cypher pro malo, of course) quibble I could make: What if disdain for people fond of the sort of thing you'd find in a christian bookstore is not about what they like, but about the exclusivity of what they like. That it isn't about a deficiency of their taste but of a narrow-minded approach. Like the people Bad Horse knows who apply a rather rigorous censorship regiment to all their media?
3893562 I don't personally buy that the two groups are somehow unrelated. Last year (or maybe the previous year) their official logos were by the same artist and were basically identical other than in one the dogs were sad and in the other the dogs were rabid. Sure, that isn't exactly a hard binding link, but it feels rather suspicious.
3893619
Huh, that was quick.
No, I'm sorry, that wasn't directed at you, but rather at Bad Horse's post--which he has now edited to make plain that he does not, in fact, dismiss people intellectually based on the fact that they read silly cheesy stuff (like Christian fiction. Or MLPFiM fanfic
)
So I saw he'd edited his post and that removed my objection so I deleted my second comment and OH LOOK IT'S HALEY'S COMET!
Seriously, I'm quite sorry that went amiss. I had no desire to make you feel like you'd said anything wrong.
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3893536
The SFWA are a bunch of rats on a sinking ship fighting over who gets to drown last.
And the Internet self-publishers are clustered around on their rafts trying to save them and the rats are going "OUR PROUD RODENT SPIRITS DEMAND A PROPER SHIP, NOT YOUR LOWER-CLASS FLOTSAM!"
3893625
My phone rings when I get a FimFic notification.
Ah. Okay. Sorry. You seemed put out, and I felt I had been misunderstood.
Oh God! And nearly half a century ahead of schedule too! You all know what this means! NIBIRU IS REAL! FLEE! RUN! PANIC!
Personally, I believe that publishing houses are a useful filter that keeps under control the crap content on a bookstore: if you believe your fiction is good, you send it to multiple publishers, who then decide whether this particular story fits their publishing or not. If many tell you that they don't believe that your work is worth for them to invest on printing & distribution, then you can believe that you will not make a profit if you decide that they were crazy and you decide to self-publish. A friend of mine lost his house due to doing precisely that.
3893514
Oh, stop trolling the foreigners.
This is factually incorrect and absurd on multiple levels. Furthermore as a kid who went to parochial school I can definitely, definitively and unequivocally call shenaniganum sha-nah-nah-num on you.
3893676
In all honesty, I was highly skeptical of this claim. I know that certain denominations of protestant evangelical Christianity really hate Catholics and claim they aren't Christian at all[1]—whatever Jack Chick belongs to seems to be of this view, and historically the Know Nothings were a bit like this too. But denominations such as these are surely the minority, and anyway, I really doubt Catholics would say they aren't Christians. They are rather big on the whole Christian thing in my experience.
[1] Some sort of... takfiri Christian, I guess?
3893104
Imagine if people didn't play baseball anymore unless they were professionals. That's the situation in writing. And in music. It didn't used to be that way.
Why did you comment on this blog post? Why do people comment on stories?
The gatekeepers are bad at finding good things, and their dogmas amount to a degree of censorship.
3893536
I'm not familiar with Ted Beale, but if you're going to write that about live people on my blog, I need you to reference someplace where he says that black people aren't human, or that women are only barely human. "Nazi" is usually used metaphorically now; I assume you don't mean he is either a nationalist or a socialist, for instance. But the last 2 claims are too specific to throw out there without evidence.
3893605 I do shop at GOG sometimes, but if you want an AAA PC title the day it comes out without the hassle of hauling yourself to a store and buying the physical media, you're usually limited to Steam.
Now, I like Steam as a platform. I do. It works and works well! It's hardly perfect, but no distribution is. But I really was edgy for a long period of time not having physical copy, because I am The Olds, and having physical copies of media is something I grew up with. I could install Wing Commander II off floppies right now if I wanted to! It would involve a nontrivial amount of work on my part (although maybe not; dosbox has come a long way as an emulator) but I could do it.
I try not to get too bent out of shape by DRM schemes. I do. I understand. People would like for their shit not to get stolen. I sympathize. But god dammit, I just want to buy something, and I am extraordinarily reluctant to do so unless I'm buying it.
You know Bad Horse, what started out as a sedate meeting of your literary salon has devolved into a vulgar brawl.
That's how you become a popular host!
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My wife taught for several years in a Hispanic school district in LA county, and I can say with complete certainty, that none of her students would call themselves Christians, and would even deny it if you told them they were.
That said, no, the majority of Catholics in the US are aware of the hierarchical nature of the labels, but when asked about their faith, they're still not going to call themselves Christians. That's not because they think they aren't, but because undifferentiated "Christian" means fundamentalist to most people in this country.
My friend who is a Jesuit priest assures me that the distinction is fairly important (to them), because a great deal of what is advertised as Christian fiction in the US is based on fundamentalist mythology (like the Left Behind series) which is heretical under Catholic doctrine.
3893807
You...you actually think that Los Angeles is typical of most of the U.S.?
I''ve lived there. And several other places (Tulsa, Houston, Maryland, Michigan). It isn't.
No, really: you've taken the evidence of a bunch of children that your wife taught in one school in one city in a rather unusual part of the U.S, and generalized it to the entire country.
I'm not disputing the evidence of your senses. I will dispute that it is representative, speaking of which...
...so you've polled "the majority of Christians," then? What was your sample size?
I'll agree that the people who go on and on about CHRISTIAN CHRISTIAN CHRISTIAN I'M A CHRISTIAN LOOK LOOK EVABODDY CHRISTIAN aren't particularly good examples of Christianity.
But I learned that in Catholic school. For that matter, the fact that pietism was not the same as (and exclusive of) piety, was old news in Biblical times.
3893536
Irene Gallo was far from the only person involved. The Neilsen-Haydens and Mr. Feder, among others, were also involved. I'd provide quotations and links to context, but most of what I've got bookmarked has been memory-holed since then. Additionally, multiple witnesses reported that PNH (Senior Editor and Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books) accosted one Tor author at the Hugo Awards, and insulted her husband, another Tor author.
Theodore Beale is an (entertaining) extremist, and the Rabids have been quite clear that their only remaining goal is to burn the whole thing down, but your characterization of their motivations is, as you say, "flatly untrue". The whole thing is laid out in plain English on the blogs of Vox and his Ilk, and as far as I can tell, hasn't been redacted. I know there wasn't any secret back-channel racist plot, because I was watching the livestreams when the planning was going on. It was straight-up "they're lying about Vox, they're lying about the Sads, and they're a bunch of assholes, so let's fuck them up" spite. No -ism required.
That said, shouting "but Vox Daaaaay!" doesn't make any of the motivations behind the Sads (and to a lesser degree the Rabids) less valid. "Not my circus, not my monkeys" as the Sads are wont to say.
-------
In any case, the point of my previous post wasn't to dig up old dirt on individuals, but to point out the widening rift between left and right in SF&F publishing. Given that the publishers themselves lean left, right-leaning authors are finding that they're better off looking elsewhere.
[Disclaimer: I lean left. I just want to read a good story, dammit. Leave the bloody politics out of the publishing process.]
3893807
Huh. Must be an American thing. The Catholics I know describe themselves as Christians readily.
And 'Left Behind' is explicitly dispensational premillennialism, isn't it? That's the only theological position that allows for the rapture. That's rather heretical in most forms of Christianity, really.
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I'm so glad you asked.
Actually, I'm not. This stuff is awful. But let's dive in anyway.
Beale got into a dustup with NK Jemisin awhile back. Let's take a look at some of his words there:
That got your attention? Let's go a little deeper:
Charming.
Some of his greatest hits with regard to women:
Let's get something about homosexuality in there as well, because why not.
I have not posted any links. I will not link to the man, period. But if anyone feels like I'm cherry-picking here, every quote I just threw up is trackable back to its source as the first result by punching them into Google. You can judge for yourself.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Beale also believes that the Obama Administration orchestrates mass shootings as false flag operations to take your guns away and a bunch of other equally vile and/or nutty stuff.
Calling him and the organization he founded a bunch of neo-nazis is 100% justified.
3893782
That comes out of a dust-up between Beale and the SFWA. Shortly after Beale ran for SFWA president (and embarrassed many by airing some dirty laundry), Beale made unflattering remarks about NK Jemisin (a black woman). These were determined by the SFWA to be racist and sexist, resulting in the (arguably illegal) ousting of Beale from the SFWA.
You can read the SFWA's report on the incident here, and Beale's response here. Note that much of the context is only referred to in passing, as this was an internal disciplinary matter. You can find lots of editorializing and out-of-context quoting on both sides by searching for their names together on Google, though.
EDIT: Might want to search out the context of the quotes in 3893857
From Beale's reply to the SFWA:
The whole thing's an organizational-politics clusterfuck, honestly. The guy's got a mouth the size of Trump's, and he says a lot of stupid shit, but he's hardly Hitler.
3893834
It's not. I've lived on the East Coast, the West Coast and the Gulf Coast of the U.S. over the course of a half-century, much of that as a Catholic and all of it as the child and sibling of Catholics who themselves have lived in a lot of different parts of the U.S. Some Catholics may behave that way. None of the Catholics I've known have done so.
3893817
I wrote "the majority of Catholics." Are you saying that you believe the majority of Catholics don't know that they are also Christians? Or did you misread what I wrote?
3893834
Yeah, I've traveled widely, and it is an American quirk. Haven't run into it elsewhere.
Yep. I don't know the status of that belief in other sects, but Father Stephen is pretty adamant that it's garbage and, "Those pendejos are gonna get 'raptured' to Hell!" But it seems to be extremely wide-spread in the US.