Brian J. White, founding editor of Fireside Magazine, today pursued Goodreads’ deletion of FIYAH’s Series listing in two different forums on Goodreads. (He screencapped the entire interaction.) Thread starts here.
And there was heightened concern after Anathema Magazine, a “spec fic mag of work by queer POC/Indigenous/Aboriginals,” reported Goodreads has deleted its entry, too.
Well. Anathema's off @goodreads now too, alongside @FIYAH. (Best cool kids table ever!) Mostly so, in our case, as there's still artifacts of it on the site. See the image.
This is possibly related to our lack of ISSNs, yes. & hey, ISSNs are great cataloguing tools, true. BUT -> pic.twitter.com/f8O5Cw1ZkA
The discussion surfaced the Goodreads Librarian who deleted Anathema and some issues of FIYAH. A couple of excerpts (note, unfortunately I can’t make WordPress display only the selected tweet, so these come in pairs) —
Responses by Goodreads participants have focused on (1) Goodreads has a policy against listing publications which lack ASIN/ISBN numbers, and (2) denying that the enforcement could be anything besides business as usual, let alone an individual or institutional expression of racism.
An important element of the controversy has been that Goodreads deleted these particular spec fic magazines while leaving intact the listings for many others. Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld, in a twitter thread that can be reached via Carrie Cuinn, describes his own encounters with Goodreads librarians, what rules were invoked then, and how decisions were made. Some of his tweets say —
By the way, they also appear to take ASIN. They load data from Amazon, so that's likely how most of the magazines mentioned were added.
That's the true comparative then. Now the question is whether or not they'll strike that too or restore what they've deleted. Always thought it weird that this "rule" was not programmed into their system. Suggests it's not as much of a rule as some say.
Never really understood their hangup on this issue though. Specifically odd when you see they allow "short stories published online" and then disallow "Short stories only published in an anthology or magazine."
Did some more digging. Found a recent thread about issues of another magazine and Clarkesworld came up. Since we have the print edition with ISBN, issues survived, but some of the editions linked to those issues went away. pic.twitter.com/A0RuTAPQrz
Due to the attention now being paid, a reader contacted Brian J. White to say that an issue of his Fireside Magazine was (at some point) deleted by Goodreads –
Bridget of SF Bluestockingwrote a thread which says in part:
Short thread. So listen. I added the first couple issues of @fiyahlitmag to @goodreads myself, because it's a great and important publication and I wanted everyone who follows my reviews to see it, and it wasn't there when I went to add it to my currently reading list.
This is why no one is ever going to convince me that the removal of @fiyahlitmag from @goodreads wasn't an act of malicious, targeted racism, committed with the intent to silence a black publication and exclude them from mainstream structures commonly used to market their work.
Escape Artists says they will be taking down Mothership Zeta’s Goodreads listing in protest:
The selective enforcement action of @goodreads appears racially motivated and we won't be a part of it. We're taking down all @EditorZeta volumes until @fiyahlitmag is reinstated and receives a public apology.
FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction is a quarterly literary magazine.
An attempt to discuss the decision in the Goodreads Librarians Group was answered with “a literary magazine is not a series by GR standards,” which apparently is Goodreads’ policy. However, that did not explain why FIYAH’s Series entry was singled out for enforcement while entries for many other genre magazine Series remain undisturbed. Put pretty much any spec fic magazine in the search bar, and they’re all on Goodreads: Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Uncanny, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Shimmer, Interzone, Forever Magazine, even all four issues of the new Pulphouse and the single issue of the new Amazing Stories.
When someone raised the challenge in the Goodreads Librarians Group that the decision to delete FIYAH might be motivated by racism, a Librarian Moderator closed the thread to further comments.
The FIYAH Series entry can still be seen via a Google cache file (while that lasts.) Here’s a screencap — click for larger image.
The entire Goodreads Librarians Group comment thread is screencapped in this tweet (click through to see all three pages of images).
In a report dropped just after the close of the Hugo nomination deadline last night, the timing chosen purposefully (I’m told by a source) though the reasons are not obvious, “a group of writers and editors” has challenged the statistical basis of the Fireside Report which said last July,” We don’t need the numbers to know that racism is a problem in our field. But we have them.”
Published at Medium under the pseudonym “Lev Bronstein” (Leon Trotsky’s real name), “Bias in Speculative Fiction” counters the Fireside Report by applying additional statistical study methods to the data, or enlarging the field from which relevant data can be drawn.
Fireside Fiction’s July 2016 report “Antiblack Racism in Speculative Fiction” [FR] purports to have found pervasive racism in speculative fiction publishing. With 38 out of 2,039 (1.9%) published works authored by black-identifying authors, there is unquestionable underrepresentation. FR ascribes this disparity to widespread anti-black editorial bias. We share Fireside’s concerns about underrepresentation and commend its authors for raising awareness. At the same time we find the report to be fraught with error.
The article’s many examples include:
The misuse of the binomial distribution in FR is a significant cause for concern. Under the binomial distribution, we treat each publication as an independent random event with some fixed probability of occurrence. FR assumes that each submitted submission should have a 13.2% chance of black authorship. The probability of observing their data subject to this assumption is 3.207×10^–76. They provide no rationale for using population rather than occupational rates. Suppose instead that science fiction slush is submitted from a pool of professional writers uniformly at random. Under these assumptions we assume that there’s a a 4% probability that a story is written by a black author. The data becomes 68 orders of magnitude more likely. Still unlikely, yes, but this demonstrate the impact of our assumptions.
The article can be presumed to serve as a defense of editors in the speculative fiction field. It argues there is bias, but that it is exerted in the culture in ways not directly related to the fate of slushpile manuscripts, such as in the educational system where PoC may or may not take degrees in literature, and other things that discourage black people from becoming authors at all.
The authors of the article defended their choice to remain anonymous in these terms —
Who are you?
We’re a group of writers and editors. We have chosen to publish under a collective pseudonym. Our identities would only serve as a distraction.
It’s puzzling why a group that agrees in their preamble that “There is a race problem in speculative fiction and we need to make an effort to understand its causes” is unwilling to engage under their own names, essentially reducing this to a drive-by correction of somebody else’s homework.
Justina Ireland, an executive editor at FIYAH magazine, has responded at length on Twitter. Here are several of her tweets:
Brandon O’Brien, a poet and writer in Trinidad and Tobago, also has made some observations:
So insisting the statistics are in your favour by ignoring international PoC is beyond vapid, or worse, willfully disingenuous.
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
My creative investment in SFF? Caribbean. My primary mentors? Caribbean. My themes & critical concerns? Caribbean, global, & pan-universal.
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
Essentially saying, 'all things being American, enough Black Americans are writing as per my maths! And the others? Well, American or bust!'
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
I also adore how it argues that lower rep rates in writing generally is 'suggestive of systemic bias' but then ignores it throughout–
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
As if we're arguing that, for instance, a white editor not making the effort to parse AAVE or patois is some 'darker racism' versus systems.
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
O’Brien has many other comments, though one in particular about “nebulous maths” begs the question:
As @TroyLWiggins done say, this is Grade A concern trolling: framing nebulous maths as superior to the fundamental concern.
— Brandon O'Brien MUST BE JUDGED FOR BARELY WRITING (@therisingtithes) March 18, 2017
Bear in mind this quote from the Fireside Report —
To adjust for the methodological flaws, as well as the fact that we don’t have access to submission-rate data concerning race and ethnicity either overall or by individual magazine, we used binomial distributions. The purpose of this was to find the probability that such numbers could be random?—?the chances that numbers like that could exist without biases in play (which could extend to biases that are literary in nature, such as story structure), systemic problems, and/or structural gaps. In the first binomial distribution we ran the data assuming that submission rates of black authors are equal to the proportion of the black population in the United States, which was 13.2% in 2015 (according to Census projections).
The Fireside Report picked U.S. population statistics as the battleground, treated them as a valid tool for analyzing racism, and made arguments based on their own analysis of them. It’s not fair in that context to say the Fireside Report is above criticism because there are PoC writing SFF throughout the world, or that we all know racism is a problem in the publishing industry (as it is elsewhere).
Troy L. Wiggins, the other FIYAH executive editor, questioned the motive behind the new article:
This individual/entity is not concerned with antiblack bias in speculative fiction. This is concern trolling: https://t.co/rraqkDY2j4
The FIYAH 2016 Black SFF Writer Survey Report, published today, compiles the responses of 55 black writers to questions about their efforts to get published in the sf and fantasy field. No mere counting exercise, the report includes the testimony of writers who are frustrated with the market’s resistance to their work, and analysis of such touchy questions as the real performance of magazines with encouraging diversity statements.
…With this survey, we are attempting to add what is probably the most neglected–and most important–perspective to the conversation: that of black writers themselves.
Our survey responses give us a clearer picture of who these writers are: global, writing in multiple genres, at various stages in their writing careers. In this report, we seek to collect and spotlight information and opinions of these black speculative fiction writers. We feel that this kind of insight is invaluable for a true assessment of black writers’ attitudes regarding their treatment by markets that publish short form speculative fiction and by publishing in general.
It is important to note that all of the writer-side data is self-reported. We invited writers to submit information about their practices and insights on submission to SFF short fiction markets with a focus on the period between October 2015 and November 2016.
There are two excellent infographics based on the Market-side and Writer-side data. This excerpt is from the Market-side summary:
The BonFiyah: Anecdote Summary gives voice to stories behind these numbers. These quotes come from the section on Frustrations —
Experiences on the roadblocks encountered in the marketplace.
“I understand that breaking into these highly competitive markets is a struggle for any writer, and have always considered the rejections to be based on normal craft concerns. Until I saw the Fireside Report. I don’t think any of my work is perfect, but I can’t help but question the evaluation of the extremely exclusive sci if fantasy magazine community. I look forward to receiving a rejection and knowing for sure it’s the story that’s the problem, not my unabashedly black voice.”
“Once got a rejection because the editor said the scenario was unrealistic and unlikely to ever happen (the scenario was, in fact, based on true events in Nigeria.)”
“The market is full of white people who get multiple chances to write uninspiring, clueless, by the numbers speculative fiction, and these white people are often published gleefully in SFWA-qualifying markets that pay professional rates. However, when it comes to black authors, everything that we have to do has to be better than everything else. Black writers cannot be average. We have to be superstars.”
“To be honest, the lack of taste representation in magazines–the lack of stories that I want to read and enjoy in most of the major short story markets–is more discouraging than any other factor. I dislike how few authors of color are published but I also dislike how rote and trope many of the stories that do get published are, which makes me hold back from submitting because I feel as though my writing is often too weird for major markets. There’s a lot of “safe” choices that aren’t particularly compelling getting published and I just don’t know if stylistically I’d be accepted in some cases.” …
Finally, in Going Forward the authors make a broad range of suggestions for change which are discussed in a nuanced way. But having heard many times before the arguments from people who don’t want to make progress on these issues, they say explicitly —
This report is not for those people.
This report is for writers, readers, editors, magazines, and fans interested in actively working against the anti-black bias inherent in this system for the sake of the writers and work that said bias excludes.
It’s a very helpful document for pros and fans seeking a way ahead.
(1) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. SF Crowsnest reviewer Eamonn Murphy isn’t a big fan of Uncanny Magazine. His review of issue #13, which is still online, passes such judgements as —
The non-fiction in ‘Uncanny Magazine’ usually consists of essays complaining about the lack of one-legged Mexican lesbian heroes in films because of the white Anglo-Saxon phallocentric conspiracy that controls the media or about how difficult it is to be a ‘Star Wars’ fan if you have a big nose.
At this hour, however, Murphy’s more recent review of Uncanny Magazine #14 is a 404-sized hole in the internet. It was yanked in response to the outraged reaction provoked by Murphy’s sarcastic comments about the transgender and gay characters in Sam J. Miller’s story “Bodies Stacked Like Firewood.”
Murphy’s review is still available as screenshots in Sarah Gailey’s Twitter feed.
Uncanny Magazine’s editors declared: “A review website published a hateful, heavily transphobic review of Uncanny Magazine 14. They will no longer be receiving review copies.” and “We normally don’t comment on reviews, but we will when there is hate speech in the review directed at the content & the creators.”
Jim C. Hines answered with what I’d call a fisk of Murphy’s review (although Hines doesn’t).
Not only does Mr. Murphy start frothing at the mouth when a story includes a queer or trans character or talks about tolerance, he keeps frothing even when he thinks the story isn’t about those things. We’re talking about a man set to permanent froth, a cross between malfunctioning espresso machine and a dog who ate too much toothpaste and shat all over your carpet.
(2) UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO HIGH. The Nature Conservancy’s Photo of the Month for January pictures the Milky Way over Mount Rainier, positioned so it looks like Rainier is erupting stars. The photographer explains:
This shot was a year in the making. That’s the Milky Way galaxy appearing as if it’s erupting out of the Mount Rainier volcano, with the headlamps of climbers on their way to the summit.
…Once I acquired a good camera from a friend I began tracking the phases of the moon and waiting for that once-a-month new moon when the skies would be darkest. I tracked satellite images of where light pollution was located, tracked weather patterns, and waited for a clear enough sky to perfectly align with the new moon.
I also scouted locations for the exact time and placement in the sky of the core of the Milky Way relative to where I would be hiking. I experienced a lot of trial and error, but finally the ideal location, weather and moon phase all lined up perfectly for a galactic eruption.
(3) FLAME ON. Launched this month — Fiyah Magazine of black speculative fiction.
P. Djeli Clark tells the history behind the magazine and the significance of its title in “The FIYAH This Time”.
Long Time Lurker, First Time Bomber // Malon Edwards
Police Magic // Brent Lambert
Revival // Wendi Dunlap
The Shade Caller // DaVaun Sanders
Sisi Je Kuisha (We Have Ended) // V.H. Galloway
Chesirah // L.D. Lewis
(4) SFWA ELECTIONS. Cat Rambo answered my questions about when the process officially begins:
The official call for candidates goes out January 15, administered by our able Elections Commissioner, Fran Wilde and that’s when we open up the section of our discussion boards where people can post their platforms and answer the inevitably lively “Ask the Candidates” thread. This year the election will be for President, Secretary, and a couple of Director positions.
…File770 readers who are SFWA members who’ve never been on the board might want to think about running for Director at Large. The team is super, the organization is moving towards doing some cool stuff, and it’s a great way to pay things forward.
Talon of God, by Wesley Snipes and Ray Norman (July 25) It’s one thing to hear that Wesley Snipes (yes, that Wesley Snipes!) has written a novel. It’s another thing to find out that it’s one of the best new urban fantasies you’ve read in a long time. Beyond its star appeal and great angels versus demons mythos, the thing that Wesley and Ray Norman do that really drew me in was give us some powerful black heroes at a time when the call for diversity has never been higher—or more necessary.
Sanford personally landed four on the list “including three stars for my Beneath Ceaseless Skies novelette ‘Blood Grains Speak Through Memories.’ This made my day!”
(7) AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE BUT CALIFORNIA. From the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America discussion board:
By now virtually everyone in ABAA knows about how Easton Press is no longer shipping autographed books to California. To see this for yourself, just go to the Easton Press website and click on a specific autographed item for sale.
You will see this message:
Sorry, this product cannot ship to California.
No explanation for this is given on the website. Scott Brown reports that Easton Press won’t confirm it has anything to do with the new California law. But what else could it be?
So many well-known authors are represented by Easton Press that this could be the break we have needed to get legislators to understand what is at stake because of their new law:
No one in California can buy an autographed book from Easton Press any more!
Easton Press is currently offering 127 signed items.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
Born January 4, 1785 — German folklore and fairy tale collector Jacob Grimm.
I contacted the University of Oregon to ask who is the second recipient and have not had a reply.
(11) DOCUMENTING FANAC. Joe Siclari shared with readers of his Fanac.org newsletter —
We’re starting to get some notice. Cory Doctorow picked up on our posting of the mid-80s fannish mystery “FAANS” to the FANAC Youtube channel, and wrote about it for BoingBoing.net. The MAC Video Archeology Project contributed some choice pieces of 1976 video, including a truly entertaining interview with Alfred Bester. The interview has had more than 700 views and FAANs is up over 400.
FANAC.ORG website: Our Newszine History Project is still going strong. Since our last update, we have added 200 new issues. We still have 100s more to do and could certainly use some help with missing issues. We’re not ignoring the rest of the fan publishing world though – we’re adding some choice fanzine titles, like Greg Benford and Ted White’s 1950s VOID and Dave Kyle’s 1930s Fantasy World (credited with being one of the first comics fanzines).
I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school. It’ll be Sunday morning, and I’ll be scrambling some eggs….
I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall to buy some new clothes for you. You’ll be thirteen.
The narrator is Louise Banks in “Story of Your Life,” a 1998 novella by Ted Chiang. She is addressing her daughter, Hannah, who, we soon learn, has died at a young age. Louise is addressing Hannah in memory, evidently. But something peculiar is happening in this story. Time is not operating as expected. As the Queen said to Alice, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
The latest work, published on 4 January in Nature, is the sharpest look yet at the home of a fast radio burst known as FRB 121102. Located in the constellation Auriga, the intermittent signal was first detected on 2 November 2012. Since then, it has flared up several times, making it the only fast radio burst known to repeat.
A team led by Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, began with the 305-metre-wide Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Its sensitivity allowed the scientists to detect multiple bursts from FRB 121102. The team then used two sets of radio telescopes — the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the European VLBI Network across Europe — to narrow down the location of FRB 121102 even further.
The bursts originate from a dwarf galaxy that emits faint radiation in both radio and visual wavelengths. Follow-up observations with the Gemini North telescope, on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, showed that it is less than one-tenth the size and has less than one-thousandth the mass of the Milky Way.
”The host galaxy is puny,” says team member Shriharsh Tendulkar, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “That’s weird.” With fewer stars than many galaxies, dwarf galaxies would seem to have less of a chance of hosting whatever creates fast radio bursts. That would include neutron stars, one of the leading candidates for the source of fast radio bursts.
But much more work is needed to pin down the physical mechanism of what causes these mysterious bursts, says Chatterjee. For now, FRB 121102 is just one example.
What would you do for your best friend? The 13-minute video follows Solo, yet again being confronted for one of his smuggling antics — but at least this time he’s got a very precise mission in mind. Chewbacca has been captured, and he needs a valuable item to make the trade.
JJ calls it, “A spot-on imitation of Ford’s mannerisms by this actor, and just a fun little film.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, Dawn Incognito, JJ, Mark-kitteh, and Bruce D. Arthurs for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson, who may justly complain that I trimmed half his joke.]
