Tempest and Ellison
(This is another one of those entries that will probably make no sense to people not involved in the speculative-fiction world, and that will probably be too late to be news for people who are. Sorry about that.)
Tempest posted last week about the fact that Realms of Fantasy covers (link has an image that's arguably not work-safe) tend to feature scantily clad women, but never feature scantily clad men. It was a good point, and I was pleased to see that new Realms publisher Warren Lapine appeared to be taking the issue seriously.
Unfortunately, through the transformative miracle of Internet quasi-communication, Harlan Ellison heard some completely incorrect partial information about the situation, and took it upon himself to post some deeply unfortunate and very poorly chosen comments about Tempest. I don't normally comment on Ellison's postings, but this one was pretty awful.
Things move fast on the Internet, and by the time I managed to get my act together to post this entry, four different people had called Ellison and told him he was wrong, which resulted in his posting a rambly quasi-apology. Fortunately, he had also given Tempest a more explicit and direct apology through back channels.
Tempest has graciously accepted the apology, and the whole episode now appears to be essentially over.
But I nonetheless wanted to post about it, albeit belatedly, to say two things:
First: Tempest, you rock.
Second: If anyone who hasn't seen it already wants a detailed account of what happened, complete with links, you can stop by Kynn's writeup.
