Cynthia Gómez: I know. I still doubt that he's going to see any consequences, but I do get your point.

J. Michael Straczynski naming names in the afterword of The Last Dangerous Visions for…reasons? This seems wildly irresponsible and self-serving at the very least. Redacted are the name of eleven “diverse” writers.

I am guessing he must have felt the need to pre-emptively blame someone else for the lack of diversity in the anthology he edited (the final version of). Can't really see that turning out very well for him.

OTOH, it seems to have turned out great for him. He hasn't lost gigs, and he clearly thinks he's right and doesn't need to listen to anyone's opinions. He seems to be doing just fine.

This is coming out today. There are already plenty of people reacting negatively to it. It usually takes at least 24 hours before anything like this reaches critical mass, and sometimes it dies down for a while.

Fair enough, but that entire foreword was in response to the last wave of negative reaction about exactly that problem.

I am talking about outing authors who did not want to be in the anthology, not the lack of diversity, which is a separate issue.

I know. I still doubt that he's going to see any consequences, but I do get your point.

Almost certainly not. The important question, though, is whether the eleven named WRITERS see any consequences.

I feel like this anthology is so niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche that I can't see any meaningful blowback on those authors? Like, I don't know who's named there, but I remember some names JMS was looking to ask a few years ago, and... they all have better things to do.

At the risk of conjuring a devil by naming it, I'm not worried about professional blowback. I'm worried about some slavering Ellison fanboy starting something.

Fair. Though I wonder how many "slavering Ellison fanboys" are still out there. JMS himself is probably on the young side for those.

Also fair. To judge by numbers among my students, there are still a statistically significant number of them in the twenties, but then that's a self-selecting population of people who want to be sf writers.

Huh. I'm genuinely surprised by that. I wouldn't think even wannabe SF writers now, even those digging through classics, would strongly connect to Ellison. But maybe that's my bias, since I didn't really connect to him in my 20s thirty years ago, let alone now.

Consequences in the sense of ruining a career, probably not. In the sense of making himself someone few people in literary SFFH circles would want to work with is a possibility. He is certainly not doing anything good for his own reputation.

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