In 2011, Time magazine named bestselling author and screenwriter George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame, as one of the most influential people in the world. The HBO production of Game of Thrones was a huge success, both with critics and with audiences. It’s unclear, though, whether those accomplishments will save Martin after his guest host stint at the Hugo science fiction and fantasy awards proved he is an older man without any woke sensibilities.

The Hugo Award annually acknowledges the best sci-fi and fantasy. Martin was the toastmaster for this year’s award show, which was held via Livestream. As the host, Martin made jokes and quips throughout the show. He later said of his performance that, “Most of the stories I told last night were time-tested, in a sense. I have told those same stories before. Usually they get big laughs.”

This time, Martin did not get big laughs. Instead, he offended the social justice community because he mispronounced nominee names, mocked the Oscar statuette, and made frequent references to dead, white, male sci-fi authors who, during their mid-20th century lives, held views about race and homosexuality that are unacceptable today.

Before showing you the tweets reflecting wokester outrage, here’s a bit of background:

1. Many of the nominees had challenging names and were supposed to submit pronunciation information for a guide to help prevent errors. In the wake of the attacks against him, Martin explained that he never got the guide:

At no point in the process was I ever given a phonetic guide to how to pronounce all the other finalists, the ones who did not win. Had I received that, I would certainly have made every effort to get all the names correct.

2. Martin several times referred to John W. Campbell, who died in 1971. Campbell was one of the major early- to mid-20th century science fiction writers and editors in America, with a career spanning thirty years. He was so famous that, in 1973, the World Science Fiction Society, which hosts the Hugos, established the “John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.” In 2019, however, that changed.

Campbell wasn’t just a sci-fi maven; he was also a racist crackpot. He argued that the descendants of those blacks brought to America as slaves enjoyed a higher standard of living than they would have had their ancestors remained in Africa (which is true but still offends people); believed that mechanization would have ended slavery without the necessity of the Civil War; supported segregation; was hostile to the Civil Rights movement; hated the government’s war on cigarettes; and was an early supporter of L. Ron Hubbard.

Award winner Jeannette Ng brought Campbell’s beliefs to light in 2019, at which point the Campbell award became the “Astounding Award.”

3. As part of his time-tested shtick, Martin also talked about H.P. Lovecraft, who created the Cthulhu Mythos. Martin apparently was unaware or did not care that Lovecraft has of late been categorized as a white supremacist and homophobe.

With that background, you can appreciate the insanity of the woke social justice warriors in the sci-fi and fantasy world. They are Maoists. There is no place in their world for older people with older ideas, for good intentions, or for humor. Deviate from their ideological perspective and you will be destroyed.

Last night's Hugo Award ceremony was an embarrassment and a insult to the entire genre community. Every aspect of it that could have been celebratory, kind, or thoughtful was devoured by the cowardice and narcissism of an "old guard" that is terrified of its own irrelevance.

— Sarah Gailey (@gaileyfrey) August 1, 2020

Tl;dr of tonight’s Hugos: George Ronald Reagan Martin took what should have been a night celebrating a massively diverse field of finalists and winners and instead took a big throbbing shit in the middle of it, and then spite-talked about John Capbell for several hours https://t.co/6AlrL4aiJ7

— brian j white (@talkwordy) August 1, 2020

The fact that this mispronunciation came from the same writer who devised names such as Daenerys, Viserys and Jaehaerys, is particularly infuriating. #HugoAwards https://t.co/MMVqVzQbdO

— Jade рџ’љ (@_JadeWrites) August 1, 2020

The Hugos gains more legitimacy, more relevance, more clout from the participation of marginalised writers than we do from them.

Without us, they stop being the future. https://t.co/Es7jSuP1kZ

— Jeannette Ng еђіеї—йє— (@jeannette_ng) August 1, 2020

I’ll end this post with what I laughed at most, which was the outrage someone named Natalie Luhrs felt on behalf of the Oscar statuette, a hunk of inanimate metal that Martin dared demean:

There was also a whole segment about the Oscar statuette and its crotch. It was gender essentialist and transphobic. It was so gross I don’t even want to talk about it to be honest. CoNZealand tweeted a non-apology apology about it to people who were offended. I’m not particularly gender non-conforming, but if that segment made me feel gross and unwelcome, imagine how it made not only the trans and other gender non-conforming nominees feel, but also all those who were watching. It was a gigantic “f[***] you, you’re not welcome here.”

Image: H.P. Lovecraft’s sketch of Cthulhu, which is a public domain work.