The fail, it burns.

I am completely unsure of where to start with the bad as far as this article "Third World Worlds" by Norman Spinrad is concerned. Because there is a lot of fail jam packed into it. I actually read the entire thing, and yeah. Failtastic.

I think Jason Sanford gets at the basics of the wrongness in this post and Nick Mamatmas does an even better job with his post "World SF, Worth Reading BEFORE developing an opinion"

The part of the text most people have pointed to as being the pinnacle of fail is this passage:

So, for now at least, and in the apparent absence of a significant body of science fiction written by born and bred Africans, this Caucasian American is probably the closest thing there is or has been to an African science fiction writer, with the exception of Octavia Butler. Who did write the same sort of thing, and did it well, and was Black to boot, but I use that politically incorrect word rather than “African American” because aside from her genetic heritage she was no more African than Mike Resnick.

( My reactions and reasons why I believe that quote and indeed the entire article is quite wrong. )

ETA: Paragraph got cut off. Fixed that.