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Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear Accused by Alexandra Rowland


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22 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

I'm totally burnt out on all this [all of it, not just the Lynch et co drama] and yet... And yet I keep scrolling Twitter and the News expecting to find out Myke Cole's been dumped by all of his publishers.

But nope.

I feel similar. I'll just be sitting in the corner quietly clutching my Pratchett books.

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21 hours ago, Gertrude said:

OK, so I've read a little more about this and unless Rowland's claims of this being a pattern and them not being the only one to experience this, I'm ready to write this off as pure drama that doesn't belong in the public forum. If something more substantial comes out, I can re-evaluate, but right now this just seems not any of my business.

Same.There's been nothing implying a non-consensual thing happened (i.e. drugs, alcohol or outright rape/assault) so it's more like the Aziz Ansari stuff vs something worse. 

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On 6/27/2020 at 10:24 PM, JEORDHl said:

I'm totally burnt out on all this [all of it, not just the Lynch et co drama] and yet... And yet I keep scrolling Twitter and the News expecting to find out Myke Cole's been dumped by all of his publishers.

But nope.

He has. It was over some twitter feeds. 

 

Or am I misreading your post and you already knew th at? 

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2 hours ago, Andrew Gilfellon said:

He has. It was over some twitter feeds. Or am I misreading your post and you already knew that? 

Thou art not. 

This is ginchy news, thanks.

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On 6/27/2020 at 10:48 PM, DanteGabriel said:

I feel similar. I'll just be sitting in the corner quietly clutching my Pratchett books.

I'm clinging to Bujold and Hobb. If anything comes to light about them i'm just going to give up on reading forever.

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I hadn't realized that Myke Cole was in some sort of trouble. Dropped by his publishers? Ouch

We're in a new era and there's going to be a lot of artists who previously got away with bad behavior/actions will have a reckoning. For the ones I truly cared most about, I'll have to go through the painful process of trying to extract what I found of value from the art and keep it separate from the artist. The rest I'll just dump in the trash (Marion Zimmer Bradley was thrown in the trash with some force). I've been doing that with musicians for decades but now we're seeing more and more of artists, celebrities, and news people getting their comeuppance. I welcome the reckoning to those bad actors but it's still going to be a rough ride for us fans. 

I'm having a really hard time not thinking "gee, Scott, maybe you should stop trying to get laid and try writing". I know, I know, he has other problems. But jaysus, try to keep it your pants dude.  

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1 hour ago, Jerol said:

I hadn't realized that Myke Cole was in some sort of trouble. Dropped by his publishers? Ouch

...

He apparently had harassed people at conventions (ie work-space for people in the field) while under the influence of alcohol, apologized back then. And never changed his behaviour (enough) to prevent it happening again.

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3 hours ago, Jerol said:

I'm having a really hard time not thinking "gee, Scott, maybe you should stop trying to get laid and try writing". I know, I know, he has other problems. But jaysus, try to keep it your pants dude.  

I hate this presumption that writers can only succeed through monastic focus on their work. They're just people with a certain skill set, which means plenty of writers are completely capable of producing great work and being fuck-ups in other ways. Asimov was a total lecher and Hemingway a drunk, etc... 

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2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

I hate this presumption that writers can only succeed through monastic focus on their work. They're just people with a certain skill set, which means plenty of writers are completely capable of producing great work and being fuck-ups in other ways. Asimov was a total lecher and Hemingway a drunk, etc... 

Yeah, I came off as a little harsh. Monastic focus is for monks. I'm just saying that for a guy that delivered 3 books in fourteen years (his struggles with depression aside) maybe partying at cons and chasing women could go on the backburner. Again, I realize that authors are not anyone's bitch (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman). 

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42 minutes ago, Jerol said:

Yeah, I came off as a little harsh. Monastic focus is for monks. I'm just saying that for a guy that delivered 3 books in fourteen years (his struggles with depression aside) maybe partying at cons and chasing women could go on the backburner. Again, I realize that authors are not anyone's bitch (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman). 

Yeah, I rather suspect he spends far more time at home than he does at cons or "chasing after women".

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I'm wondering if it is appropriate to continue having this discussion now (especially about someone who is also, if fairly nominally these days, a board member). It appears the matter was a private one between three consenting adults, despite at first glance being part of the wider "authors appearing like arseholes in public spaces and/or using their professional power inappropriately" debate. That no longer appears to be true. Any further developments in the public arena can be discussed as part of a general discussion about what's going on with all the other cases.

It feels like this discussion was already bouncing back and forth over the line between something germane to the wider discussion of author behaviour in public and tawdry gossip, and now appears to more firmly be lodging in the latter position.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Of course, at the exact same time I was typing that, another story related to the matter broke on Twitter. Sigh.

From a Twitter account with two posts ever made, and now a statement from Bear:

https://twitter.com/matociquala/status/1278113411914772481

 

Quote

Just so you all know, an unknown actor who is possibly Requires Hate is just about to launch a really fucking big disinformation campaign about
scottlynch78 and me.

If a whole bunch of accounts you've never heard of start launching really wild accusations, don't be surprised."

If you're wondering why RH is back in the fray, she took advantage of Ann Aguirre's post naming names to forward her own "I was done wrong by the reports about me, full of lies" go at rehabilitation:

https://twitter.com/hatchmel/status/1277926903609880581

Link has a picture.

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 The world is burning up, and down, and every other way, with disease, crashing economy and environment, and sf/f writers and fans and etc. are ... burning with ... this?  What an sf novel we have here.  Charlie Stross forget Lovecraft in space and alternate dimensions and how to handle the future because everything you have imagined has had to be jetisoned by Developments In the Real World -- this is where it is at in sf/f. This is not a dig at Charlie at all -- he's trying so hard to be relevant.  But here we are.  Sheesh.

 

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RH/winterfox/Benjanun was a trash person in the past, and I would not be surprised if they are a trash person to this day. Was definitely not surprised to see them leaping in with both feet at the slightest opportunity (and a really random one at that).

No idea if Bear is right that RoH is behind this pair of randos tweeting/RTing some unverifiable accusation, but as RoH has no credibility at all I'm not putting it past them. Certainly, part of their MO in the past has  in part been wrapping other people up in their BS and getting them to do their dirty work for them.

@unJon

Yeah. I mean, I guess he's not a midlister, exactly, because TLoLL has done very well, but I suspect there are midlisters who have sold more books in the same time frame as he has. 

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10 hours ago, unJon said:

The thing I can’t wrap my head around is the idea that Scott Lynch is viewed a wildly successful and powerful author. 

Scott has sold roughly one-third as many books as Joe Abercrombie with only three books (compared to eleven). On an individual basis, The Lies of the Locke Lamora is one of the most successful fantasy novels of the last fifteen years, and seems to have outsold any individual novel by Abercrombie or Sanderson (bar his WoT books). Only the likes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Name of the Wind (and of course the real big hitters like Rowling, Martin, Jordan, etc) have verifiably outsold it this century.

Lynch's failure to produce the follow-ups on a more consistent basis hasn't really taken away from the impact of that first book, which was and remains somewhat considerable.

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13 hours ago, Zorral said:

 The world is burning up, and down, and every other way, with disease, crashing economy and environment, and sf/f writers and fans and etc. are ... burning with ... this?  What an sf novel we have here.  Charlie Stross forget Lovecraft in space and alternate dimensions and how to handle the future because everything you have imagined has had to be jetisoned by Developments In the Real World -- this is where it is at in sf/f. This is not a dig at Charlie at all -- he's trying so hard to be relevant.  But here we are.  Sheesh.

 


Yes yes you're the best reader you're better than anyone else's concerns and interests you carry right on yes yes.




On the success and power of Scott Lynch: he might not be GRRM or JK Rowling but he's pretty definitely one of the most successful and visible authors of the last two decades in SFF. What that amounts to in actual power I don't know but it's definitely more power than, say, Alexandra Rowland. 


This BS rehab thing is gonna get messy because on the one hand, even if every single thing said about her was true, BS was herself treated fairly abominably in the doxxing and the racist nonsense about how even BS might not be her real identity because she rights English too well, so it's fairly easy to conflate that with how much of her defense is lies. And additionally it's obviously coming up because a lot of people in SFF clearly have problems with Bear, some fair (she's clearly at the very least a prickly persona and has made mistakes in the past) some maybe maybe not, and are using the chance that she might have treated BS unfairly to distract from the fact that there's no evidence so far to support Rowland's accusation that this was a pattern for them rather than one bad relationship.

And on the third, unless someone with actual name recognition and that comes forward it's gonna be pretty impossible to do anything but take one person's word or the other about any further accusations that come out about Lynch and Bear, because their defence is gonna be 'well Rowland is a manipulative liar and now BS is involved, this is all them'. Like, if that accusation Wert linked earlier is a real person, how is the reaction gonna make them feel about their decision to obfuscate details? It won't change their mind.



What a shitshow.

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Everything you all say is true, including that Bear is / or has been a huge turd herself in many ways and many times.

So, I dunno -- doesn't this carousel of accusation and counter accusation seem rather pointless -- at least in These Times, when people can't even meet up in person?

8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Yes yes you're the best reader you're better than anyone else's concerns and interests you carry right on yes yes.

Well, there you are, right there!

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