SF Canada Member Greg Bechtel’s semi-autobiographical essay on Margaret Atwood, Sad/Rabid Puppies, and villainy appears in Issue 5 of the grad student journal The Word Hoard. The essay examines SF writers’ sense of ourselves as noble “outsiders” to mainstream culture and literature, and how our aggrieved frustration with this perceived outsider-ness–while not entirely imaginary–may also reveal something about us as both SF writers and an SF community. In it, he argues that our choice of imaginary villains (and how we respond to them), may reveal more about us than we might like to admit, and that it may be productive–even necessary–to recognize the ways that even our “real world” villains are often largely imaginary.
You can download the .pdf of Greg’s essay at this link.
To download and read other articles or the entirety of this issue of The Word Hoard, visit the website here.
Greg is currently busy reviewing submissions for Tesseracts Twenty-One with co-editor Rhonda Parrish. You can find his website at http://gregbechtel.ca/.