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All good points...might even be true. I have nothing to do
with 'em anymore, so it's moot in any event.

The new season starts this week.

There's one other aspect to this whole thing which was brought
home to me in something Ellen Datlow said on MSNBC the other week. She
pointed out, with deadly accuracy, that once upon a time, movies tended
to mine SF novels for their stories. Now, it's movies and TV that
drive novels, with endless ST books, books based on movies,
novelizations, the whole Star Wars Empire stuff, on and on and on.
You'd think that an organization of SF writers would want to be more
involved in the mass media that was changing the way their field buys
books, and what they buy, since it has a direct effect on their
livelihood.

By working *with* the media, they would have a better chance of
helping SF film and TV producers understand what SF is, and what books
are out there they can option. That could lead to more movies based on
books, more option money for writers, and so on. It's a provincial
attitude that is going to continue to do them great harm in the long
run. But SFWA, for all its SF trappings, is remarkably short-sighted
when it comes to alternate storytelling technologies.

jms