Pixel Scroll 2/12/17 Who Knows What Pixels Lurk In The Heart Of Scrolls?

(1) REFERENCE DIRECTOR. Chip Hitchcock writes, “Boston has declared a snow emergency, so I followed the email link for information. The front page, https://www.boston.gov/winter-boston, says –“

(2) AGAINST ALL ODDS. Seanan McGuire tweets her animal rescue stories. Worst houseguest, lemur or emu, YOU DECIDE!

(3) 2017 BAFTA WINNERS. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced the winners of the EE British Academy Film Awards for 2017 on February 12. Although there originally were items of genre interest in 14 categories, only a few took home the hardware —

ANIMATED FILM

  • KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS Travis Knight

PRODUCTION DESIGN

  • FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM Stuart Craig, Anna Pinnock

SOUND

  • ARRIVAL Sylvain Bellemare, Claude La Haye, Bernard Gariépy Strobl

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS

  • THE JUNGLE BOOK Robert Legato, Dan Lemmon, Andrew R. Jones, Adam Valdez

(4) NOW BATTING FOR SUNIL PATEL. The Everyone: World Without Walls Kickstarter launched with a cover mockup featuring Sunil Patel’s name first among the story contributors. Today the publisher announced Patel is out, and most of the graphics have been changed to remove his name.

  • Before

  • After

No further explanation was given – the decision likely involves the reasons that other publications cut ties with Patel last October.

(5)  FLAMMABLE TOPIC. The cover of  the YA fantasy novel Before She Ignites, which features a black girl in a pretty ballgown, struck Justina Ireland as worthy of complaint, not because of the art, but the context.

Last night, someone sent me a link to Jodi Meadows’ new book, Before She Ignites.  I didn’t really understand the context until I saw the cover.

The cover, which is gorgeous, features a Black Girl in a pretty dress.  Awesome.

But the fact that the cover appears to be the first of it’s kind and it belongs to a white author serves to reinforce the absolute whiteness of publishing.  Because even when it wants to increase representation, publishers look to white authors to fill that need.

And that is the exact opposite of what should be happening…

(6) PUSHBACK. Mia Sereno (Likhain), a 2016 Tiptree Fellow, has published a letter to the editors of Apex Magazine complaining about their choice of Benjanun Sriduangkaew to host the “Intersectional SFF Roundtable”, posted on February 10.

I am deeply disappointed to find Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who previously also wrote under the pseudonym Requires Hate (RH), as a contributor to your roundtable on intersectionality in SFF.

It is not your choice to publish RH that I find appalling, but your specific choice to ask her to contribute to a roundtable on, of all things, intersectionality.

It is a well-known fact that RH caused harm to people in the SFF community, disproportionately targeting women of color; there was even a published report on it, which garnered its writer a Hugo. Whether you agree with the circumstances surrounding the publication of the report or not, it cannot be denied that women in the SFF community, among them women of color, spoke about the harm RH caused them.

This leads me to some questions: does intersectionality in SFF not include women, especially women of color? Is intersectionality only important enough that we must write about it, but not so important that we actively value it by considering how much further harm giving RH a platform to talk about intersectionality would cause? By this I mean that RH speaking about intersectionality, when she herself has harmed marginalized people — when she has caused harm by using people’s marginalizations against them — is a grievous injury.

I wonder whether you did not consider these things, or whether you did, but simply valued having RH’s contributions to your intersectional roundtable more than preventing harm. Neither bodes well for your commitment to marginalized people in the community.

I state again: it is not your decision to publish RH that appalls me; you have published her before, and I have simply not read the work. It is your decision to publish her in this specific, slap-in-the-face, salt-in-the-wounds context. Many of those harmed by RH — and the names attached to public reports or posts are not the entirety of them — are meant to be included by the idea of intersectionality; instead, you do worse than exclude.

(7) DAY OF THE DAY

  • February 12 – If you’re not living somewhere that celebrates Lincoln’s birthday, then naturally you’ll have to make the best selection you can —

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities. still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. – Charles Darwin

There was a pivotal moment in history when we began to look at ourselves, and at life, in a new way. It changed not just how we perceived ourselves, but how we were related to all the other life and species on Earth. We came to realize, along the way, that we were kin, however distant, of every lifeform on Earth, and that moment was both aggrandizing and humbling, all at once. That moment was when Charles Darwin brought the idea of Law of Natural Selection into the limelight of the scientific world, and we began to see with clear eyes how everything, absolutely everything, was connected.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 12, 1931 — Today marks the 86th anniversary of the release of Dracula starring the iconic Bela Lugosi.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY COMMANDER

  • February 15, 1915 – After he finished playing Pa Cartwright, today’s birthday boy Lorne Greene became Battlestar Galactica’s Commander Adama.

(10) CALHOUN NULLIFIED. Yale dumps slavery supporter’s name on “college”, replaces with computer hero.

Calhoun College will be renamed to honour Grace Murray Hopper, who helped transform the way people use technology.

Hopper earned Yale degrees in the 1930s and became a US Navy rear admiral.

Saturday’s announcement, which follows years of debate, reverses a decision made last year.

The Ivy League university said the move ends the controversy over the former politician and defender of slavery John C Calhoun, whose legacy led to campus protests in 2015.

Four people were arrested in a peaceful protest as recently as Friday after they blocked a road near the residential college.

Yale University president, Peter Salovey, announced in April that the school would keep Calhoun’s name. However he later appointed an advisory panel to determine whether the decision was correct.

Chip Hitchcock amplifies, “For those not familiar with this peculiarity: ‘colleges’ were nominally modeled after Oxbridge but are residential/social only; all undergraduates are enrolled in Yale College.”

(11) DON’T BUY THAT STAR BALONEY. Columnist John Kelly gets to play Snopes when someone asks him if “the Washington Post film critic was fired for giving Star Wars a bad review“; the critic, Gary Arnold, notes that his review of Star Wars was, in fact, highly favorable.

Arnold was quite prescient when it came to how “Star Wars” would be remembered, predicting that the film was “virtually certain of overwhelming popular and critical success. It has a real shot at approaching the phenomenal popularity of ‘Jaws.’?”

Although Arnold never heard the rumor that his “Star Wars” review cost him his job, he has heard another urban myth: that a top Post editor ordered his dismissal after his negative review of Robert Duvall’s “Tender Mercies.”

That’s not true, either. Well, it is true that Arnold didn’t like 1983’s “Tender Mercies.” Duvall played a glum country-western singer by the name of Mac Sledge — “more like Mac Sludge,” Gary wrote.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg Hullender.]

49 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/12/17 Who Knows What Pixels Lurk In The Heart Of Scrolls?

  1. In other news, I’m using my time machine to go back and click the damn tickybox. Well, not directly, but if my calculations are correct, stepping on this one ugly Cretacious era grasshopper should result in the box being ticked. Only one way to find out—!

  2. (6) the editors of Apex Magazine [choosing] Benjanun Sriduangkaew to host its “Intersectional SFF Roundtable”

    What, seriously? I just don’t even.

    Apex Magazine needs to get their head out of their ass. 😡

  3. Just watched the first 2 episodes of Stranger Things. I know, I know, I’m late, but hey, better late than never.

    Recent reading:

    The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. Yes, this just won the National Book Award, so it’s definitely on the literary side of genre. That said, it does have a fairly plot-dependent fantasy element. Unfortunately, in the context of the story, said fantasy element does not make sense, and contemplating it wrenched me out of the book. Also, for a book that won such a prestigious award, the prose is merely pedestrian, and the characters not particularly deep or likable, at least to me. Which is a roundabout way of stumping for Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines, the far superior choice.

    Arabella of Mars, David D. Levine. This book surprised the heck out of me–the further along I read, the more I liked it. I can safely say the author has invented a brand-new genre all his own–Pulp Steampunk Regency. “Pulp” as in a throwback to the Jules Verne kind of rip-roaring adventure (if pre-modern science, as evidenced by, among many other things, a mention of the “swamps of Venus”); Steampunk as in airships and automatons, the former done a helluva lot better than Jim Butcher; and Regency, as in this book is set in 1813, with the racism and sexism the time period entails, although the author does a pretty good job of handling it, all things considered. This one’s good, folks. I wish the YA Hugo award existed this year–this would be the perfect book to nominate for it. (Also, it has a back cover blurb from our very own Kurt Busiek.)

  4. @Bonnie-
    I tried to enjoy “Underground Airlines” but just couldn’t get into the story. And the ending didn’t gel for me.
    I was planning on reading “The Underground Railroad” until I saw the ‘Oprah’ sticker. None of the books I’ve read based on her reccomendations have been able to keep my interest. Maybe it’s a guy thing. Granted I haven’t pick any up since tossing “She’s Come Undone” across the couch.
    If you haven’t read it already, I just finished “Breath of Earth” by Beth Cato and really enjoyed it. I started slightly sceptical but found myself drawn into the story of an alternate San Francisco in 1906 where the US and Japan are allies and geomancers keep earthquakes at bay. I enjoyed it enough to be looking for a sequal.

  5. It’s the birthday of the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound: Chuck Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, on this day in 1923.

    10) There is a Lake Calhoun here in the Twin Cities, a rather large lake. (Fun fact: there are 13 lakes of 2 hectares or larger within the Minneapolis city limits.) There’s debate here about the name vis a vis the original Dakota name, Mde Maka Ska.

  6. Ah, that’s why I saw a brief blowup about the Everyone kickstarter. By the time I checked, figuring that it was likely to be Patel, his name was off the project.

  7. JJ on February 12, 2017 at 8:53 pm said:
    (6) the editors of Apex Magazine [choosing] Benjanun Sriduangkaew to host its “Intersectional SFF Roundtable”

    What, seriously? I just don’t even.

    Apex Magazine needs to get their head out of their ass. ?

    Even setting aside her terrible past behaviour, choosing a member of a privileged, ultra-wealthy, international, elite family to host a discussion on intersectionality is a bit of social justice fail, isn’t it?

    It’s things like this that make me not entirely sympathetic to the right on, pro-diversity crew in SFF.

  8. rob_matic: It’s things like this that make me not entirely sympathetic to the right on, pro-diversity crew in SFF.

    I have to admit that at this point, I am giving a serious side-eye to the other authors who participated, because they should have known better, spoken up, and refused to participate. That they went along with it puts them at a negative balance on my spreadsheet. 😐

  9. rob_matic: “It’s things like this that make me not entirely sympathetic to the right on, pro-diversity crew in SFF.”

    Yeah, and I think today’s scroll provides a pretty perfect example of it. Patel is apparently blacklisted from the entire genre while Sriduangkaew continues to be published, sold, and treated as an authority, despite Sriduangkaew doing everything Patel was accused of doing (using status to try to coerce people under threat of being blackballed.) and far more (rape threats, death threats, destroying at least one community…)

    There’s a double standard. Prominent people in the community that SMoFs like can get away with anything, while more junior people can’t. (And Bee’s repeated invocation of her identity as a shield–she wrote a lot of tweets arguing that the Mixon report was just a racist white woman taking shots as a superior WoC writer–shows how the progressive attitudes of the community can be exploited to further this).

  10. rob_matic: Well, it’s not a single crew. Lots of people whom one would describe as right on and pro-diversity have criticised Sriduangkaew, though I remain annoyed by those who haven’t.

    Bonnie McDaniel: So The Underground Railroad is definitely fantasy, is it? From the descriptions I’ve seen that looks right to me, but Locus confused me by listing it as science fiction (despite listing many ambiguous works as fantasy).

  11. “It’s things like this that make me not entirely sympathetic to the right on, pro-diversity crew in SFF.”

    FAKE pro-diversity! Sad!

  12. In honor of the birthday boy and also series which begin with great promise only to fade to infra-candescent mediocrity:

    The Hexagon of Time turns… Well not so much turns as sits or, occasionally, as circumstances may dictate, slides, upon one edge. Some say it is complacent in its ways but if you asked it would say it is conserving energy – though for what it remains unknown. It’s mum to follow on questions like that. You might say hexagonal inscrutability is at play but that is more revealing of your own shape-ism than anything about the Hexagon.

    Still, sometimes, impelled by external force and leverage it teeters precariously. Usually the burble is brief and it settles back to where it was. (Everything’s OK, nothing to see here. Let’s move along!) Given enough impetus though: sometimes teeter becomes totter and totter becomes commitment and – KA-THUNK – it flips to a new side. It’s progress, of a sort, in its slow creaking way.

    On one Facet, called the Third Facet by some, a Facet yet to come, a Facet long past, a galactic wind rose in the Horsehead Nebula. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the spastic advance of the Hexagon of Time. But it was a beginning.

    Commander Kyra Odama sat in her ready room a cup of chai at hand, untouched. Her face betrayed troubling considerations. The note had come from someone but surveillance review showed not from whom: ‘There are only 12 Psi-Lon models’. The thought flitted through her caffeine deprived brain – ‘What’s a Psi-Lon?!?’…

  13. @AndrewM

    It has what is to me a fantasy element regarding the Railroad itself, and a particularly unbelievable one, that kept throwing me out of the story. Your mileage may vary. I didn’t like the rest of the book enough to overlook it.

    @Harold Osler

    I own Breath of Earth. Loved it. It’s on my Hugo shortlist.

  14. @7: “selection”, eh? cute….

    @Bonnie McDaniel: I wasn’t entirely convinced by Underground Airlines, even if I accepted the basic premise that the rest of the country would have compromised after being able to add “assassins” to “traitors” in describing the South; practically everybody seemed to be making generally bad decisions (even allowing for the chronic and acute pressures they were under), and the US as shown was implausibly advanced.

    @2: well, \that/ emu seems to have been worse than the \average/ lemur; OTOH, being saved from 10 years of potential burglaries has to count for something.

  15. @JJ, I’m usually not sympathetic to folks on financial grounds (can’t begin to catalogue the “sacrifices” I’ve made over the years in order not to work for or take money from bad actors), but nevertheless, a signed contract (if there is one) is often very difficult for an author to turn down over “politics”.
    There’s any number of reasonable justifications – story is already written, check already went for food, story belies the offending stuff, etc., etc., etc.

    On the other hand: does everyone know that the alt-right has a wiki devoted to identifying “SJWs”? Does anyone think that such a list has been assembled for anything good?

    Perhaps the forces of freedom and light need their own list – not a blackball list, but a list of individuals with whom doing business may be problematic….

    Get Ready For the Shitstorm – a list of individuals that SJWs ought to think twice about before working with…..

  16. (1) If I’d known Winter was coming, I’d have frosted a cake.

    @Bonnie: Arabella is also an alternate cosmology novel. Like you, the further along I read, the more I liked it. The scope at the beginning is very narrow. Most of the characters introduced are not seen again, necessarily as Arabella is on a journey. As the story goes on, the scope widens. There are more memorable characters. Arabella develops confidence. There is mayhem, quite a lot of it, as it turns out.

  17. @Steve Davidson

    On the other hand: does everyone know that the alt-right has a wiki devoted to identifying “SJWs”? Does anyone think that such a list has been assembled for anything good?

    Yes, I believe it was mentioned and soundly mocked sometime last year. Any list of that sort would need mocking no matter who did it.

  18. (5) Apparently there is no way to please some people. I do think the principle that writers should be able to write about whomever they wish and that works should be judged by their contents, not their creators, are very important principles.

  19. So, as a direct result of a conversation in a recent File770.com thread, I shipped a box with some five dozen old Doc Savage novels (bronzed, appropriately, by the effect of the passage of time on cheap pulp paper) to Cat Rambo a couple of weeks ago.

    THIS is the delightful result. I’m still chortling.

  20. @Cassy

    Oh, that’s hilarious. I really hope she gives the rest the same treatment.

    @Greg

    I’m pretty sure that article doesn’t try to stop anyone from writing anything.

  21. I havent read Underground Railworad yet, but I did read his The Intuitionist, which is an interesting novel: It plays ina sort-of-alternative reality, where lift inspectors (yes, you read that right) are very important people. The protagonist is the first female black lift inspector. So Whitehead is no stranger to writing about race in a fantasy-like-setting (or alternative world for that matter) – he also has written a zombie book, which got quite good reviews.
    I like the book, but a part of that was because it was so different. But it is not the kind of book that provide a neat clear-cut ending. I would only recommend it with the caveat that you should try to enjoy the ride and dont expect to much action. A part of the book is about a new philosophy on lift inspection…

  22. @Mark

    I’m pretty sure that article doesn’t try to stop anyone from writing anything.

    Justina Ireland’s complaint is that the author was white. Had the author been black, she’d have been happy. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

    It’s an example of finding a way to complain even when you’ve made progress. It’s not hard to do; there are always lots and lots of problems that need fixing. But it’s the sort of thing that alienates people who could have been allies. If you respond to progress by bitterly pointing to the problems that remain, pretty soon, no one will want to make an effort for you.

    And it gives credence to those alt-Right idiots who keep claiming that liberals don’t really believe in the causes they espouse: that we just want an excuse to whine about something.

  23. @ Greg:

    Justina Ireland’s complaint is that the author was white. Had the author been black, she’d have been happy. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

    It also seemed that way to me at first, but on second reading I think her argument is subtly different. Her beef is with the “gatekeepers,” not the author – in particular, that this publisher chose a white author for its first YA novel with a black heroine. I got the idea (and of course I could be wrong) that she wouldn’t have had the same problem if similar books by black authors had been published prior to or together with “Before She Ignites” – i.e., that her quarrel isn’t with white people writing black characters but with publishers choosing white authors as the exclusive or primary portrayers of black characters.

    I personally don’t agree with that argument, because I don’t agree that a white author writing the first book with a black character on the cover would suck the oxygen from black authors; instead, I believe that such books, whether written by white or black people, increase the market for similar works in the future. But I don’t think she’s making the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” argument either.

  24. @ Greg Hullender

    I read Justina’s complaint as being aimed at the publisher. I.e., that even when black authors write about black characters, their covers don’t get the standard default “pretty girl in a pretty dress” cover. We all know that authors have little control one way or another over their covers, so I don’t see how someone as familiar with the industry as Justina could be read as blaming the author as an individual for the cover their book was given, rather than noting that the author as a white person was treated differently than a black author writing a similar character would have been.

  25. Not quite ninja’ed by Jonathan because I’m going to challenge this bit:

    I personally don’t agree with that argument, because I don’t agree that a white author writing the first book with a black character on the cover would suck the oxygen from black authors

    There are plenty of examples of writers from marginalized/minority groups being told by an agent or publisher “Sorry, we already have a [insert marginalization here] book.” So I think it is a rational belief that a publisher newly venturing into “novel with black protagonist” territory with a book by a white author may well be eclipsing opportunities for black authors.

    And a second aspect of that is that, if that new venture doesn’t do as well as expected, the lesson taken may not be “we should have published a story from a cultural insider instead” but rather “you see, stories with black protagonists don’t sell.”

    ETA: Crap, must have typoed my email address and now this and the previous comment are going to be held up waiting on moderation.

  26. This is going to duplicate two comments that are held up because I typo’ed my email address:

    @ Greg Hullender

    I read Justina’s complaint as being aimed at the publisher. I.e., that even when black authors write about black characters, their covers don’t get the standard default “pretty girl in a pretty dress” cover. We all know that authors have little control one way or another over their covers, so I don’t see how someone as familiar with the industry as Justina could be read as blaming the author as an individual for the cover their book was given, rather than noting that the author as a white person was treated differently than a black author writing a similar character would have been.

    * * *
    Not quite ninja’ed by Jonathan because I’m going to challenge this bit:

    I personally don’t agree with that argument, because I don’t agree that a white author writing the first book with a black character on the cover would suck the oxygen from black authors

    There are plenty of examples of writers from marginalized/minority groups being told by an agent or publisher “Sorry, we already have a [insert marginalization here] book.” So I think it is a rational belief that a publisher newly venturing into “novel with black protagonist” territory with a book by a white author may well be eclipsing opportunities for black authors.

    And a second aspect of that is that, if that new venture doesn’t do as well as expected, the lesson taken may not be “we should have published a story from a cultural insider instead” but rather “you see, stories with black protagonists don’t sell.”

  27. @Greg

    I think you’ve simplified her argument to the point of it not being the argument she’s making, while Jonathan explains it much more accurately. Most pertinently to your first post, she’s not saying anyone should be prevented from having X, she’s saying other people (who really wanted X earlier) should have it as well, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

    (ETA, pretty much ninja’d by HRJ, didn’t mean to give the impression of a pile on!)

  28. [5]

    Because even when it wants to increase representation, publishers look to white authors to fill that need.

    While this may well be true, I often find that the answer to questions like “If the publisher wanted more representation, why didn’t it hire someone of the proper ethnicity/gender/whatever to write PROJECT X?” is…

    “The publisher wasn’t thinking about representation. The writer in question was thinking, “I want to write a project about this, came up with the ideas and presented them to the publisher. The publisher didn’t then take the ideas, fire the guy who came up with them and hire someone else because they’re that guy’s ideas, and it’s his project.”

    That doesn’t mean the publisher shouldn’t be thinking about representation. But the spur often came from someone else.

    [11] TENDER MERCIES is a terrific movie. I speak truth.

  29. Here’s a thing about representation…and I’m going to frame it in a different context to try to get a different angle on the topic (not to necessarily draw parallels).

    When I was first doing my publisher research to consider where to submit Daughter of Mystery, I looked around at the major (and even minor) SFF publishers to see who might be publishing things like my book. I could find books that were sort of like it, but the characters were straight. Or the characters were male. Or the author was a Big Name and had written one book sort of like that but was publishing different things now.

    When you’re doing market research–and especially as an unknown who’s never published a novel before–you don’t approach a publisher saying, “You’ve never published anything like this by anyone like me before which is how I know you really really want my book.”

    No, you look at what’s being published and assume that it represents the sorts of books from the sorts of authors that the publisher wants to produce.

    So saying, “Well, this is the author who happened to approach the publisher with this particular topic, so that’s who got published” side-steps the question of how it was that a particular author got to be in a position to have that pre-existing relationship with the publisher such that they were able to pitch a project that stepped outside the existing paradigm in that particular way.

    I get a certain amount of flack from people for the choice I ended up making (and I beat myself up second-guessing it on a regularly scheduled basis), but I have a great deal of empathy for any author who looks at the output of a field and sees no one and nothing resembling them coming out of a publishing house and concludes that it’s a deliberate and intentional choice. And therefore makes choices that less resemble heads encountering brick walls.

    Representation matters. A black author looking at a publishing house that publishes books about black characters written by white authors cannot reliably conclude that the publishing house would have been similarly open to the same book written by a black author.

  30. @steve davidson: “Perhaps the forces of freedom and light need their own list – not a blackball list, but a list of individuals with whom doing business may be problematic…”

    I’m not seeing how “a list of individuals with whom doing business may be problematic” is in any way different from “a blackball list”, except for the more tentative/euphemistic tone.

    I mean, I’m well aware that “blackball” is often used in ridiculously broad ways by people like Mr. Del Arroz who really just mean “someone didn’t invite me to a thing and I think it was because of my political reputation”… but once you’re talking about literally making a list and advising people to refer to that list so they know who to shun professionally, that’s more or less the exact definition of the term.

  31. Looks like Apex has taken down the roundtable and published this response.

    I don’t quite know how to feel about it, myself. I understand the arguments about Sriduangkaew, but I would have liked to read the discussion. It included writers I enjoy and respect.

  32. rob_matic:

    Even setting aside her terrible past behaviour, choosing a member of a privileged, ultra-wealthy, international, elite family to host a discussion on intersectionality is a bit of social justice fail, isn’t it?

    Pretty much. It’s been proven time and time again that Sriduangkaew/RequiresMeds comes from a privileged, elitist background that she utilized to spew acid and vitriol at members of fandom (including towards women and minorities) and exploiting her status of a Thai woman as a shield. She has no grounds for talking social justice, let alone contributing to a round-table. Separate from that issue, is how she’s continued to be published by Apex, Clarkesworld, BCS, etc, but that’s a whole other can o’ worms.

    In regards to #4: I know for a fact that Tony was not aware of Sunil Patel’s behaviour. I informed him of what Sunil had been up to, what he’d been accused of, etc. Although I’m the fiction editor at SSS I’m not for this anthology, and it was Tony’s decision to exempt Sunil from the anthology, and did it immediately after I told him about what happened.

    Not soliciting him is one thing, kicking him out is another. Personally, I’m not unhappy he’s gone, but there’s some bitter hypocrisy at work that allows Sriduangkaew to be accepted as a member of fandom and constantly published by leading magazines that claim to laud diversity and progressiveness while Sunil has essentially been exiled.

    Not saying I have the answers, nor am I excusing his horrible behaviour. Just shedding some light on the glaring contradiction.

  33. @Jeremy Szal:

    Sriduangkaew/RequiresMeds

    Periodically, I have the spoons to ask people to please not conflate mental illness with being an abusive asshole. I require meds, but even when unmedicated I somehow managed to not abuse, threaten, or harass anyone over the internet.

    Thanks.

  34. @Jeremy Szal:

    RequiresMeds

    Please, please, don’t do that. I know multiple people who take medications for mental illnesses. They do not act like Sriduangkaew, and they would not regard their illness as a reason to act like Sriduangkaew. You are trying to insult her, but you are only hurting them.

    ETA: Ninjad by Dawn! But I think it’s worth repeating.

  35. I apologise for the above comment – it was not intended to conflate mental illness or the taking of medication with people behaving like complete revolting arseholes a la RH. Uncalled for on my part.

  36. Thank you, Jeremy. To be honest, it took me forever to remove “batshit crazy” from my lexicon. I’m sure that sort of stuff still slips out of my mouth at times, but I try to be careful because I believe that stigma keeps people from seeking treatment that might really improve their quality of life.

    (That probably shows my extreme privilege. I have heard many mental health horror stories and believe them. It’s complicated.)

  37. I skimmed the roundtable and my impression was that Sriduangkaew decided the subject of “intersectionality” should really be defined as “why more non-Western writers should be published” and “why US-centric efforts to promote ‘diversity’ are generally bullshit”, and directed the conversation accordingly. The other participants then had a fairly productive discussion on those subjects. After the introduction, Sriduangkaew did not contribute a lot. Some of her remarks, as they contained derisive generalizations about kinds of critics she dislikes without any specifics at all, could be construed as invitations for the participants to go into detail about who those people are and why they’re bad, but if so, they didn’t really bite.

  38. The original (now edited) response was pretty troubling, trying to shift the blame to the anthology publishers (and making note that Likhain works for them, as if it’s somehow her fault) and basically implying she did something wrong by going public with her letter.

    Gross.

  39. I have very mixed feelings about all of the Apex RT stuff, but I will say that I found the original version useful and thoughtful in a way that had me jotting down some notes and bookmarking many of the links. Thank you for posting the link, Peter J.

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