And the Adam Yoshida award of the season goes to...

[bellatrys]

Big surprise, this:

via Tobias Buckell again, I see this a.m. that Sanders has:
1. Minitrued his 'pantiwadulous' insult to Yoon Ha Lee and Nora Jemisin, in keeping with his rep for doing this - apparently unaware that people who get reps for retconning their faux pas also get screencaps;

2. Has now decided that he's going to charge people $40 to

Comments

oh, the law's irrelevant in this case

[bellatrys]

mostly, that is - it's looking like he could get burnt (again) by his own words, as his victims debate strategy even now. Like yhlee said up front, Helix has the technical *right* to hang on to their stories - another way in which pro SF polity & custom differs radically from amateur, I'm frankly rather shocked at the Refusal To Remove From Archive even more than the bigot eruptions, b/c not posting other people's stuff without permission is so deeply ingrained in the fannish ethic, it's right up there with plagiarism and probably even less controversial than RPF, I guess that's another thing we need to watch out for if any of us go pro - to remember that what we in the fanfic coms think of as The Rules don't apply, and the rules there are totally different, at the Old Folks' Table.

But regardless of that, the problem is simply that Sanders is destroying Helix in real time. Who is EVER going to allow him to post another story of theirs, now? The argument going on among the injured Helix authors, most of whom had no idea of Sanders' rep any more than the rest of us did, before this, is how to deal, since they don't want to be associated: Tobias Buckell and others have offered to pay the ransom for authors who can't afford it (it would be more than some of them got paid for their stories, if I understand the word-count thing correctly) but others have said "No ransom to abusers!" and rydra_wong has suggested the simple solution of posting a mirror w/ a public notice about how your story is being held there w/o permission and why you don't want it there, generating still more bad PR for Sanders/Helix, while Kate Elliot and others have volunteered to set up a mirror archive site for authors who don't have their own places to post - and somebody I just saw has come up with the bright idea of all of them banding together to do a *print* anthology, on Lulu, and possibly thus getting their de-archiving rights back by Sanders' own terms.

But whatever the people now stuck not wanting to be associated with Helix end up doing, singly or en masse - who on EARTH is going to want their story there? Or dare chance another, worse bigot eruption and having no recourse afterwards? Who's going to say 'yes' to another invite to this invite-only archive, after this? If Sanders is too far gone in his narcissism to realize this, surely one of the other staff must, but I'm not hearing echoes from them yet.

It's like watching someone chain-gun their left leg off, shout blithely "It's only a flesh wound!" and reach for the grenade launcher to do the other one...

Re: oh, the law's irrelevant in this case

[evilstorm]

I saw one poor bastard who was stuck with Helix because she wanted to honour contract, honour being the operative word. Very bad luck. Don't think anyone's coming back to it after this, though, no.