SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.
Episode 10 of Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, “Farwell, Hunt, and Shaw,” dropped this morning!
Today we look at two landmark labor law cases argued and decided in a heady few weeks in the summer of 1842…and at the man, “no friend of labor,” who made them happen.
Show notes at my Solidarity Forever page. Listen at Acast or your favorite podcast app.
I’m proud to announce the first episode of my new podcast, Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, has dropped at Acast and your local podcast app.
Solidarity Forever is, as it says on the tin, the history of American labor – from 1619 to the 21st century. Informed by my reading on labor history and organization, and my own lived union experience, I aim to provide the big picture of American labor history – who the mill girls were, what happened at Homestead, the first Red Scare, what a sit-down strike is – and the tools you need to go out and make some labor history of your own.
This first episode, “The History of the History of American Labor” discusses what labor unions are, what the podcast is about, who I am, and why you should care. It’s fifteen minutes long – go have a listen.
Mathieus are a fish-eating people. We take our meat from the sea, from Morro Bay oysters to farm tilapia to Maine lobster to Italian anchovies to delicate nori and dashi of Japan. The first meat Lyra ever tasted was her mother’s pan-fried salmon. We both grew up in a little drinking village with a fishing problem where every restaurant except the Chinese place offered clam chowder and the soupe du jour.
I love a good rare steak as much as the next man, and as much as my father does, but we live on the sea.
Mathieus are an educated people. My mother, Nancy Castle, went back to school at 38 after she bore me, and the memories of sitting next to her as we did our homework together are a bulwark of my childhood memories. Her library card was open to me to evade school board censorship. Even my father, Steve Mathieu, a proud working-class hippie who missed his college years counting parts for Control Data, is worshipful of Jack London and a handful of writers of the 60s, and watched my grades like a hawk.
Mathieus are a civic people.
Let me tell you some of our stories and myths, some of the stories we tell to explain who we are. These are the stories I will tell Lyra, to show her what kind of people she comes from.
This post is now part of a grand conversation in the SFWA about machine learning, AI, and its impact on fiction. For more points of view, click here.
First, it’s not AI. It’s machine learning, aided and abetted by human input from stem to stern. It’s essentially your phone’s text prediction but with more sweat and blood in. Which is an accomplishment, but it’s not Mr. Data.
Second, read this article of Unmitigated Pedantry. Bret Devereux articulated a lot of the half-formed ideas I’ve had about what we’ll call AI for argument’s sake as of last Friday.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
That was where I stood two days ago.
Yesterday, Clarkesworld closed for submissions.
Neil Clarke is about the nicest man in science fiction. He’s also dedicated. He didn’t close for submissions during his heart attack. He’s made some dread pact with a dark power to always get his responses out within three days. He’s the best paying regular market for short fiction, and everyone’s first port of call.
Being the first port of call, he got maybe 50 submissions a month. But now…
That staggering difference is AI-written slush, clogging up the works. Neil is one man. He can’t read all that in a month, much less reply in three days.
Taylor Swift had a song about this.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheila Williams at Asimov’s may have a team, but how overwhelmed are they going to be this year compared to last year? And AI detection software is still crude, and, anyway, that just starts another arms race with each trying to outwit the other. You’ll never know if your AI detector will work today or if some bright spark in Russia just came up with something that technically passes. Right now, like Dr. Devereux, there are some stereotypical aspects of machine-generated writing (fake citations, boring but technically perfect plotting) that we can pick up on, but humans are fallible, too, and those visible signals are going to evolve.
The problem isn’t with the machine-learning ‘AI’ as such.
It has potential for aiding the handicapped (alt text generators, automatic closed captioning), for assisting writers in the outlining, story-bible-checking, and other “preproduction” phases, and putting Depositphotos book covers out of business.
The problem is that it’s being implemented by people who, as Kane Lynch pointed out last night over my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, fundamentally do not understand what art is or what it’s for. A few weeks ago, this tweet made the rounds.
This is the problem. The people who are developing AI and presently leading the narrative on what it is, does, and means do not understand how real human beings work. I rather enjoy porn, and despite what this fellow thinks, I’ve had access to pictures of naked or nearly-naked men, women, and others for the better part of three decades, some of it even computer-generated. It does not replace my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, our long meandering conversations, the brightness in her eyes when I show her some new science fiction I’ve known for ages, her incisive wit editing my work, her embrace, the sound of her prayers, or her passion and creativity…for art and leftist politics! *koff*
Now, this guy is easy to mock. In fact…
…but the people back of AI “art” and “fiction” just as fundamentally misunderstand how humans work. Art and fiction aren’t just an extruded mass to consume – even at the bottom barrel-scrapings of porn, romance, and pulp. Even mediocre (written) porn, you’re reading for the artist’s personality – their verbal tics and turns of phrase and weird little obsessions. The sub-mediocre stuff is full of shortcuts – cut/paste, entire stories resold with the names changed – and I have no doubt they’ll turn to this shortcut too. (It’s hard writing a novella a week, and I have immense respect and trepidation for those authors that actually do!) But the moment you say “I like this author” and you even subconsciously notice their nom-de-plume next time you search, you’re out of the stuff that AI can automate.
Because writing and art aren’t about automation. They’re about personality. And personality comes from deutomation.
“What the Hell is deutomation?”
To deutomate something is the opposite of automating it – it renders a process more involved and more conscious. Deutomation makes art (including fiction) better. That’s why we self-edit so many drafts and read and reread our prose until we detest it. Because the time and effort and labor involved makes the writing better. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It grinds our personality, our unconscious obsessions and verbal tics, into the writing, so it bursts off the page.
Automating art gets it fundamentally bass-ackwards. I can see usages of this kind of machine-generated art for sketches, tests, roughs – testing the ideas. But for the actual creation of the work of art you plan to show other people as a finished objet d’art? That’s something that gets better from deutomating it, not automating it.
And yet, people who don’t think they need to pay for writing, or even ask permission, are the people training these “AIs” and proclaiming them THE FUTURE! as loudly as the terrorists in Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future!. These are people who, as near as I can tell from out here, don’t believe in ethical constraints on their work, nor understand what human beings might want from their work, and when confronted, just verbally bully their interlocutors and crow “well this is the future GET USED TO IT LUDDITE!” These aren’t people I want in charge of my cheese drawer, much less disruptive technology. I have a nice double-crème brie in there, it’d spoil from disruption.
Mathieu’s Law of New Technology – assume bad actors exist, and they will use your technology to harm other people.
I’m not actually afraid of “AI” stealing my job. Like Dr. Devereux, the fundamental misunderstanding of what my job is insulates me from that, and my extensive experience reading porn and seeing where the shortcuts stop gives me some experience in predicting where this shortcut will also stop. But I am worried about clog. We’re going to clog up (if the AI boosters are to be believed) legal services, medical services, movie theaters, Google searches, and, not least, editor’s inboxes, with substandard machine-extruded “content” that drowns out anything useful, because machine learning can’t at present, and may never, understand its content. If I wanted terrible medical advice, WebMD is already right there, telling me I have uterine cancer. It’s the phone tree for tech support all over again.
And what do we scream at the phone tree? “GET ME A REAL PERSON!”
We’re gonna still want a real person – especially a real artist or writer or musician. But this is the phone tree writ large, at amounts that cripple Neil Clarke the way a heart attack never could. I don’t have any solutions to this – though SFWA are fervently discussing possible stopgaps – but asking the right question is the first and most important step toward any solution.
My apologies, this wasn’t a super-tight argument about The Right Way Forward with AI – although a culture shift that maybe ethical constraints like asking permission before training on someone’s blood, sweat, tears, and IP actually apply to how technology is used would be a good start. This is a series of thoughts from one writer who’s been trying to imagine better futures for two and a half decades.
But, seriously, engineers? Assume bad actors exist. And assume they will use your technology. Please.
Today, I did the hat trick.
A hat trick, according to The Guardian, was when the cricket club would present a member a new hat upon completing three wickets in one game. I originally heard it in terms of hockey, when a player scored three goals in a row. But my hat trick has nothing to do with sports.
I don’t remember when I started calling it that, but I’ve been calling it that ever since. For me, a hat trick is a day with three, very different, accomplishments in it:
If you’re a little confounded by these, let me break them down.
10 Minutes of Waiting Worship
As a (Liberal) Quaker, my worship of God and awareness of the Presence do not involve set prayers, or songs, or pew aerobics. Some folks, even some Friends, find these things bring them closer to the Light, and I’ve sung for joy or repeated a mantra before. But the beating heart of my religious life is sitting in silence among Friends on Sunday morning, praying stillness into my soul so that I can hear, and heed, the still, small voice of God. Outsiders call it silent worship, but among Friends, we call it waiting worship. It’s not so much that we are silent, as that we are waiting for God and waiting on the Presence of God among and between us.
The early Quakers had a practice of retiring daily, or as often as possible, which I understand to be a Friends’ Meeting “in good order” that happens to have only one Friend in it. Each Friend sits down, settles down, and centers down, letting God’s Light illuminate them and enlighten them. Not quite meditation, not quite prayer, it seems to be the Quaker experience par excellence. And I do not retire nearly often enough.
1,000 New Words
Jack London (my problematic patron saint) called it his stint. Ray Bradbury sat down on Monday and wrote a few thousand words of new story, editing Tuesday and submitting Wednesday, every week for most of the 1950s. Stephen King cruises on about 1,200 a day.
And like these working-men before me, I lay down 1,000 more words on my latest project (or blog post) before I can rest for the day. Edits don’t count, research don’t count, revisions only count if I add a scene or a character. It’s laying down raw first-draft wordcount, the most sacred of writerly tasks, the holiest of holies. Everything else is just publishing.
It started out as a minimum bar to keep my production up. It’s become so much more. I used to think of the words of my stint as like rail, something we lay down and leave behind, always moving forward. Now I think of the thousand as ballast, weight laid by my keel that makes me more stable and better able to weather high seas and sudden storms. I am happier and healthier each day I meet my stint, and exactly the reverse the days that I don’t.
Of the three components of my hat trick, I easily hit 1,000 new words more often than I hit 10 minutes in waiting worship or 3 sanchin kata.
3 Sanchin Kata
If you practice Uechi-ryu karate, this is self-explanatory. If you don’t practice Uechi-ryu but practice karate, you might know what a kata is, but not know Sanchin. If you took one look at that and said “can you eat it?” then read on.
Kata (or, in other martial arts, forms) are the set solo practice exercises used to teach technique in East Asian martial arts. If you’ve ever seen old people in the park doing t’ai chi, they’re all doing the same form (probably Beijing 24-Step Form). Individual karate styles are strongly defined by their kata, which kata they teach and how they practice. My tradition, Uechi-ryu karate (Uechi family style), rests on a kata called sanchin or “the three battles.” Here is an Okinawan grandmaster showing us all how it’s done.
Sanchin has acquired a semi-mystical status and no small amount of superstition. Master Uechi himself often said “all is in sanchin.” At my dojo, growing up, we did one each of the other eight kata…
…and three sanchin.
To do three sanchin requires going through the other five Uechi-ryu kata that I know, stretching, probably also doing my daily core regimen. At the gym, I might even play with the kettlebells or dance or hit the heavy bag. But if I accomplish nothing else physically, all is in sanchin.
Bringing It All Back Home
Straightforward enough, but it’s become more over the years. I mentioned how writing ballasts me. Extending the nautical metaphor, writing is ballast, sanchin is maintenance, and waiting worship is trimming the sails. “I laid down a thousand words today” is so many pounds of ballast along my keel, weighing and centering me, allowing me to weather storms that should otherwise have tossed me over. But it’s ballast of grain or sawdust, and soon grows sodden and slips away, and I have to lay more down. Sanchin is maintenance, the bo’sun’s trade, tarring line, scraping barnacles, mending sails, making baggywinkles. In port, I can work deeper, but even out at sea, I can lean her over and scrape away all the barnacles that built up as long as there’s a sand drift that’ll hold her …but however I do, I need to keep ship-shape and Bristol-fashion. Waiting worship, though, is easiest to understand: it is to find the prevailing winds from God, and rather than fight it, adjust my sails to better work with wind and water to get where I need to be.
Days I do the hat trick, I feel balanced, well-kept, and agile. I feel the most R. Jean Mathieu I can be, like I’ve lived up to some inner standard. Do you have anything like that? Some task or series of tasks that make you feel the most yourself? Tell us about them in the comments!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to center down and listen for the still, small voice…
In honor of Sen. Sanders’ win in New Hampshire last night, I’m reposting this post from 2016, when we were all younger and more innocent. Some edits have been made in concession to changed political realities, but the opinions are vintage ’16.
If you’re voting for Bernie, good for you! I agree with you that Bernie Sanders is the best candidate running, both for the many accomplishments he’s got done in his time in Congress and because of his voting record of consistently voting in the interests of the American people, especially the worst-off Americans. I support him for his well-thought out tax plan, his willingness to confront race issues, and for letting the rest of us democratic socialists out of the red closet.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you’re probably stirred by his message of revolution: “not me, us.” You want to see a more democratic, more just America, where mothers don’t have to choose between nursing their newborns and getting a paycheck, where veterans aren’t begging for change on the street, where CEOs aren’t taking home millions while their workers count pennies. You’re passionate, you’re inspired, you want to change the world.
But if you’re voting for Bernie, voting for Bernie isn’t enough.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you know how many seats in Congress are up for grabs this election. Socialist (or at least socialist-friendly) Senators and Representatives will make President Sanders’ term a lot easier. But do you know who your current Senator and Representative are? Here’s your answer. Do you know who’s running against them? Find out here. Do you know which candidates side with Bernie on issues like minimum wage, antitrust action, and campaign financing? Check their websites! (I’d also peek at their ranking with the Citizens’ Congress.) Now you know, and you can tell your friends and neighbors to vote for whomever in the same breath you mention Bernie Sanders. You might even volunteer for those down-ticket campaigns, where every vote counts.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about your government and what it’s doing to you and to the rest of us. Get involved in local politics. Your state, county, and especially city governments have a much bigger impact on your life than the resident of the Oval Office – and vice versa. Look up your city council’s agenda for their next meeting, and go speak at public comment. Sign up for a city board or commission appointment, such as Public Works, Planning Commission, Recreation and Parks, or, erm, Citizens’ Finance Advisory Committee. Run for elected office! San Luis Obispo became the first city in America to get money out of elections and clean up campaigns because of a small group of dedicated citizens. Start there.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about working people. Unionize your office Half the reason we need Bernie in the first place is because capital convinced white-collar workers and service people that we didn’t need unions. But the same laws of economics apply to white-collar jobs as blue-collar: If all you working stiffs are on the same page about demanding a living wage or paternal leave or inclusionary hiring practices, you can win against management. You don’t have to strike, you just have to be willing to negotiate…and be willing to stand with your brothers and sisters when they need you.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about the downtrodden members of society. Volunteer a few hours or a few loaves of bread at your local homeless shelter. Organize a #BlackLivesMatter march. Join a campus or city social justice activist group. If you’re church-going, demand your congregation help. If you’re a frat boy or sorority girl, get your brothers/sisters behind you for community service. If you have five hundred Facebook friends, get a tenth of them to show up. Put your skills, time, and resources to making this country more just, more fair, and more equal, so that we really do have liberty and justice for all.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you want a revolution. One man isn’t a revolution. It can’t just be him, it has to be us. We have to carry the revolution forward. And while it sometimes involves waving banners and shouting slogans, most of it is doing homework, sitting in meetings, speaking at podiums, and making agreements. It’s coalition-building and voting your conscience and doing a job. It’s keeping in mind the vision of a new America, and making your corner of America look more like that. Then, and only then, will we have a real revolution. Then, we’ll see body-cams on policemen and bankers in jail. Then, we’ll earn the right to say “we fought the revolution.” Until then, there’s work to do.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you don’t mind a little work to bring the revolution. If you’re voting for Bernie, you live for it.
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” – Commissioner Pravin Lal, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
I have two enemies in this world: the zealot and the censor. The only difference between the two is that the censor is too squeamish to burn writers along with their books. I have wary respect for the zealot with matches in hand, I have nothing but disdain for the censor.
This fellow, Matthew David Surridge, speaks my mind, regarding my opinion on the Sad Puppies and their pathetic attempt to control the Hugos. They have attempted to form a slate around their ideology, to exclude any other nominations for any reason but agreement with their ideology. That this is completely legal is a fault in the Hugo nomination and voting system. Do not bother me with protestations as to its legality, it is still wrong. In building a slate around their ideology, Vox Day and Brad Torgerson and all their butthurt, simpering followers have declared themselves my enemy.
This image seemed appropriate, because a bunch of dildos have the whole thing spinning out of control.
I have heard rumblings that those most offended by the odious ideology of Torgerson et al should assemble their own slate, fight fire with fire, in the 2016 Hugos. Fingering their matches. If you agree with this logic, you are also declaring yourself my enemy.
This is where it gets involved. TL;DR: “There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running around with lit matches.” And they’re standing in the room with you.
When this article made the rounds a few months ago, I was chatting via Messenger on a Facebook group I am no longer a member of. She asked if I, as a writer, would be following the recommendation. No, I replied – I reread Gabriel Garcia Marquez about once a year, I love Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, and I was at the time working my way through Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren. I chose these examples as they were relevant to the recommendation, which is mostly centered on speculative fiction. She accused me of being elitist and provincial. I pointed out, at this, that I was the only person of any color I knew who had read the Dao De Jing, the Analects of Confucius, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Mengzi, the Chuangzi, Lao She’s Teahouse, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the I Ching, and the Little Red Book of Mao Zedong. In addition to reading the Dhammapada in the original Pali and Baital Pachisi in the original Sanskrit.
The next words from her message box were “I refuse to accept this intellectual colonization.”
I have no idea what she wanted me to read, if neither whites nor (by inference from her disapproval of reading Chinese and Indian authors) anyone else. I do know she would happily light a bonfire of vanities, if not an auto-da-fé. And she will almost certainly vote the Anti-Puppy Slate in 2016.
There are zealots and censors in every group, among every nation, in every creed and for every cause. Yes, even yours. They’re the ones who sensibly advocate stripping Republicans of their voting rights or demand armed uprising against O-Islama-Commu-Social-FASCIST-ism, the Kenyan Usurper.
Both groups, the already-organized wrong-side-of-the-bedsheets-but-lily-white Sad/Rabid Puppies, and the coalescing Anti-Puppy brigade, are my enemy, because they put ideology over aesthetics.
There are places where this is the right thing to do – voting for government elections, for instance. Changing the law, which is always ugly no matter what you do to it. Raising consciousness, although their the rules of marketing and social dynamics start affecting you, and it’s illegal for either of those to marry aesthetics in most states.
Nominating the best short story, magazine, and novel of the year in a given genre in ostensibly a plebiscite of “dedicated” fans of that genre? No. Like the Olympics, that is a matter for aesthetics, not ideology – and I’m well aware how far short the Olympics falls in this goal, but hell, at least they have it as a goal.
The Hugo voting base has clearly dispensed with such petty notions in favor of pure ideological conflict, now and forever. I seem to be the only person who’s noticed that aesthetics as a concern for what the best short story of the year should be have been quietly dropped. Edit: Other than Charlie Jane Anders’ excellent piece on io9. Thank you to the one who pointed me to it!
It doesn’t matter if they tell you to vote against someone because of ideology, or vote for someone because of ideology. Positive censorship is still censorship. If they are telling you to systematically exclude anyone rather than vote your conscience and your taste, they are attempting to censor somebody.
Besides, I’m a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class American male who writes about a superpowered Mexican Catholic who married a white chick and hangs around with a bisexual mixed-race atheist and a Korean atheist. If you’re voting a slate, Puppy or Anti-Puppy, you already hate my guts for some damn reason or another.
But, I hear you say, some people and their ideologies are so odious that aesthetics shouldn’t trump ideology! You don’t read Vox Day do you?
No, and neither do I read Matthew David Surridge. Because I haven’t gotten around to them yet.
The only saints I know are St. Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, and Friend Bayard Rustin. Robert Heinlein was a warhawk, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr. stole chunks of his PhD wholesale while philandering up a storm, Woody Allen diddles (diddled?) children, Orson Scott Card has politics slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun. Orson, I am absolutely sure, would happily light an auto-da-fé as long as all the Wrong People were strapped to it.
This does not stop me from reading and even enjoying Ender’s Game, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and Hart’s Hope. Nor does it stop me from watching Vicki Christina Barcelona or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, reading Dr. King’s speeches, reading the Declaration of Independence (while fully aware of the hypocrisy), or …frankly my Heinlein collection is too long to list here.
I have discovered that most of the Valiant Sixty, the original Quakers, were anti-Semite, Islamophobic, and anti-pagan. But they, too, like Dr. King, Bob Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Tom Jefferson, and Woody Allen, like, if you wish, Malcolm X and Confucius and Sun Tzu and Gandhi, have an inner light. And while corrupted by their frailties, their work can and does transcend them, so that Jefferson can write “all men are created equal” and Card can write Petra and Barclay and Penington and Penn and Fox can write that “all who are brought into the world have that of God inside them, whatever their externals in creed or color.” Transcending the writer and the reader is what writing is for.
When Ender’s Game hit stores, I watched the very female clerk recommend it to a family, speaking knowingly of both the book and the movie. When I asked how she could, she shrugged and said “if I only read people I could agree with, I wouldn’t have anything to read.” Knowing her politics later, I concurred that she was right.
I do not care what the author has done, or what she believes, I care about the work. Is the work good? Does the author destroy the work by injecting ideology, as Heinlein does after Stranger in a Strange Land (and even Stranger gets iffy)? Does the author’s ideology befog their minds, so that Jack London can only write worshipful, inferior Peoples of Color or “credits to their race”? Does the author commit both errors at once, and so write Perdido Street Station?
I accept no other criteria than aesthetics for judging a book as a book. And I have a sneaking suspicion that ideology can only have an adverse effect on a work’s aesthetic quality (consider Tolkien’s rebuke of C. S. Lewis on the strength of allegory versus [reader] application). Then again, I may be wrong – and I am certainly guilty of smuggling Zen and Taoist themes, Quaker testimonies, the way of Mastery, and liberal politics into my work. I seem unable to leave a story without it smelling faintly of soy sauce and frying oil.
Ray Bradbury put it best in the Coda of Fahrenheit 451.
“For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
[…]
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.”
So what am I asking you to do? If you have read the Hugo entries, and are so inclined to part with your forty dollars, vote. Vote for the good stories, the stories that move you, the stories that shock you, the stories that force you to understand another person…whether the writer or his unappointed, ideology-driven fanbase was transcended by the work or no. If it moved you, vote it. If it did not, or if you have not read them…don’t vote in this year’s awards, or go ahead and vote ‘no award’ if you feel you’ve already wasted your two twenties.
But do, in any case, do vote to change the rules of nomination and of voting so that slates cannot happen again. So that aesthetics, rather than ideology, reigns supreme in judging a work of art…or at least can be a hopeful contender, rather than dismissed from the ring with a sneer and a sigh.
And then, if it offends you so terribly that I condemn both censors instead of just the one you hate, go rent a typewriter. Submit that story to Escape Pod, Solstice Literary, Strange Horizons, and other markets that are consciously diversifying to overcome the historical systemic exclusion of women, authors of color, and the QUILTBAG. If it offends you that I slammed the Sad Puppy slate, just go to the markets that are still publishing Campbell-approved “white (hu)man conquers universe” stories and make a faint whining sound when you squeeze them. You already know which ones they are.
Light me on fire in the story, if you like. Show some goddamn guts. But let me know who you are. As a writer, I consider it good business to know exactly who and where the censors are.
© 2024 R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments