Former SFWA President Cat Rambo Accused Of Antisemitic Tirade At Gencon

SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) has been mired in an incredible amount of controversy over the last few years. The organization, which once was a staple of professional sci-fi writing, has turned into little more than an online forum to pretend to be a successful author that costs $100/year for its members to use. The destruction first occurred under its former president, Cat Rambo, who has now been called out for allegedly making antisemitic remarks at Gencon’s Writers symposium. 

The change of SFWA from a professional writers’ organization to an amateur writers’ club occurred over the last several years as the organization, which used to do a lot of work for authors, like negotiate contracts with publishers, found itself becoming functionally useless in the modern era where most people who make good livings writing do so by selling their books directly and self-publishing.

The club used to have a requirement to join where it required an author to make more than $5,000 on one work or sell three short stories at a professional rate which varied from five to eight cents per word. Though this was a low barrier to entry, many current SFWA members wouldn’t qualify under those standards, and so the floodgates were open to amateur aspiring writers who cared more about political clout than science fiction.

A lot of the current changes to the club began under the tenure of Cat Rambo, a writer who used her SFWA clout to get herself into dozens of short story collections every year, so it appeared as if she was everywhere in the writing community. The dirty little secret, though, is that these collections rarely sold in great amounts, and she didn’t generate much of a real reader fanbase of her own.

Several years back, a book publishing industry insider once leaked Bookscan sales which showed Cat Rambo’s venture into full-length novels only sold twelve copies, which is insane given the amount of attention she received from SFWA members. It goes to show that appealing to other authors to be your readers is not a great strategy.

A Kiwi Farms investigative analyst had this to say about Rambo, “Cat Rambo! That's a name I haven't thought about in almost 20 years. I knew her as "Sanvean," which was her handle when making/running the MUD called Armageddon. Considering that game's extended history of protecting sex pests, it does not surprise me in the least that Cat ran defense for Marion Zimmer Bradley. Fun fact: Armageddon was well-known among the roleplay-intensive MUD community as one of the most intentionally edgy games and communities. Sexual assault of adults and children were both commonly roleplayed in the game.”

Cat Rambo also became embroiled in controversy when Moira Greyland came out with her memoir, The Last Closet, which detailed her sexual abuse by a feminist icon in science fiction, Marion Zimmer Bradley, when she was a child. It was noted that SFWA had MZB name-checked within their organization, and when Cat Rambo was confronted about the situation, she downplayed the sexual abuse of a minor, and attacked people who were calling on her to have SFWA make a statement “alt-right,” showing that even the abuse of children doesn’t matter to the organization—politics trumped all. 

The changes Cat Rambo made to SFWA kept the organization spiraling in recent years, leading to a current scandal where one of her successors, Jeffe Kennedy, has stepped down from being president under nebulous circumstances.

Now, however, Cat Rambo has apparently crossed the line into alleged antisemitism at Gencon’s writer’s symposium.

According to an attendee of the convention who sent an exclusive report to Fandom Pulse, Cat Rambo started ranting about Jews outside of one of the writing panels at the gaming convention. 

“Cat Rambo went off on an antisemitic tirade in the Writers Symposium lounge in front of multiple witnesses,” the whistleblower said. “It took all of two minutes to go from discussing how ‘the sci-fi community needs to do more for Palestinians’ to an utterly unhinged rant about there being ‘too many New York Jews in publishing’... complete with a patronizing addendum to name-drop a few famous editors as ‘some of the good ones, if misguided.’”

If this report is accurate, having an organization that is obsessed with race and has often labeled opponents as racist, SFWA now has a massive problem on its hands. Speaking this way about an entire race of people but saying there are merely “some” good ones is shocking, to say the least.

SFWA removed Hugo Award-nominated editor Vox Day for merely replying to attacks on his person from N.K. Jemisin in which he declared the author to be a “half-savage,” but this seems far more egregious of racism than anything that can be construed out of a personal feud between authors.

The question looms—will SFWA take action against blatant racism and anti-semitism allegedly spoken at Gencon? Leave a comment and let us know.

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