Sci-Fi Author M.C.A Hogarth Claims She Was Harassed By A SFWA Member At Nebula Awards Conference Over Politics

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has had its share of controversies this year, but now sci-fi writer M.C.A. Hogarth claims she didn’t run for SFWA president because she was harassed over ideology at their Nebula Awards Conference.

SFWA is supposed to be a professional writers’ association, but in recent years, it has become a social club for authors who are not anywhere near making money as a full-time job. 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.

Left-wing activists filled the board's roles, pushing identity politics over science fiction. Many recent board members did not even write science fiction.

This year, the club has had many scandals. Jeffe Kennedy, long-time president of SFWA despite not being a science fiction writer, abruptly resigned. She was replaced by Chelsea Mueller, who appears to be an amateur YA Horror writer who went completely silent publicly on BlueSky during Worldcon and then abruptly quit.

SFWA had trouble filling their vacated board positions, as very few people wanted to run, even resulting in a write-in campaign for secretary after the one person on the ballot dropped out of consideration.

Rumors are that the club has a toxic environment demanding too much of volunteers while lording over them and keeping them under “NDAs” against speaking out as to their treatment. On top of this, the club was rocked by a disability scandal where one of their employees alleged they were being mistreated for complaining about lack of accessibility.

Then, in October, multiple-award-winning author Donald Ekpeki, a Nigerian writer who had been propped up for diversity, was abruptly removed from the board after he was accused of stealing a white woman’s short story and slapping his name on it for an African voices publication.

Now, the well-respected M.C.A. Hogarth, author of An Exile Aboard Ship, has revealed the real reason she didn’t run for president: to try to save the organization after a disastrous election of new board members, in which less than 300 people bothered to vote.

She posted to X,

I still get questions from people who think I dropped out as SFWA's VP and from its presidential race because of dire health issues. I didn't have a health issue. I left because of people like the girl who accosted me at the Nebula Conference while I was talking to two vendor reps, so she could have a (real, not kidding) crying fit at me about how threatening I was, and how if I became president I would oppress the minorities in SFWA (note: I am three kinds of minority myself), and how that was unbearable and I was a bad person and shouldn't be running.

I had a discussion with my family not long after and their advice rung in my heart like a bell that's still echoing, years later: "You should only be running if you're willing to serve the best interests of the members of SFWA." And I realized I could not, lovingly and honestly, serve people like that girl, and the people she brought as emotional support when she came to confront me.

At the time, I thought it was only about that girl. But when I relayed this incident to people I thought of as friends, they said, "Oh, how strange... she's not normally like that! I'm sure she's under a lot of strain." In retrospect, I understand now that my friends would never have seen that yes, people like that girl are "normally like that"...to people who disagree with them. Since my friends agreed with them, they never saw that side of their acquaintances and friends. And they would never defend or help me, thus.

I loved SFWA, despite its many flaws, and regret I couldn't remain part of it. But it's not an ideologically diverse or welcoming organization, and not all my efforts to change that made a particle of difference.

(Perhaps the saddest thing, looking back, is the off-hand comment one of the vendor reps said to me after I apologized for the scene: "Oh, we've worked with artists for a long time. We're used to it.")

The accusation of being accosted is in line with how SFWA has historically treated anyone who doesn’t toe the political line of the extreme left wing of the Democratic party. Board Members ran a harassment campaign in late 2017 to get the author of this article banned from WorldCon under false pretenses, conspiring on a writers forum called Codex to get a letter writing campaign to force WorldCon to act.

It's clear that SFWA does not act in the best interest of science fiction writers or keep to business. Instead, it continues to be a petty political entity that validates bad behavior from its members rather than trying to help all authors and create the best business practices for science fiction and fantasy publishing.

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