Camestros Felapton

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Whatever happened to the SFFC Guild?

I’m breaking a self-imposed rule today just to mark an anniversary. January 16 2018 I posted this: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/the-scrappy-dappy-club/

Interactions with the founder of the “Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators Guild” only got weirder after that and the baseline of weirdness was already high, hence a self-imposed rule not to even mention them again. However, that creates silence on public events. In this case, the arrival of the SFFC Guild provoked a lot of discussion about this ostensible rival to the SFWA.

So what happened? The guild more formally announced its existence on January 19 2018.

‘Today is the day, the very first day, that we creators take back science fiction and fantasy. We do this for ourselves and for all of the fans. Today is the day we create a new home for all science fiction/fantasy creators – writers, editors, artists, indie film producers, indie publishers, comic book artists and publishers, game creators and bloggers – to gather, network and create. There will be no political purity tests, no one will care what color your skin is, what gender you are or any of the other ridiculous filters these so-called gatekeepers have installed to keep out those terrible “wrong thinkers.”’

https://sffcguild.com/welcome-to-the-science-fiction-fantasy-creators-guild/

The guild planned that it would have forums, a regular newsletter, a regular radio show and even an annual conference.

Just under a month later, the guild had appointed a President (Doug Irvin) and other acting officials for 2018 who would shepherd the guild while it established itself.

‘We aren’t a reaction against past organizations. If anything, we are the unfolding of their core impetus. And we embrace all creators of SF&F – whether writers, gamers, cartoonists, or other expressions of creativity that may not even have a name yet. And we aren’t bound by arbitrary lines on a map.’

https://sffcguild.com/welcome-to-the-guild/

As a stop-gap measure while they established these things the guild also set up a closed Facebook group. By March 2018, the Facebook group had about 160 members, most of whom had joined in January.

So what happened next? The SFFC Guild website made no further changes after February 2018. The last tweet from its Twitter account was 21 Feb 2018.

The Facebook group still exists. I’m not a member so I can’t say how active it is but it has 266 members — so a small amount of growth since last year but not much.

What happened to it? The short answer is ‘life’. Setting up even a small group is work, establishing a group with the ambitions of the SFFC Guild is something that would have taken a huge commitment. Even established groups run by volunteers depend on a few souls who use most of their free time just keeping things going. So, no great surprise that nothing really came of it.

So, lots of noise and a moribund website — legacies of a year that has gone.

camestrosfelapton

12 responses to “Whatever happened to the SFFC Guild?”

  1. Like the new new Heinlein, Rod Walker, the SFFC Guild has not failed. It has ascended. It is now looking down upon you from heights that your puny mortal brain cannot imagine, much less comprehend.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. The Guildsters might be interested in an article from Reason.com (the libertarian online magazine) which I read several years ago. It’s about an SF publishing house that had recently been responsible for every one of the novels nominated for the Prometheus Award, and although the publisher state he had no particular axe to grind politically, writing “First comes the story” and that his goal is “do a story in a way that’s honest,” one of the prominent editors noted that “It’s impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition.” Sounds like the perfect publishing house for the Guild to submit work to – the article is here https://reason.com/archives/2008/11/13/tors-worlds-without-death-or-t

    Liked by 1 person

  3. The Guildsters might be interested in an article from Reason.com (the libertarian online magazine) which I read several years ago. It’s about an SF publishing house that had recently been responsible for every one of the novels nominated for the Prometheus Award, and although the publisher state he had no particular axe to grind politically, writing “First comes the story” and that his goal is “do a story in a way that’s honest,” one of the prominent editors noted that “It’s impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition.” Sounds like the perfect publishing house for the Guild to submit work to – the article is here https://reason.com/archives/2008/11/13/tors-worlds-without-death-or-t

    Liked by 5 people

  4. They let me join the Facebook group, and it’s modestly active (a few posts a week). Discussions are what you’d expect from a group of writers, e.g. “What do you think of this cover?” Politics is a banned topic, and people have followed that rule pretty well even with no enforcement of it. I’ve even contributed occasionally. For all the fiery public rhetoric, the group itself is amazingly wholesome.

    I’m not sure if anything will come of it or not at this point, but it’s certainly not dead. However, almost nothing that’s been posted there would have been out of place in the appropriate SFWA forum. Judging by the evidence of the Facebook discussions, all these folks might as well just join SFWA. They could have the exact same discussions but with more people. (I’m an Affiliate Member of SFWA, which lets me participate in forums but not vote on anything.)

    Liked by 3 people

  6. They are really obsessed with the SFWA as the boogeymonster, aren’t they? And give it extraordinary powers in the field it’s never had. There is certainly room for multiple writers organizations in the field and multiple groups have always been the case. But any group requires an organization to run it. And it needs to have clear goals about what they are going to do as an advocacy group and who will enact those efforts. At no point did it look like this guild thing really had any of that.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Aren’t there already several functioning groups? Horror, fantasy, whatevs.

      It’s a typical RWNJ thing: big announcement about fighting the SJWs, then nothing when they realize running any sort of organization requires clear goal-setting and a lot of unpaid, unheralded work where no external egoboo is to be had, and much slagging off is going to be had.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Lurkertype: It’s a typical RWNJ thing: big announcement about fighting the SJWs, then nothing when they realize running any sort of organization requires clear goal-setting and a lot of unpaid, unheralded work where no external egoboo is to be had, and much slagging off is going to be had.

        Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? When the life philosophy of your target audience is “Screw You, I’ve Got Mine”, how many of them are going to be willing to donate — for FREE — hundreds of hours of time and effort to get it established and make it successful, when they could be using that time and effort to make money for themselves?

        Liked by 1 person

      • Yes, over several decades, writers created the Writers of America groups for genre fiction primarily in the American market — the SFWA, the RWA for romance, the MWA for mystery/suspense, the HWA for horror and the WWA for westerns. They came out of the magazine market since there used to be much more of a magazine market for fiction, and then extended out into books. The goals of the groups were and are to be professional writers organizations — to promote their genre out in the market (and all of them developed sets of awards for this, the SFWA one being the Nebula,) some of them doing conventions or writers conferences, to help their authors with resources and information, to deal with financial and business issues in the field for their members and indirectly for others, including helping with publisher messes (RWA for instance cowed Harlequin when it was taking advantage of romance authors with a self-publishing services operation and SFWA helped negotiate a deal for the authors of Night Shade Books on their rights and monies when Night Shade collapsed,) and in later years, to provide assistance regarding health insurance and emergency funds, etc.

        The collapse of the wholesale paperback market and the effect of the recession in the 1990s hit the magazine market and the genre fiction markets hard, so these groups all took a bit of a hit back then. The WWA went rather moribund when the western category market was dissolved in the late 1990s, but they still put out the Spur Awards and some conferences and such. The HWA turned itself into the Horror Writers Association, a more global organization, and puts out the Bram Stoker Awards. The MWA had quite a few regional and state chapters close down, but overall rebounded and puts out the Edgar Awards. The RWA is the most influential and active group, and unquestionably the most organized, and puts out the RITA Awards. SFWA is the next biggest, though this is in part because the whole SFF field has maintained a system of conventions that lets writers interact and organize regularly. They also are useful to other writers groups because of Writers Beware, which helps spot con artists trying to take advantage of authors in the business. The organizations were all for written text fiction; comic books, illustrators and such had their own groups and film production wasn’t really involved except that some of the awards were given to film and t.v. productions. There is also the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, a very big, active professional group, and on and on.

        But a lot of SFF authors are not members of the SFWA. A lot of younger authors particularly don’t feel that the SFWA is that useful to them, especially because the SFWA is still adapting to e-books, the expansion of self-publishing, and hasn’t always been brilliant about dealing with persistent discriminatory issues in the field and in some of its older members, for POC authors and women in general. The SFWA is an important organization, but it is not an exclusive clubhouse that rules over the field, nor ever has been. The SFWA came under fire because Beale took over the Sad Puppies and hated their guts, so as they built more and more elaborate conspiracies off the Hugos, the Puppies had the SFWA became the elite, SJW Illuminati, which is pretty funny to those who actually belong to the SFWA. (And also why many Puppies confusedly thought the SFWA ran the Hugos.)

        So this Guild pronounced first that it would take anybody doing anything in SFF. That isn’t the worst idea though how they were going to manage such a vast membership and actually provide any services to all those different types of creators in different industries was anybody’s guess. And second that it was to be totally not like the SFWA, a professional written fiction authors organization. That’s not a goal. Having forums, a conference and a radio show and such is a goal, but that sort of thing is only a small part of what SFWA is actually doing. It’s more in line with what organizations such as the World Science Fiction Society that runs WorldCon and the World Fantasy Convention are doing. It would have made more sense to say that they were making a group like the World Science Fiction Society but broader and not call it a guild. Guild writers organizations are like The Authors Guild, which is a legal and contractual advocacy group. SFWA does some of that sort of work but not as extensively as guild groups.

        Basically the people who wanted to do this Guild were throwing ideas into a hat with only the vaguest idea of what they wanted, little interest in the actual business issues of the field, and mainly with professions of spite. But if you don’t have a proper organization/infrastructure, membership policies, figure out funding, concrete goals and programs to get there, etc., you’re not going to have a workable organization. If they really wanted to launch it properly, they could team up with the Libertarian Futurist Society, which does the Prometheus Awards and already has an infrastructure organization. But there’s no real strategy. So right now, it sounds like it is just a writers discussion group on Facebook.

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