If you don't know what this is: Writers of the Future (WOTF) is a quarterly SFF short fiction contest for new writers with few or no publications. It's run, indirectly, by the Church of Scientology (CoS). There are prizes &c.
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For decades the tendency in SF has been to compartmentalize that institutional affiliation and claim that WOTF has nothing to do with CoS, which of course they encourage. It's a lie. Despite years of people pointing it out, it's a lie that still somehow holds.
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And while the last decade has seen many exposés of CoS, like the Going Clear documentary in 2015, obviously there haven't yet been enough.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4257858/ …
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WOTF has always been about Hubbard and Scientology: to canonize the former and legitimize the latter. Every quarter, a thousand new writers unknowingly compete to have their names, work, future prestige, and integrity exploited for those purposes.
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People talk about missing stairs in science fiction—WOTF is an entire missing Innsmouth-ass town and it has been for decades.
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Am I done? Hmm, no, apparently I'm not done.
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WOTF and the Church of Scientology have an intimate relationship with science fiction. This is not surprising. The CoS metastasized out of mid-20th century American science fiction in the first place. In a lot of ways this is the field's diseased underbelly.
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It's not ONLY that L. Ron Hubbard was an sf writer or that Scientology is hacked together from pulp sf tropes (Xenu, thetans, spaceships that look like planes wtf) and his self-help pseudoscience, Dianetics.
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It's also that, e.g., Dianetics was heavily promoted by the likes of oh, John W. Campbell, one of the most influential early SF editors. Literally the person the Campbell Award for New Writers is named after
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(See Michael Moorcock's 1977 essay "Starship Stormtroopers" for his account of Campbell's various godawful opinions—he was apparently pro-slavery, for instance)https://libcom.org/library/starship-stormtroopers-michael-moorcock …
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Oh yeah, Campbell was bonkers. He was also pro-smoking and pro-thalidomide
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Didn’t know any of this! Also, can u give ref. for the3 ugly & explosive statements about Campbell? Wd like to understand.
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