(1) THE ORIGINAL KTF REVIEWER. Humanities revisits “Edgar Allan Poe’s Hatchet Jobs”.
Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews—the Library of America’s collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that’s had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.
Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that “the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord’s compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast.” He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan’s 1836 novel, The Swiss Heiress, by proclaiming that it “should be read by all who have nothing better to do.” The prose of Theodore S. Fay’s 1835 novel, Norman Leslie, was “unworthy of a school-boy.” A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson’s novel Paul Ulric by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric.”
Attacking better-known writers – a tactic still in use today by several minor sff authors — was also typical of Poe.
The twist, though, is that as a critic Poe often treated ethics as disposably as we do coffee filters. That self-dealing rave review is just one example. Poe plagiarized multiple times early in his career (most notably in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and “Usher”), but still spent much of 1845 leveling plagiarism accusations against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe delivered his attacks under his own name, but also anonymously, and through an imaginary interlocutor named “Outis.” But for all of Poe’s bluster, evidence of Longfellow’s thievery was thin, and the poet, wisely, didn’t respond. “Poe’s Longfellow war,” said publisher Charles Briggs, who’d hired Poe at the Broadway Journal, “is all on one side.”
(2) WHAT A REVIEWER IS FOR. New Yorker’s Nathan Heller revisits the American Heart controversy in “Kirkus Reviews and the Plight of the “Problematic” Book Review”.
People make sense of art as individuals, and their experiences of the work differ individually, too. A reviewer speaks for somebody, even if he or she doesn’t speak for you.
To assume otherwise risks the worst kind of generalization. I went to high school in San Francisco at the height of the multiculturalism movement. My freshman curriculum did not include “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby,” or “Moby-Dick.” We read, instead, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Bless Me, Ultima,” and other books showing the range of American fiction. I’m glad. (One can read “The Grapes of Wrath” anytime.) I remember finding Hurston’s novel brilliant and Anaya’s novel boring. I did not conclude, from these feelings, that African-American literature was interesting and Chicano literature was not. Why would I? The joy of books is the joy of people: they’re individuals, with a balance of virtues and flaws. We are free to find—and learn our way into—the ones that we enjoy the most, wherever they come from.
That specificity of response is what Vicky Smith seems to encourage by opening the full canon of new work to new readers. It’s also, though, the diversity that Kirkus has smothered by issuing a “correction”—the editor’s word—on the political emphasis of a published response. Although it’s easy these days to forget, a politics is a practice of problem-solving, case by case, not a unilateral set of color-coded rules. If certain inputs guarantee certain outputs, what’s in play isn’t politics but doctrine. Kirkus, admirably, is trying to be on the progressive side of a moment of transition in our reading. But its recent choices aren’t about progress, or about helping young people find their way through many voices. They’re about reducing books to concepts—and subjecting individuals who read them to the judgments of a crowd.
(3) AWARD REBOOT. Newly appointed award administrator Tehani Croft announced “Significant changes for the Norma K Hemming Award”.
The Norma K Hemming Award, under the auspices of the Australian Science Fiction Foundation (ASFF), announces significant changes to the Award structure.
Designed to recognise excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in a published speculative fiction work, the Norma K Hemming Award, which has been running since 2010, has had a major overhaul this year, with new categories and a two year cycle.
The award is now open to short fiction and edited anthologies, alongside the previous eligible work of novellas, novels, collections, graphic novels and stage plays. It will also make allowances for serialised work. In addition, entry submissions may be digital or print for all submissions.
Two prizes will now be given, one for short fiction (up to 17,500 words) and one award for long work (novellas, novels, collections, anthologies, graphic novels and play scripts), with a cash prize and citation awarded.
Nominations for the 2018 awards, covering all eligible work published in 2016 and 2017, will open in early November.
(4) THE HORROR. Chloe continues the Horror 101 series at Nerds of a Feather with “HORROR 101: The Uncanny”.
The uncanny to me is a crucial element of horror: not being able to pinpoint exactly what makes us scared. While the extreme can be terrifying (the xenomorph in Alien is a category crisis—its something we can’t classify/is not instantly knowable—but it’s not uncanny because we shouldn’t be able to know it/classify it as its something completely new to the human experience). However, even more terrifying is that which is just a little off: pod people who may look like your lover, but they smile in just a slightly different way. A man with fingers just a little too long. Women with hair in front of their faces so that their expressions are unknowable.
In technology, we refer to the “uncanny valley” (a term coined by Masohiro Mori in the 70’s) when dealing with robots and computer designed images of people. A robot who looks human-like but not realistically so (think Bender in Futurama) wouldn’t trigger the uncanny valley but a robot who looks extremely close to human, but has some tiny bit of offness, such as the more and more realistic robots we have currently, would fall into it and create a sense of slight fear, revulsion, or distrust. In the film Ex Machina (which on its surface is a film about a Turing test going very wrong, but in its heart is a take on the tropes of Gothic literature and the Bluebeard fairy tale), Alicia Vikander portrays Ava brilliantly by making the robotic elements include both Ava’s movements (more perfect than an average person’s) and speech (carefully clipped and enunciated)—this heightens the uncanny valley feeling while going against the entirely human looks of her face (which wouldn’t necessarily fall into the uncanny valley).
(5) WHEN WILL YOU MAKE AN END? Alastair Reynolds writes a whole post – “Gestation time” — around a term that also came up in a discussion of Zelazny here earlier this week.
In the previous post I mentioned that my new story “Night Passage” – just out in the Infinite Stars anthology – was one I was glad to see in print because it had taken about five years to finish. I thought that was approximately the case, but when I checked my hard drive I saw that I opened a file on that story at the end of November 2009, so the better part of eight years ago. That wasn’t an attempt at the story itself, but as per my usual working method, a set of notes toward a possible idea. I rarely start work on a story cold, but instead prefer to brainstorm a series of rambling, sometimes contradictory thoughts, out of which I hope something coherent may emerge. This process can take anything from a morning to several days or weeks, but I never start a story in the first fire of inspiration.
(6) INITIAL QUESTION. At Nerds of a Feather, The G interviews Shadow Clarke reviewer Megan AM – “FIRESIDE CHAT: Megan AM of Couch to Moon”.
MEGAN AM: … My own personal goal was to demonstrate that good, interesting, literary SF does exist; that it can come from anyone, anywhere, and in any language; and that it can compete with the basic, Americanized, TV-style SF I keep encountering on shortlists. Unfortunately, the 2017 Clarke submissions list didn’t give me much to work with on that front–a lot of the choices were very formulaic, very bland, not to mention very British, white, and male– but I did manage to find some champions I’m grateful to have read: Joanna Kavenna, Martin MacInnes, Lavie Tidhar, Johanna Sinisalo. As for my experience as a contributor… I mean, eight people I have admired in this field–most of whom I had never interacted with before– read and talked books with me. It was the coolest thing ever. I’m curious what you thought of the whole thing. Watching you watch it from the outside was interesting: You seemed genuinely interested in bridging gaps between contentious parties, communicating good faith in all sides, and withholding judgment until it was all said and done. So, now that it is done, what do you think? …
THE G: …. I’d also extend these observations to criticism itself. So I try to have a thick skin anytime I press “publish.” Someone is bound to think my ideas are rubbish, and that’s fine. At the same time, authors and fans are often guilty of violating the text/person distinction–taking depersonalized comments on a text personally and lashing out at the person who made them. The effect is to police what critics, bloggers and other reviewers can say in public, and that’s bullshit.
I could go on, but let’s get back to the Sharke project! Or rather, back to awards. One thing that’s come up a lot in discussions is the concept of “award worthiness,” i.e. that there is some objective-ish bar that works of fiction must live up to in order to be proper candidates. I’ve bandied this term about a few times, generally when talking about the Hugos. I have a very clear sense of what, for me, constitutes award worthiness in science fiction and fantasy–some combination of ideas, execution, emotional resonance and prose chops. Not always the same combination, but hitting all four to a significant degree, and hitting one or two out of the park….
MEGAN AM: ….This comes back to questioning the idea of an objective kind of “award worthiness.” You mention “comfort SF,” which is just as subjective, because I don’t find that kind of SF comforting at all. We’re living in a Trumpnado, where critical reading and thinking skills are devalued, fake news accusations are flying from all directions, nazism is being given a platform in centrist media, and yet progressive SF fans feel threatened by the idea that it might be necessary to sharpen up on difficult, rigorous, uncomfortable novels? I’m not sure it’s appropriate right now to award anything less than radical and complex. And even setting politics aside, the these ‘comfort food books’ are aesthetically old and crusty. Reading award-nominated novels from different decades really helps to put that into perspective: Not a lot has changed in the styling of SF and its “coding” of metaphors, so I’m confused by why we keep awarding the same styles and thoughts… seventy. years. later.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- October 29, 1992 – Twilight Zone cameraman George T. Clemens passed away at the age of 90. SyFy Wire says there’s a good reason to remember him:
Amazingly, Clemens photographed 117 of the 156 episodes of the series. His crisp black-and white photography is well featured in the Blu-ray format – so crisp that a freeze-frame sometimes reveals details that even the art directors didn’t want you to see. For instance, in the Donald Pleasence episode “Changing of the Guard” (the final episode of the third season), the diploma on the wall of Professor Ellis Fowler’s office should feature his name. It doesn’t. Thanks to George Clemens’ crystal-clear photography, we see that it belongs to another man.
- October 29, 1998 – John Glenn returned to outer space.
(8) THINKING ABOUT MOOLAH. Franklin Templeton Investments gives a rundown about AI “Science Fiction To Science Fact: The Rise Of The Machines”.
By Mat Gulley, CFA, Executive Vice President, Head of Alternatives and Co-Head IM Data Science, Fintech & Rapid Development; Ryan Biggs, CFA, Research Analyst
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated a lot of excitement, but also some (perhaps justified) paranoia. Will computers replace-or even overtake-human beings? Mat Gulley, executive vice president and head of alternatives at Franklin Templeton Investments, and Ryan Biggs, research analyst at Franklin Equity Group, explore the ramifications of “the rise of the machines” in the realm of asset management. They say the full implications of the new machine age will likely take decades to fully play out, but will likely be staggering.
We have been anticipating their arrival for decades. As far back as 1958 the New York Times wrote a story about a machine developed at Cornell University called the Perceptron. The device was said to be “the embryo of an electronic computer … expected to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its own existence.” In 1958!? That would have been an astonishing achievement in a time even before the microwave oven graced our kitchen countertops.
For the past half century, humanity has been eagerly anticipating the age of artificial intelligence (AI); imagining it in Hollywood and reporting on its progress in the media. Perhaps at times our optimism has gotten ahead of itself. Not any longer. This time, the machines are not just coming-they are already here….
(9) SPEAKING UP. The Washington Post’s Todd C. Frankel looks at the career of the video game voice actor, who can spend four hours straight practicing ways of screaming death scenes and who went on an eight-month strike to get better working conditions and residuals: “In $25 billion video game industry, voice actors face broken vocal cords and low pay”.
Yet voice actors in this industry are not treated like actors in television and movies. This led voice actors to go on strike last year against 11 of the largest video game developers over bonus pay and safety issues such as vocal stress. The bitter labor dispute dragged on for 11 months, making it the longest strike in the history of Hollywood’s largest actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA. Burch was forced to give up a critically acclaimed role she loved. Gaming fans feared delays for their favorite titles before a tentative deal was reached late last month. A vote by the full union is going on now.
The lengthy strike highlighted how video games have emerged as the scene of a tense clash between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Voice actors want to be treated more like TV and film actors, who are viewed as central to the creative process. Tech firms often see the developers and engineers as the true stars of the show.
“They keep saying, ‘Games are different,’?” said J.B. Blanc, a well-known voice actor and director who has worked with Burch several times. “But that’s no longer true. Because games want to be movies, and movies want to be games. These are basically 100-hour-long movies.”
(10) EASY PICKINGS. Abbie Emmons has now taken her Twitter account private after absorbing a thorough and professional internet beating. The punishment began after she tweeted the opinion belittled by Foz Meadows in “Dear Abbie: An Open Letter”. Foz begins with the admission “I don’t know where your hometown is” but doesn’t let that keep her from making assumptions about it, or from working in “white” and “Christian” four times in her opening paragraph, and not in a positive way.
You’re quite right to say that you, personally, will not encounter every type of person in your small corner of the world. But “small” is the operative word, here: wherever your hometown might be, the fact that it’s the basis of your personal experience doesn’t make it even vaguely representative of the world – or even America – at large.
You claim that you “love everyone” regardless of their background, and I’m sure you believe that about yourself. Here’s the thing, though: when you say you wish people would stop being “correct” and “just write books that actually… reflected the kind of thing we encounter in real life,” you’re making a big assumption about who that “we” is. There might be very few black people in your hometown, but if one of them were to write a novel based on their memories of growing up there, you likely wouldn’t recognise certain parts of their experience, not because it was “incorrect,” but because different people lead different lives. And when you claim that certain narratives are forced and unrealistic, not because the writing is badly executed, but because they don’t resemble the things you’ve encountered, that’s not an example of you loving everyone: that’s you assuming that experiences outside your own are uncomfortable, inapplicable and wrong.
(11) EXOTIC NATTER. NextBigFuture declares “Teleportation and traversible wormholes are all real”. You wouldn’t doubt Han Solo would you?
Einstein-Rosen or “ER” bridges, are equivalent to entangled quantum particles, also known as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or “EPR” pairs. The quantum connection between wormholes prevents their collapse without involving exotic matter.
The quantum-teleportation format precludes using these traversable wormholes as time machines. Anything that goes through the wormhole has to wait for Alice’s message to travel to Bob in the outside universe before it can exit Bob’s black hole, so the wormhole doesn’t offer any superluminal boost that could be exploited for time travel.
Researchers are working towards lab tests of quantum teleportation to verify their theories…
(12) POT. KETTLE. BLACK. Camestros Felapton, in “Reading Vox Day So You Don’t Have To: The last essay on Chapter 6”, thinks the way to refute Vox Day’s characterization of alleged SJW organizational tactics is to show how Republicans have done the same thing to each other. True as that may be, the trouble is tit-for-tat casemaking isn’t entertaining – and usually, Camestros is very entertaining.
Organizational Tactics
These are the terrible things SJWs are supposed to do to organizations. Vox lists seven and he manages to set up a deeply insightful analysis of how an organization can be destroyed by political extremists. The only problem is that as an analysis it fit bests how the right have wrecked the Republican party. Again, I’ve changed the order to show the sequence of events better.
“The Code of Conduct: Modifying the organization’s rules and rendering them more nebulous in order to allow the prosecution or defense of any member, according to their perceived support for social justice.”
Lobbying organizations on the right like the NRA or “Americans for Tax Reform” have systematically created an extension of the GOP’s actual rules and accountabilities for their politicians. For example the ATR has been pressurizing Republican candidates (at state and federal level) to sign the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge”: …
(13) DEAR SIR OR MADAM. SyFy Wire tells about the exhibit where you can read J.K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter pitch to publishers.
Rowling’s original pitch opens with:
Harry Potter lives with his aunt, uncle and cousin because his parents died in a car-crash — or so he has been told. The Dursleys don’t like Harry asking questions; in fact, they don’t seem to like anything about him, especially the very odd things that keep happening around him (which Harry himself can’t explain).
The Dursleys’ greatest fear is that Harry will discover the truth about himself, so when letters start arriving for him near his eleventh birthday, he isn’t allowed to read them. However, the Dursleys aren’t dealing with an ordinary postman, and at midnight on Harry’s birthday the gigantic Rubeus Hagrid breaks down the door to make sure Harry gets to read his post at last. Ignoring the horrified Dursleys, Hagrid informs Harry that he is a wizard, and the letter he gives Harry explains that he is expected at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in a month’s time.
The synopsis goes on to discuss Hagrid’s arrival and his revelations about Harry’s forehead scar while also explaining that “Harry is famous among the witches and wizards who live in secret all over the country because Harry’s miraculous survival marked Voldemort’s downfall”.
(14) SPACE VAMPIRES AND THE FUTURE OF “I”. Peter Watts brings a whole new level to the term “self-effacing” – “The Bicentennial 21st-Century Symposium of All About Me”.
This feels a bit weird. Creepy, even. If it makes any difference, I advised them not to go ahead with it.
A couple of weeks from now— Nov 10-11— the University of Toronto will be hosting an academic symposium about me. More precisely, about my writing.
You could even call it an international event. While U of T is providing the venue, the symposium itself is organized by Aussie Ben Eldridge, of the University of Sydney. At least two of the presenters are from the US (although one of them will be Skyping in, doubtless to avoid the mandatory cavity search that seems to be SOP at the border these days).
Friday is layperson-friendly: a round-table discussion of my oeuvre, or omelet, or however you say that; a reading (new stuff, yet to be published); an interview; a bit of Q&A. The schedule only listed 15 minutes for drinks after that, but as Ben reminds me he is an Australian and would never make so rookie a mistake. That 15 minutes is only for warm-up drinking on campus, after which we retire to the Duke of York.
Saturday is the academic stuff….
(15) VISIBLE WOMAN. We probably have more cyborgs than Taylor Swift fans on this site — which still means some of you should be interested in this new recording: “Taylor Swift Turns Cyborg For New ‘Blade Runner’-Inspired Video to ‘…Ready For It?’ Watch”.
As fans of the Blade Runner universe mull over Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral cinematic study of what makes a human, Swift goes full replicant in the new futuristic music video, which dropped at midnight.
Taylor lit up the Internet earlier this week when she teased snippets from the sci-fi clip, in which she appears in a skin-tone thermoptic suit, giving the illusion of actually being her birthday suit. Who needs threads when you’re a machine, right?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Carl Slaughter, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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[1] I have that Library of America volume right here, with his hit jobs. It’s one of the first L of A books I got, in fact. Haven’t read as much of them as I’d intended, though, because his critical prose is pretty dense. He’s no Corno di Basso.
Clicking for old time’s sake, but it hasn’t worked in months.
1) Read his “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” for an example of what you’re talking about.
(10) EASY PICKINGS. Foz begins with the admission “I don’t know where your hometown is” but doesn’t let that keep her from making assumptions about it, or from working in “white” and “Christian” four times in her opening paragraph, and not in a positive way.
Well, a little Googling reveals that Foz is dead on the money, and her response was pretty much the same as my response when I first read this tweet. Given this young woman’s idea of “realistic”, it’s clear that she’s been living in a white small-town bubble (despite the fact that 5% of the people in her town are black).
I was an 18-year-old from a small white Christian town at one time, too, I thought I knew everything, too (though I was apparently a lot less racist than this), and I learned some harsh lessons about how little I actually knew, too. Fortunately, the Internet didn’t exist back then, so the blowback I got was a lot less than this young woman did.
I’d like to hope that she’s learned from this experience. Unfortunately, my fear is that the lesson she learned was not the right one (i.e., to not talk about one’s ignorance and racism, vs. to not be ignorant and racist). 😐
(15) VISIBLE WOMAN. I like 2-3 Taylor Swift songs a ton, but in general am not a big fan. So I don’t like that music, but SF videos? Sure, I like. 🙂
Pre-fifth.
@5: Interesting to get a view of a writer’s development process, at least for one story. I wonder how many others go through the build-up-and-pare-down cycle? I’ve run into bits and pieces of authors describing their methods (or at least what they see as their typical process) and it’s generally enlightening; I remember McCaffrey saying that someone else had to tell her the 2nd Pern book was about the junior partner of the first book rather than continuing the male lead’s story. Random item: Bernstein’s The Joy of Music describes a manuscript that shows Beethoven went through a Reynolds-like process: several elaborations on the first try at a conclusion for movement 1 of the 5th Symphony, ending with something even more abrupt than the original.
edit: Fifth! But too late here to open one….
JJ: It’s good that you can look those things up, but you can’t cash Foz Meadows’ IOU with your after-the-fact research.
Mike Glyer: It’s good that you can look those things up, but you can’t cash Foz Meadows’ IOU with your after-the-fact research.
Meadows doesn’t have an IOU. The young woman’s post is ignorant and racist (and likely homophobic), and it didn’t take me Googling her hometown to know that.
I know dozens of people just like that young woman, from my hometown. “I’m not racist! I’m not homophobic! I’m a good Christian, and I love everybody! I just don’t want to see those people in my books. 🙁
JJ: Foz comes off as indifferent about who she’s actually attacking as long as she can download her predetermined list of slurs. What really struck me about this is the question — who is Abbie Emmons that the internet converged on her from all directions to puree this bit of low-hanging fruit? Is this some big internet celebrity?
10) I grew up in a suburb of Stockholm that really wasn’t diverse. Looking at old school photos, I think there were two black students in all the classes, both adopted. I do not know if such places exist in US, but they absolutely did in Sweden when I grew up.
Of course, just one train station closer to Stockholm, there was quite a difference. So it is still a matter of how you limit your perspective.
For those who may not know, “Outis” is Greek for “Nobody” – and was, in particular, the alias that Odysseus used to trick the Cyclops. Poe could reasonably have expected his readers to know this, I think.
Mike Glyer: who is Abbie Emmons that the internet converged on her from all directions to puree this bit of low-hanging fruit? Is this some big internet celebrity?
She’s an (ostensibly) adult musician with 1200+ Twitter followers, who thought it would be clever to shoot her mouth off about things that she really doesn’t understand.
Did she get a hard lesson out of it? Yes, and probably a harsher one than was warranted.
But I’m saving the bulk of my compassion for the people she wants to erase.
Silence gives assent.
Asking people like Foz, who’ve been subjected to this sort of ignorant bigoted crap their whole lives, to keep their mouths shut because the person is question is just a poor widdle small-town girl who’s too ignorant to know any better, is asking them to be complicit in their own erasure.
The “diverse” people that Abbie is whining about have been subjected to centuries of this crap, precisely because no one was willing to speak out about it (and the few who did dare to speak got persecuted or killed for it).
When is it okay for them to speak up? Just how big of a celebrity does someone have to be, before it’s finally okay for people of color and LGBTQ and their allies to say “NO, THIS IS NOT OKAY, WE WILL NOT ALLOW THIS SHIT TO SLIDE BY ANY MORE.”? 10,000 Twitter followers? 100,000 Twitter followers? How famous does the person have to be before the people they’re trying to erase finally get to say something?
Otherwise, I do think Mike describes twitter in a nutshell. Different people see one text, they retweet it a bit indignantly and a few retweets later, it has been seen by several thousand people. Of these several thousand, one percent will pester the original author and some will never give up (until they find the next person to pile upon).
My guess is that Meadows is only one of those that got a retweet in their flow and decided to use it as a general example.
But. Open Letter? Really? You do write open letters to persons of authority or in power. Thousand followers on twitter is nothing to hang in a christmas tree.
JJ: The choice is not between two imaginary extremes of mobbing people on the internet or suffering erasure.
Foz constantly expresses aspects of her experience and wounds in reviews, autobiography and commentary, and does so well enough to have many readers. As one of her readers, I am under the impression she’s interested in living in a world where people treat each other with mutual respect and acceptance.
It wasn’t some other site, it was File 770 that covered the story when Vox Day manipulated Black Gate to boot a column by Foz referencing him as a neo-Nazi.
When Foz is confronting someone who expresses the views of a white supremacist, who has initiated that issue, then despite being white I take no offense because I oppose those views as well.
In this case, Foz starts by admitting she doesn’t know the target’s background, but gratuitously hammers away at white Christians. I don’t think that’s an approach that moves the needle in the direction of making this the world we want to live in.
Mike Glyer: The choice is not between two imaginary extremes of mobbing people on the internet or suffering erasure.
Theoretically, it’s not.
In reality, it is.
Who decides how many people comprise a “mob”?
Who decides which of the marginalized people get to speak up, and which have to stay quiet, so that the person advocating erasure is not “mobbed”?
The reality is that any marginalized person or ally who wants to speak up against this sort of thing should be able to do so, because the alternative is erasure of those who are involuntarily silenced.
You’re offended by Foz assuming the young woman is white and Christian based on her photo and her words, because you’re white and Christian, and you don’t behave this way.
But the reality is that a significant number of white Christians do behave this way.
How many times have you heard an atheist say that “I love everyone”? Never, I’m guessing. And that’s because atheists don’t have the moral imperative on them to love everyone, but Christians do. Now I certainly can’t speak for atheists other than myself, and I would be interested to hear from any who do say that, because I’m guessing that they are pretty rare. But I certainly won’t say I love everyone. I can have compassion for all people (some more, and some less, depending on whether they’re making a concerted effort to make life harder for other people), but I don’t love everyone. And I don’t feel bad about that, because I don’t believe I have to love everyone in order to be a good person.
But anytime I see someone say, “I love everyone, really I do, but…”
Invariably, they’re a Christian, trying to tell themselves (and everyone else) that really they’re a good Christian, really they are — despite the fact that they don’t want women or POC or LGBTQ or physically disabled or mentally disabled or whatever minority it is they don’t want in their books or their comics or their movie or their church or their neighborhood.
And any time someone talks about straight white people being a “realistic” depiction of the world, as this young woman has done, they’re a bigot — whether they realize it or not, whether they mean to be one or not.
You read that young woman’s words and it does not scream “white Christian bigot” to you, because you are a white person who, from what I’ve been able to see, does a pretty good job of living your faith, and you’re a believer in equality regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion.
But I, and Foz, and a whole lot of other people read her post and a big bell goes “DING DING DING” because we’ve heard it and read it a thousand times before, coming from straight white Christians. “I love everyone, but…”
Foz knows who this young woman is, because her words reveal it.
Certainly not all straight white Christians say what she says — but the massively overwhelming majority of people who say what she says are straight white Christians.
And I kind of feel that you’re having a #notallstraightwhitechristians response here, and I understand that. I know a significant number of straight white Christians who are good people like you who live their faith well (there are a number of them here on File770), and I know that it sucks to feel like you are being lumped in with people who don’t.
But I don’t think that #notallstraightwhitechristians moves the needle in the direction of the world we want to live in, either. 😐
I really do think the “realistic” word is the problem. If you count all types of diversity: Religion, non-neurotypical, skin colour, HBTQ… I’d say it is kind of unrealistic to not have diversity. It might be realistic that you do not talk about diversity in some areas. But it will exist. And to say it doesn’t, that it is unrealistic, is refusing to accept that people exist.
I do not think christianity has much to do with it though, because we have people saying such stuff in Sweden too and they are typically atheist libertarians.
Hampus Eckerman: I do not think christianity has much to do with it though, because we have people saying such stuff in Sweden too and they are typically atheist libertarians.
Do your atheist libertarians generally profess to love everyone?
The unrealism of a lack of diversity is what I took issue with the musicians’ post. I’m straight, white, male, nominally Catholic. I’m the kind of person she seems to ONLY want in the works she read. The whole idea of diversity being “shoved down her throat” (this is not a phrase she uses, but its a phrase I just heard as I was writing this on an NPR story) sets me off now.
Erasure is harmful. I get that some people are uncomfortable with diversity, and just want to live in a world where they can pretend there is no diversity. But that lack of depicted diversity is a lie, and its a corrosive and pernicious one. Even here in Minneapolis, which is a fairly homoegeous place, there is diversity, in the right places, and marginalizing and denying it can be a step toward hatred. (our friend Beale, for example, snarkily has called Minneapolis Mogadishu on the Mississippi)
(6) INITIAL QUESTION.
I initially felt quite supportive of the Shadow Clarke thing and kind of still am – people engaging with books is a good thing – but the more I’ve read of their thoughts the less interested I’ve become.
I’ll just stick to being very British, white and male and reading stuff I enjoy.
I can’t speak for Hampus and his atheist libertarians but I encounter plenty of right-on idealistic people with massive blind spots about privilege and their interactions with the world, regardless of colour and religion.
@Mike Glyer …working in “white” and “Christian” four times in her opening paragraph, and not in a positive way.
But not, as far as I can see, in a negative way either. Nor can I see any actual slurs in Foz Meadows’ piece, much less a ‘predetermined list’ of them. At worst I think she’s being a bit condescending – but that’s because she’s choosing to read Abbie Emmons’ argument as a naive one, offered in good faith.
Foz starts by admitting she doesn’t know the target’s background, but gratuitously hammers away at white Christians. I don’t think that’s an approach that moves the needle in the direction of making this the world we want to live in.
Foz is talking about the mistake of assuming that your and your life are normal and that other kinds of people and lives are exceptions, and how easy it is to make that mistake if you’ve not had much exposure to difference. I’m not sure how that’s “hammering away at white Christians” and I think that any move of the needle in the direction of recognising different experiences – which is to say empathy – is a good one.
I’m a currently-displaced-Londoner, from one of the most visibly diverse boroughs, and I’m living in one of the least diverse parts of the country. I understand that my default expectation of reality is probably not going to be the same as people who grew up here (for a lot of reasons, not just diversity). And yet, and yet, at this summer’s beer festival, in a small and mostly white town, in a mostly white county, the musical entertainment was a black man with dreadlocks performing reggae. I wonder if that would seem unrealistic in a story?
I didn’t think Foz Meadows was out of line; it didn’t seem to me she was using white or Christian as insults, just as a way of saying [the majority in your area]. But Twitter can be a hellscape that encourages nastiness. I wouldn’t be very surprised if some of the response Abbie Emmons got was just plain awful and totally unjustified. I have seen things characterised as a mob which really weren’t, and I’ve seen people use the excuse of someone being Wrong about Social Justice on the Internet as a justification for being awful. I don’t know which one applies here.
I’m really glad Foz Meadows has gotten enough power to be a mean prick to someone. It’s a real advance for the cause of justice when someone on the internet can pick someone less powerful out, trash them, and drive them into silence. That’s how we get the right sort of diversity: By telling people we disagree with to sit down and shut up.
JJ:
Would it be a great scandal if they did? I’m not sure of why I should focus on that part.
Hampus Eckerman: I’m not sure of why I should focus on that part.
You said you didn’t think this had anything to do with Christianity. But the young woman in question is signalling her (self-perceived) Christianity with those words, which is where (I believe) Foz got that from. It’s certainly how I read her post, long before I read Foz’ response.
As far as blaming Foz Meadows:
Foz wasn’t responsible for the pile-on to this young woman, any more than Seanan McGuire was responsible for Jonathan Ross withdrawing from the Hugo program. They are both high-profile LGBTQ women who make convenient scapegoats for people who want someone to blame when straight white people get a lot of blowback for behaving badly.
Gosh, it would be nice to see the people who behave badly be the ones held accountable for their own behavior for a change. 🙄
@Meredith But Twitter can be a hellscape that encourages nastiness. I wouldn’t be very surprised if some of the response Abbie Emmons got was just plain awful and totally unjustified.
@John A Arkansawyer I’m really glad Foz Meadows has gotten enough power to be a mean prick to someone.
Not just Twitter, apparently.
And has anyone else noticed how much easier it is to talk about the hurt feelings of white Christians than whether Foz Meadows has a point?
It appears that people who don’t frequent Twitter have the mistaken impression that Foz Meadows’ post, written 4 days after the tweet in question, was responsible for the young woman deleting her profile.
It was not. She’d already deleted her account 24 hours before Meadows’ post appeared.
JJ:
What I meant was that I do not believe that christianity by itself is a reason for such opinions as those expressed by Emmons.
—
With regards to the pile-on, it is quite clear already from Meadows post that she was only reacting to what other people were already tweeting and tumbling about.
I do think that writing an Open Letter to someone who is not in authority, not in a place of power, just a person on the internet who has no idea of who you are and will most likely never read whatever you write, is a very strange idea.
I’m not terribly concerned about the feelings of some abstract group of white Christians. I strongly dislike seeing someone big pick on someone little.
Just to clarify, my comments about Twitter were about Twitter, and were not intended to imply any connection between Foz Meadows and whatever happened on Twitter. I know what rallying cries to be abusive usually look like, and I’ve never seen one that looks like Foz Meadows’ post. I tried to make that clear when I said Foz Meadows didn’t seem out of line to me.
I assumed, though, that Foz Meadows’ post was highlighted because she’s a part of fandom, not because she’s a queer woman.
Meredith: I assumed, though, that Foz Meadows’ post was highlighted because she’s a part of fandom, not because she’s a queer woman.
Foz Meadows’ post was highlighted because she is a part of fandom, and I thought it was a thoughtful and well-written response and sent the link to Mike.
Mike apparently felt otherwise.
My comment about Meadows and McGuire was in relation to, as Ghostbird points out, all the focus on defending the poor, persecuted straight white Christian person (who in terms of “bigness” on Twitter, is approximately the same bigness as Meadows) rather than on the fact that Meadows made a cogent and articulate point — not in relation to the scroll item.
10) Is a Chinese writer, say, setting her story in a Chinese village expected to have an ethnically diverse cast of characters? A Nigerian writer? Why is what this woman is saying any different?
/Godstalk
Abbie Emmons said something stupid online, it went viral and she got blowback, some of it undoubtedly nasty.
However, Foz Meadows’ post was not out of line IMO. It was probably unnecessary to address her post directly to Abbie Emmons, but I guess she could not resist the Dear Abby headline. And her point is absolutely right. Even very homogeneous and very white small towns have diversity and it’s a choice not to see it. I grew up in such a place and while we may not have had a whole lot of people of colour (though there were some) we had LGBT people, we had disabled people, we had immigrants, we had Muslims.
As for the Christian thing, I didn’t read her “I love everyone” comment as specifically Christian, but then publicly professed Christianity isn’t a thing here – religion is considered a private matter. But based on what a quick Google told me about Abbie Emmons, I would have assumed she hails from a predominantly white and Christian dominated background too.
@Clack
Diversity looks different depending on where you are. And one of my pet peeves if only something that matches the US idea of diversity counts as diverse, e.g. The clueless person who complained that there were no Hispanics in Doctor Who. However, even if the work of a Chinese or Nigerian writer doesn’t match the US idea of diversity, this doesn’t mean it’s not diverse.
9) I don’t know if voice actors are the same as movie stars, but they definetly deserve good working conditions and I’m glad to hear they are getting improvements.
10) If I wanted realism in my fiction, I wouldn’t read SFF.
Hmm. The tickbox doesn’t seem to be working today, but (like the cat in the song) I know it will come back sooner or later.
Regarding 10), a few months back I discovered “The Autistic Book Party” (http://www.ada-hoffmann.com/2017/05/11/vintage-autistic-book-party-episode-2-a-deepness-in-the-sky/)which looked at how autistic people were represented in SF, and enjoyed the blogger’s insights (as I recall, she liked the representation of Enrique in “A Civil Campaign”); even in an apparently uniform setting, there is very likely to be diversity in the way people think.
…and lest we not forget
“It wasn’t some other site, it was File 770 that covered the story when Vox Day manipulated Black Gate to boot a column by Foz referencing him as a neo-Nazi.” (Mike Glyer)
and it was Amazing Stories that republished the post after being taken down by Black Gate.
Though we didn’t get as much blowback as I was kinda hoping for….
“Did she get a hard lesson out of it? Yes, and probably a harsher one than was warranted.
But I’m saving the bulk of my compassion for the people she wants to erase.”
Twitter abuse is abuse, even if she’s the wrong type of woman. It takes a broken sort of empathy to stop caring when the victim is not from a demographic you care about. Even if they’re wrong they don’t deserve to be abused off twitter.
@JJ: “How many times have you heard an atheist say that “I love everyone”? Never, I’m guessing.”
Clearly, you don’t know many atheists. I myself feel an obligation to love everyone. I don’t like a lot of them, and there are a few I’d put down like the dogs they are if the occasion warranted it. I struggle every day to remind myself that hating them on top of any action I’m required to take against them just degrades everyone. So I try to love them instead.
But I’m curious how you know something else: That the unfortunate author of that tweet has “people she wants to erase”. That there are “people [she’s] trying to erase”. You are imputing active, willful acts of bigotry. How do you know that person “wants” to hurt people? Is “trying” to hurt people?
Nigeria isn’t a monolith and stories I’ve read set there acknowledge that. Same for China; it’s not wall to wall Han.
Exactly. Realism is a fig leaf. I was brought up in a much, much more homogenous milieu than you, Hampus. Everybody I knew, everybody I saw, everybody I heard about was white and Catholic. It took me years to wonder where all the Jews were, despite having been told the facts of history many times in school. It took me surprisingly long to add two and two and realise that the reason I lived in such a homogenous society was not that there are naturally white and Catholic towns – it was that the sizeable minority of non-Catholics had been carried off in cattle trucks and hadn’t come back. Something not dissimilar was true for the gays, which were invisible because they did not dare become visible.
So if I were to write a novel set in my home town blithely ignoring this, I would in a very important sense be lying.
10) I find myself very strongly agreeing w/ JJ & Ghostbird here. I come from a small rural community in Northwestern Ontario, which is sort of the Canadian equivalent of rural Alabama, and the fiction I’ve written about what that kind of community was like when I was growing up always includes a diverse cast, because it has to. The public perception of the community is overwhelmingly white and straight and Christian, and so is the way it presents itself (insofar as it presents itself at all), but my godmother was Ojibway, my first babysitter was an immigrant from India, the lead guitarist in the band I played in was black, I played street hockey with Vietnamese kids, my grade school principal was Japanese, I’d eat lunch at the Filipino restaurant on most Saturdays, and the number of openly LGBTQ people I knew was much higher than you might imagine for a conservative rural town in the ’90s… As far as I’m concerned those folks were every bit as integral to my community as the people whose ancestors came from Britain and Ukraine (the two largest groups of white folks in the community).
I don’t really have a problem with the assumption of “Christian” either, not least because of how visibly religious the US is, to a degree that we tend to think of as unseemly here, not just to those of us who are atheists. (Even my father feels that way, and he is an actual Anglican priest.)
This paragraph strikes me as being particularly true. I was one of the poor kids (though luckily not the poorest) in a town that was fairly rich despite being small and rural, and my experiences growing up are dramatically different than many of my peers from the same community, even though we hung out together, went to the same school, etc. That I even got to participate as much as I did is more a function of “small and rural” rather than any egalitarian impulses my peers or their parents had. And certainly not because of any Christian impulses, though they would likely identify as Christian if you were to ask (not that any of them knew a damn thing about what as actually in the bible).
@Clack/Hampus: Neither Sweden nor China are countries inhabited primarily by colonists from somewhere else, and neither did they spend centuries explicitly inviting immigrants to settle there or (to the best of my knowledge) also spend centuries importing slaves and other more or less indentured labourers (like Chinese railworkers). North America by default has a more complex racial makeup than a lot of other places for a variety of reasons (the reasons I listed above are mostly the US/Canada; Mexico has its own unique set of complications), and I strongly doubt there is any community on the continent that doesn’t reflect that in some way.
(15) Don’t be so sure! I have gone so far as to have a Taylor Swift mini-calendar in my cubicle at work.
@ John A Arkansawyer
A call for civility is much more effective when it is civilly expressed.
Also, perhaps it is a step too far to say Emmons wanted to erase anybody. The problem with erasure, however, is that ignorance, or the desire to be comfortable in her case, can cause it just as effectively as malice. The erased are just as invisible in either case, so perhaps this is a distinction without a difference to them.
@ Cora,
Oh, I missed the “Dear Abby” reference!
“Dear pixel, dear pixel, scroll has no complaint”
Authors should write what they know. When they go beyond that, the results generally aren’t pretty.
Stephen King wrote lots of stories about people in small towns, and he frequently included gay people. When he didn’t kill us off in the first chapter or two, we were either child molesters or perverts (depending mostly on age). There’s a certain logic to it; he’s a horror writer, and he corrected picked up on the fact that many people find homosexuality horrifying. He just played that up. As a result, his stories never included a gay person whom you’d invite to your house.
I’m told he mellowed after his daughter came out of the closet. I wouldn’t know; I quit reading his stuff in 1991.
Someone who grew up in a small town in the 1960s could certainly include black and (maybe) gay people in a story set there, but they’re going to be either tokens (maybe informed by advice from present-day black or gay people) or else we’re going end up seeing them through the eyes of a young person in the white, Christian majority. The latter will be more authentic, but I don’t think that’s what’s being asked for.
A story about a black person growing up in such a community might be very interesting, but I doubt it would be very authentic if it wasn’t written by someone who lived it. It would be a very different story, though.
The ultimate logic of the argument seems to be that if you are a white person who grew up in a small town, you simply aren’t allowed to tell your story. Nothing you can do will ever make it acceptable. If you leave minorities out, you’re erasing diversity. If you use tokens, you get accused of tokenism. If you tell it as you remember it, you’re accused of promoting racism. And if you try to include a minority POV, that’s cultural appropriation.
In the face of that, I hardly blame people for saying, “I’ll just tell my story and ignore the critics.” That’s probably the best advice for writers in general.
10) The lesson to be drawn from this is, sadly, “Don’t say anything which could be even vaguely unsettling, offensive or controversial anywhere on a public forum. It will attract much more heat than it will light and the tall children with flensing knives will carve you up like a goose”.
For every comment which is made thoughtfully, even those in disagreement with what you say, there will be a great many others made which are savage, destructive and simply meant to silence a view with which someone disagrees. Children savage others. Grownups aren’t supposed to do that.
Foz Meadows did a decent job in reply, if a bit condescending. I have no quarrel with what she said. But the vitriol of others is excessive to the “offense” (a half-baked statement by a marginally “notable” individual which is loaded with qualifiers).
The problem with what Ms. Emmons said is that her view of “realistic” doesn’t remotely match mine. While I expect most fiction to make a kind of internal sense, I don’t necessarily want it to be “realistic”, even on my terms-let alone hers. Even if her intent was to demean others, which isn’t readily apparent in her comments, she doesn’t deserve the scourging she’s received for this. She’s in error, but the attacks on her reflect more on her attackers than they do on her.
You can disagree without being disagreeable, even in 6840, where we still haven’t learned to drive flying cars terribly well.
@August:
Amusingly (perhaps), Sweden did spend quite a few decades (probably a low-number of centuries) importing skilled workers from elsewhere. A lot of the Swedish mining industry was fueled by importing Flemish masters, having them settled and spread their knowledge. If I recall correctly, there were an active encouragement getting sword- and knife-smiths in from what’s now Germany, etc, etc, so on and so forth. Very much a case of encourage brain drain elsewhere in order to skill up the country.
But I don’t think there was ever a case of “we have these vast tracts of unused land, please come and settle” (there was definitely some “let’s pretend there are no Sami, move north please?”, but I don’t think hat was ever used for anything but internal migration).
@Clack: Actually, China is a good example because we can see happening now what happened in Europe and North America in the 19th-20th centuries — basically, a writing of diversity out of culture and history. The Chinese government is currently trying to redefine China as an ethnic nation as part of its campaign to disenfranchise minorities, just like many nations of Europe did when they defined themselves as ethno-states, first in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and then again after WW I. (This happened even more dramatically in Canada and the U.S., of course, because the erasure was particularly aimed at the original inhabitants of both those countries.)
TL, DR: We think the past was not diverse because we see it through a lens that was created, for political reasons, to erase diversity.
I disagree. I think the ultimate logic of that argument is that you can no longer tell your story in a way that is oblivious to the other stories that were going on around yours.
I thiiink it might be worth remembering that Christianity was spoken of in (what I considered to be) a deeply offensive manner in a comment thread here a couple of days ago, so people might just be inclined to be more sensitive on the matter than usual.
Nigeria is unusually diverse, really. A diverse Nigerian story might not look like what some USA people would expect (there have been a number of problems, as Cora says, of USA fen complaining because a different country didn’t match USA concepts rather than the concepts of that country) but certainly I would be surprised if it wasn’t addressed fairly regularly, considering.
@msb
Well, to a certain extent I would try to approach/react to someone differently if they came from a place of ignorance than if they came from a place of Rabid Puppy (for example), but yeah, it can be hard to maintain empathy the 500th time someone decides that your existence needs to be justified rather than just, you know, existing.
@Ghostbird
I draw a distinction between “one or two people being a dick” and “a large group of people just turned up in someone’s mentions to abuse them”. One of those is an individual problem, the other is systemic. Twitter has an abuse problem. File 770 has a group of people with strong opinions and a preference for (sometimes unwarranted) snark.