Devon Eriksen Banned By Hugh Howey's Self-Published Science Fiction Competition After Woke Cancel Mob Attacks Him

The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition is an event originally launched by Amazon author Hugh Howey to foster growth in awareness of great self-published sci-fi work, but it’s been co-opted and turned into a nightmare of extreme leftist politics now resulting in the banning of fan-favorite author Devon Eriksen.

In 2021, Hugh Howey launched the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition with 300 works read by 10 judges to promote great sci-fi in the independent space. A rabid leftist, Hugh Howey set up a committee that eventually ended up the competition’s undoing as this year they revealed a controversial Code of Conduct that appeared to try to target conservative and libertarian authors with nebulous wording that could disqualify anyone for subjective reasons.

They opened a blog rambling about humanity and saying, “This does not mean we included minority-sourced books regardless of quality just to “fill a quota,” to the exclusion of other groups who may have historically enjoyed a more exclusive seat at the table. It means we include everybody, and all of our contestants’ books are judged by their own merit.”

It appears as if they’re advocating that, further clarifying “we will not ignore the utterances of bigots and hatemongers in our community — while we are not here to police people’s opinions, we will not tolerate hate speech and other backwards attitudes in SPSFC channels such as Discord, X/Twitter and other social media.”

It never states what qualifies as “bigots or hatemongers” with more subjective rambling on the blog, though they posted a much lengthier Code of Conduct to X where they lie and say they won’t disqualify a book due to political reasons, but also said they will judge based on “bigotry” and talk about “authors attacking other authors” in a nebulous manner for disqualification. As authors often have disputes with one another online, this seems nonsensical.

The X post immediately hid replies as they received criticism from the independent author community and didn’t want to face such criticism.

In their Discord, the activism gets worse, as they began attacking fan-favorite sci-fi author Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire: Orbital Space, which received tremendous accolades from readers in 2024.

Immediately a person on the Discord who has the username Edpool ranted about Devon Eriksen’s “opinions” tagging everyone in the server to initiate a pile-on of the author under the guise of distancing himself from the author, which, under the terms of service, is an attack on Eriksen and therefore should disqualify and ban this user.

At this point, other authors violated their rules by piling on. The purveyor of Indie Book Spotlight attacked Eriksen saying he wouldn’t want his books advertised alongside an author who “says things like that,” referring to Eriksen’s opinionated pieces he posts on X.

More authors and judges piled on soon afterward, exactly what the contest said it was trying to prevent, though clearly they were encouraging it against certain people, in this case, Eriksen.

The Indie Book Spotlight account then starts implying Eriksen is, you guessed it, a Nazi. The server, including pronoun gang members, starts piling on from there.

One of the moderators then referenced the code of conduct again in the server, assuring they’d be taking action and listing a Streisand Effect as a possible reason not to in certain situations.

However, the competition eventually took to X to outright attack Eriksen and ban him proper, saying, “We apologize for the extended delay and radio silence. Devon Eriksen has been removed from the SPSFC effective immediately for violation of our code of conduct.”

Devon Eriksen, meanwhile, does not appear to be very involved in the competition nor know who these people are. He has not posted about the subject as of this writing and appears to be continuing on with his very successful author X platform of more than 75,000 followers while he writes his popular books.

The left continues to try to cancel and virtue signal in 2025, not learning any of the mistakes in publishing they learned before, and targeting people for having different beliefs than them. With so many institutions destroyed and gutted by their constant purity testing and hyperventilating, one wonders when they’ll stop?

What do you think of Devon Eriksen getting attacked and banned by Hugh Howey’s Self-Published Science Fiction Competition? Leave a comment and let us know.

For a great Christian-themed sci-fi that packs an action punch and would definitely be banned by the SPSFC, read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon and support Fandom Pulse!

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