On 15 February 2021, Z-List science fiction author Jason Sanford posted a so-called expose on “Baen’s Bar”, the web forum for Baen publishing, and attacking female Publisher Toni Weisskopf. It has been alleged that the article at first assumed Toni was, “Tony” and of the male gender, and the article was later changed. I cannot find an archive of the original article earlier than 16th. However, I was able to find comments in which Toni was referred to as male and “Tony” and where the commenter corrected. This tends to corroborate the allegation the article did misgender Toni. Regardless, it is only a minor issue compared to the horror of Jason’s writing. My analysis quickly found a smorgasboard of material that is, in my opinion, offensive, depraved and vile, including some involving the torture of minors by adults.

Jason Sanford’s most recent short story is freely available online and it is entitled, “The Wheels on the Torture Bus Go Round and Round” (archive). The (very) short piece follows the interactions of a little girl called ‘Jane’. Jane’s age is not given, but the information that is given makes it plain she is a child. A minor. The story opens with the sentence, “All the neighborhood kids except for Jane cheered when the torture bus stopped in front of Mrs. McKinney’s house”. Jane is a “kid”. Readers will be aware of course that Sanford is not the most successful of authors, but this reads like sub-par fanfic with a disturbing focus.

The story follows Jane’s observations of visits by the eponymous “torture bus”, and being assaulted by a boy called ‘Binny’. The bus, apparently a known and accepted institution in the world of the short story, visits members of the public without explanation and literally tortures them with medieval equipment –

“They watched as the torture techs opened the back of their yellow bus and wheeled out an iron maiden stretcher and a satchel of scary tools. The techs wore black coveralls embroidered with a grinning cartoon devil holding a red whip.”

The image of a grinning cartoon devil puts me in mind of BDSM websites. Why is this story about a little girl observing this? Not that the story lasts long. It meanders on, with Jane befriending the “lead torture tech”, whose name is, ‘Leroy’. Leroy is a creepy guy who literally drives up again the next day in an unmarked white van. He is so impressed with Jane that he decides to offer her a “free torture” –

“Leroy pulled a business card from his pocket and placed it in Jane’s hand next to the baseball. “One free torture,” Leroy said. “You call that number, say a name, and the bus will pull up at their door within the hour””

I mean, WUT?

The story ends with Jane deciding that good and evil don’t matter so she will have Binny, the boy who punched her (and also seems to be underage) tortured by adults (presumably including van-man) in their bus –

“But if everything went on her page, did it even matter if she was good or bad?

Jane pulled the card from her pocket and tapped it against the baseball. Binny and his friends would be at his house by now. They’d be laughing at her. Calling her names. Deciding what to do the next time they caught her alone.”

So let us review. Jane, an underage girl, witnesses some decidedly adult torture of an adult by other adults. She is then befriended by Leroy, an adult male torturer, when he returns incognito the next day in a white van. She decides to arrange for the man from the white van to abduct and torture another minor, Binny. By any reasonable standard this is all a depiction of child abuse.

I have to say, looked at from the outside, this sounds exactly like grooming to me. None of the characters expresses any sexual feelings but in my opinion it feels like there is an uncomfortable and disturbing paedophile subtext here. Regardless of whether Sanford intended it he ought to have been aware of possible interpretations. There is a parallel with the arguments of paedophile apologists, where the little girl in this story becomes not merely a recipient or passive observer of the torture, but the initiator of it – just as paedophiles try to claim children are sexual beings who come onto them. The little girl becomes an abuser – and in less than 2,600 words!

Jason Sanford’s true motives are known only to him. Is he trying to be edgy to excite interest in his lacklustre literary career? Perhaps there is some benign intent? Sanford’s motives seem to me irrelevant in this instance. By way of opinion, this story seems to be one that paedophile sadists could find arousing and masturbate over. As such it is extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant reading. It is disturbing that a reputable organisation like the Ohio News Media Association (ONMA) would associate with this man, or that a magazine such as Interzone would give him such prominent treatment.

The little girl and the torture bus piece is not by any means Sanford’s only uncomfortable story. “The Emotionless in Love” (archive), is a 2018 story. The work itself is a crime against humanity for its tediousness alone. There are just under 30,000 words of it. The writing is leaden and pretentious and wants for grammar. Consider the following –

“[…] The tiny machines in his blood were severely damaged, unable to give him power and strength like when he’d been an anchor. But through them he still accessed the data—the memories—with which this land’s grains spoke to one another. “The grains here are calm. But the next land is… disturbed. Those grains act as if something’s wrong. But they aren’t sharing what’s happening there with any neighboring lands. […]”

A minor quibble, compared to the planned child abduction and torture in his more recent story, but in this work Sanford does like to start sentences with the word “but”. A hundred and eleven times, in fact.

Leaving aside the strange, repetitive and cumbersome writing style however, a more serious concern is the facile and disrespectful treatment of the topic of mental health. The two “Emotionless” individuals in “Love” are a man named ‘Colton’ and a red-haired woman called ‘Sri Sa’. They suffer from some vague emotional dysfunction brought on by nanomachines implanted in their bodies and are described as, “psychopaths” –

“No. Some of the memories are total lies. Many of the first anchors were like Sri Sa. Monsters. Massive killers hunting down the good and bad, friends and enemies. That’s how the grains took over the world. Lasers and forbidden tech couldn’t stop anchors like that. But those anchors were also unstable. Psychopaths. That’s why all anchors today are less powerful. Easier to control.”

Leaving aside the poor quality prose, which is fit to make ordinary decent people’s eyes bleed, it is a deeply insensitive treatment of mental ill-health. Of course, your author gained his first legal experience (before doing my GDL, LPC and Master’s degree) as a volunteer assisting litigants in the Court of Protection and I wrote my dissertation on the topic of assisting people to assert capacity.

The term, “psychopath” is not, contrary to Hollywood movies, a diagnosis in itself. It is in fact a set of traits whose essentials are included in the diagnoses of Anti-social Personality Disorder and Dissocial Personality Disorder. The term, “psychopath” is identified as one of 250 terms used to stigmatise the mentally ill in the paper, Rose, D., Thornicroft, G., Pinfold, V. et al. 250 labels used to stigmatise people with mental illness. BMC Health Serv Res 7, 97 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-7-97 (archive). Sanford’s treatment of the topic is no better than his prose. Not that one would expect sensitivity from a man who wrote a story that culminates in a little girl having a white-van-man abduct and torture a little boy.

“Toppers” is a 2016 story about a young girl and apparent orphan whose mother has seemingly killed herself. Young girls are a bit of a thing with Sanford’s work. It opens with the truly appalling and pretentious paragraph –

“We be toppers. Toppers we be. Hanging off Empire State as cement and limestone crumble and fall. Looking down the lines and pulleys strung between nearby buildings. Eying the green-growing plants and gardens on the tall tall roofs.”

Suffice to say the story resolves with the young girl, “Hanger” surrendering to having her timeline torn apart by the flowing white mists. Readers can consider the symbolism themselves, including of the necklace she obtains, made up of tiny globes containing some of the flowing, ambulatory, white mists.

“Monday’s Monk” is a 2013 story in which a monk called Somchai dreams and / or fantasises about becoming the lover of his adoptive sister, who is described as ‘Nong Tam’, meaning, “Little sister Tam”, in Thai. There are nanites, or something. Sanford seems to use nanites as a mechanism a lot in his stories …

… such as the 2013 story, “Paprika”, featuring the artificial entity known as Paprika. Despite being effectively immortal, Paprika has, a “young girl’s body and innocent happiness” – a fact which Sanford feels important enough to mention on the first page. Paprika is a, “time angel” who comes into conflict with another artificial being of the same type, appearing as a, “small boy”. For various reasons Paprika destroys the other creature. That is, she kills, “the boy” – as he is described throughout his death scene. Although Sanford is careful to mention that these beings are thousands of years old, they have the form of children and having ticked the, “officially not underage” box he describes them repeatedly by that form from then on. Why?

Sanford’s writing reminds me queasily of Marion Zimmer Bradley as described by Vox Day’s in his foreword to the book, “The Last Closet” by Moira Greyland. The book is a courageous work by Vox and the daughter of fêted feminist author Marion Zimmer Bradley, exposing Bradley as a monstrous bisexual paedophile. The book is published by Castalia House and can be bought on Amazon. Vox points out the things that made him uneasy about Bradley long before he discovered she was a child molester –

“While I can’t say that I had any inkling of what the author’s habits or home life were at the time, I can say that I detected a slight sense of what I can only describe as a wrongness from the book. Arthur didn’t love Guinevere, but was pining away for his half-sister? Sir Lancelot was not only Galahad, but also Arthur’s bisexual cousin? Instead of being a tragic love triangle, Arthur, Launcelot, and Guinevere were a swinging threesome? And Mordred was not only Arthur’s son, but the product of incest knowingly orchestrated by Merlin for pagan purposes to boot?

Yeah, that’s not hot. That’s just weird and more than a little grotesque.”

Even Bradley however was not just flat out writing about underage children killing each other or arranging the abduction and torture of other children. Her weird was at least a little more under the radar.

What is it about the dysfunctional, self-proclaimed aristocracy of the parts of science fiction fandom who elevate such things?

This blog does not touch on science-fiction or pop-culture much, occasionally a game review and some commentary on #GamerGate. I started to read science fiction when I was very young – I learned to read to a high standard at a young age, the benefit of moving to a small village where the Christian school-teacher, Ruth Southworth, still used phonics to teach reading. It was an advantage for me, for I went to school at a time where narcissistic leftists had made it unfashionable elsewhere to teach reading using phonics, condemning many of my peers to illiteracy.

The thing about science fiction from my perspective, is that I remember when it changed. The first science fiction books I read were things like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series and E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith‘s Lensman and Skylark series.

Asimov’s stories were bloodless and for his first books, largely sexless, like his short stories. His heroes and heroines fought the universe with intellect. They were geeky stories like his (not very good) characters. The plots however were interesting – they were stories of ideas that worked best when dealing with wide scope.

Smith’s stories were quite different. They were about space adventures. Brave men and women went out into the universe, discovered, befriended and fought for what was right. The characters had their flaws, as did Smith’s writing. There is a certain amount of sex in Smith’s books, raunchy by the standards of the early twentieth century (“Skylark” was begun in 1915), but laughably tame by ours. His characters are, fundamentally sexual beings but in a healthy, heterosexual way. Adult males pursue consensual relationships with adult women. Furthermore, the relationships are only a part of the story just as sex is only one part of life.

I grew up in the days before Kindle or the internet. I would periodically visit the local library, and look at the new selection. Slowly, and without my noticing at first, the books on offer changed. There had always been books I did not like, but now large numbers of them began to feature the same themes, over, and over, and over again – as though they were all written by the same person.

In nearly every book that dealt with religion, religion was fake and bad – gods were made up or were deceivers / aliens / demons. Anything but benevolent and sovereign. In the book, “Heaven” by Ian Stewart even the desire to prolong life is portrayed as immoral and contrary to universal law. The more powerful features of an advanced space-ship are unlocked … by the diversity of its crew.

The apparent monomania of science fiction was no coincidence. In those days before the internet, a lot of what was published was not decided by what the public thought was good, but instead by a self-appointed elite, believing they had greater knowledge of what was “good” or “virtuous” than everyone else. The fact that many of them are not particularly functional or successful by a variety of measures has never given them the slightest pause (or indeed, any of the woke). It was this elite that held up Bradley.

The idea of a ‘virtuous elite’ reviewing art is a ludicrous idea. A book on mathematics, law and engineering, can be right or wrong (at least in large part). Art is aesthetic. A painting is not right or wrong. Neither is a fictional novel or short story. It has merit only insofar as people enjoy reading it, which can be measured by willingness to pay. The public, barring ‘that’ one minority, mostly do not wish to read books and stories about child abuse. When an ‘elite’ is put in charge however, there is a tendency towards degeneracy. What made Interzone devote an entire issue to Jason Sanford’s work? They would have been better off featuring popular stories from fanfiction.net, spacebattles.com or similar.

Bluntly, Jason Sanford’s fictional work, like his ‘journalism’ is not very good. The stories I read were poorly written and those with content involving children were unpleasant and gratuitous. Yet, Sanford writes about deviant sex, torturing children and some characters with non-English names and he is held up by an unhinged science-fiction establishment as some sort of paragon. Like Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, his work referring to mental health is offensive.

Just to be clear, the materials I have referred to above, whilst distasteful, do not of themselves mean Sanford is a paedophile. However, some are clearly depictions of child exploitation and abuse, published for Sanford’s profit. Those are clearly capable of gratifying and enabling those with a sexual interest in harming children.

Sanford is a symbol of an unrepresentative, cancerous faction within science fiction. Their hatred for Baen is rooted in the simple fact that Baen’s business model is about giving people what they want as opposed to telling them what they should want. Like any cancer, it needs to be cut out. If you as a reader are disgusted by Jason Sanford’s work – by his treatment of Baen, by his toxic writing about children – let people know.

Jason Sanford’s employers the ONMA have claimed that his science fiction work and his disgraceful treatment of a CEO are nothing to do with them. However, ONMA is a reputable media organisation and a gatekeeper. If it ignores Sanford’s vile scrawlings and his treatment of a CEO, it is complicit. Mr Sanford has at times promoted his science fiction work and employment by ONMA together, such as on his LinkedIn page. The content of Sanford’s writing is a stain on ONMA and the people of Columbus, Ohio, where he lives. It is surprising and dismaying that they tolerate it.

If you are revolted by what you have read, you can let Sanford’s employers know and you can let Interzone know. I provided emails for Jason Sanford’s boss and the trustees of his employer ONMA in my first article on this topic. Email them and ask if they want their reputations and that of their organisations tarred with Jason’s vile writings on child torture. Email Interzone Editor Andy Cox (andy@ttapress.com) and let him know you would like to read something more normal, more representative and less child-murdery. Let them know you disapprove, but please be polite and respectful.

Finally, some may find that Sanford’s work is so distasteful it would make them feel uncomfortable should he attend Discon III. Science fiction and fantasy should not mean profiting from depictions of child abuse. The email for the conduct team is coc@discon3.org. Please, by all means write to them and let them know how you feel.

Jason Sanford has no place in science fiction.

An early draft of this article was put to the trustees of ONMA, Jason Sanford and Andy Cox the editor of Interzone before publication. No denials were received. An extension of time was offered to all parties should they wish one. The email tracking service I use shows the emails were read, extensively.

Discon III have also been sent a copy of the draft article but have been given until later in the week to respond.