I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that you shouldn’t give trolls undeserved attention, even famous trolls, but Cheryl Morgan hacked me off:
Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.
What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.
The one thing more tiresome than engaging trolls is complaining about other people engaging trolls, especially when you make it seem that you’re mostly offended that they don’t pay attention to you. Which I’m sure wasn’t Morgan’s intent, but it does come across that way. I’m sure she understands something like Salon Futura with its mixture of short stories and thoughful non-fiction takes time to digest and reflect on, while Leo Grin’s fart of outrage takes no more than five minutes to read and mock. It makes for a nice bit of light entertainment as it does the round of Twitter and sf&f blogs, with e.g. Joe Abercrombie responding to it with some deft skewering:
But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here?
That’s very far from the “pornography of rage” Morgan talks about, more a sort of bemused merriment at the idea that somebody can be so threatened by any kind of fantasy that isn’t like he imagined the “two titanic literary talents” J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard wrote that he has to write such a dumb polemic. It can be interesting to dissect, though I won’t bother myself, to understand why somebody is so insecure that he has to imagine that any fantasy he dislikes is not just to his taste, but actively undermining western civilisation…. To scold those who are interested in doing this seems counterproductive.