Things I did not know

[james_davis_nicoll]

Apparently in their current version, the skin of Drow who convert to good becomes lighter coloured while the "blackness of the drow's skin has become a permanent sign of their depravity". The Curse of the Lamanites angle seems to have been introduced by self-confessed Canadian author Lisa Smedman in The Lady Penitent.

Nicked from arielstarshadow

Comments

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I've asked this else where, but how many of the seemingly self-replicating multitude of awards for SF/F are named for Joseph Campbell, a man who was, despite his many other qualities, something of a white supremicist with very... interesting views on the american civil war?

[avram]

None?

John Campbell, on the other hand...

(Yeah, I get 'em mixed up sometimes too.)

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is that I always go "Bruce, no, Jo?something, joseph? yeah that sounds right... Joseph Campbell."

And wiki'ing now I see that Joseph Campbell is the campbellian hero guy! Which I'd ironically been blaming on John Campbell...

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I know you meant John. There has been controversy around Joseph; but John was a suppurating racial hemorrhoid of a man, a braying jackass at the edge of acceptable public Northern opinion even for the 1940s. (He finished his degree at Duke, which is also where he encountered the idea that psi powers were scientific. He almost certainly didn't know the new campus was designed by a black man.)

As far as I know, there are just the two: the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, which only has one racist on the jury at present, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.