Here at Mindless Ones, we have a fairly broad range of opinions on most things. But a few things we’re pretty much all agreed on. Most of us agree, I think, that science fiction, or fantastic fiction generally, can sometimes be pretty great — give us a few giant robots, or spaceships, or time-travelling aliens, and we’ll be pretty happy.

And one thing that I know we absolutely all agree on is that fascists are evil scum bastards. We don’t like them. We also don’t like men’s rights’ activists, gamergaters, pick-up artists, neoreactionaries, or any of the other current labels being used by overentitled whingeing white men who can’t cope with the idea that someone, somewhere, who isn’t a cishet white man might be having fun, and who are for the most part either witting or unwitting allies with the fascists.

So, imagine our disgust that the Hugo Awards, the main SF fan-voted awards, got taken over this year by block-voting entryist fascists, so that in almost all categories the only options were books either by, or endorsed by, neofascists. It’s like eating a nice big chocolate ice cream, only to find the ice cream is actually made of dogshit. And the dogshit’s screaming “The Taliban were right to shoot Malala Yousafzai! Homosexuality is a birth defect! Feminists should have acid thrown in their faces! There is no such thing as marital rape!”

I posted something to this effect on my own blog, and Jack Graham, whose blog about Doctor Who and Marxism, Shabogan Graffiti, you should all read, invited me to be on his podcast to discuss this with him and Phil Sandifer.

Here’s the podcast (description Jack’s). It was recorded between midnight and 2AM last night, after a long and stressful day, and I’ve not listened to it since and don’t remember much of what I said, so please don’t take anything I say as being the final word on anything. I undoubtedly made mistakes both factual and logical, and unlike with a blog post there’s no way to rewrite it if I did. Just think of it as a chat between friends in a bar, rather than an attempt at something definitive.

All of which said, there’s one thing I remember for certain, which is that the conclusion from all three of us was “fuck Fascism”. As the first and last word on the subject, that’s pretty reasonable.

A Marxist, a postmodernist and liberal walk into a bar… and form a united front. Join Jack Graham, Phil Sandifer and the superb Andrew Hickey for an unexpected emergency Shabcast on the subject of the recent fascist incursion on the Hugo Awards nominations.

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