It’s nice that the Weird Tales publisher rescinded their baffling decision to publish an excerpt from poorly written, racist novel Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden.

However, in the process they also nuked the original page and comment thread.

I think that’s a shame. So for lulz, because my comment was one of those nuked, and because urge to pile on is sometimes irresistible, I’ve ganked an earlier version of the page from google cache.

Because the copy/paste function didn’t let me copy the names of the posters, I’ve screenshotted it all for now. (Unfortunately there were some comments that were lost because of the time the cache was made, if anyone else has screenshots of the lost comments I’ll be glad to add them.)

It will be sure to go down in the annals of fail.

Presented w/o further comment.

Edit: Thanks to Sean Wallace for a better screencap.

Second edit: Since people may want to copy/paste from Marvin Kaye’s original post,  I’m including a text version too.

I have been an anthologist and magazine editor for most of my life, and as of last year became copublisher and editor of Weird Tales, America’s oldest fantasy magazine. In the upcoming issue, we are publishing the first chapter of Victoria Foyt’s SF novel, Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden (the subtitle after the colon is an indication that the story will continue in a subsequent novel).

Weird Tales seldom prints SF, but this story is a compelling view of a world that didn’t listen to the warnings of ecologists, and a world that has developed a reverse racism: blacks dominating and detesting not just whites, but latinos and albinos, the few that still survive of the latter are hunted down and slaughtered.

It is the same literary technique employed in the off-Broadway musical a few years back, Zanna, Don’t!, set in a world where homosexuality is the norm, and a pair of heterosexual lovers are therefore socially condemned.

Racism is an atrocity, and that is the backbone of this book. That is very clear to anyone with an appreciation for irony who reads it.

I have noted the counterarguments that some Amazon readers have launched against the book and its author, and while I strongly disagree, this is America and they have the right to express their opinion(s).

But I also have been told that they have not stopped there, but also have attacked Amazon readers who describe the book in positive terms. I do not know if this is true, but if it is, it is mean-spirited, espcially if they have not read the entire book before condemning it, a charge that has also been leveled against some of them. Again, I do not know if this is true, or an exaggeration, but if these actions have, in fact, been performed, than I wish those who have done so a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is to wish they acquire sufficient wit, wisdom and depth of literary analysis to understand what they read, and also the compassion not to attack others merely because they hold a different opinion.

The curse is an integral part of the blessing…for if they do acquire those virtues, they will then necessarily look at their own behaviour, and be thoroughly ashamed.