coffee and ink

I have been surfing The Guardian's Top 10 Books lists and they are the most respectable, predictable, dull lists you could expect to ever see. I could have filled most of them out in my sleep just as soon as I'd heard the title. (Notable exception: Catherine Sampton's Top Ten Asian Crime Novels, which surprised and delighted me by have 8 out of 10 authors Asian. I'd expected the inverse ratio, if anything.)

I am now burning with the desire to write up lists of the Top Ten Books About Species Who Communicate By Scent or Top Ten Books with Scenes Where Villains Die By Fire or something. Given me a topic and I will attempt to provide. The sillier the better, frankly.

I hope the cuts work because I am doing this via email and won't be able to
correct it till I get home. But I don't think it's very spoilery anyway.

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Do not:

1. Post it in a public site accessible to anyone with a Net connection;
   
   or
   
   
2. Email it to a stranger as part of business correspondence.
   

This has been a public service announcement. You may now resume normal Internet usage.

Happy birthday, renenet!

Good
K. Tempest Bradford lists sf/f markets looking to increase racial diversity

Bad
LJ decides to restore Basic Accounts, only not

Ugly
William Sanders re-posts rejection letter with bigoted comments, goes on long defensive screed which I haven't bothered to read. He's also declared that now he's not letting anyone take down stories, whether or not they give him $40. I'm not sure I'm even going to comment on him anymore because clearly he either enjoys the attention or it drives him into a helpless frenzy of assholery and self-immolation.

General recommendation: If offering a perpetual non-exclusive right to host a story, make sure you have an out clause that allows you to take down your story at will after an initial period. In most cases, it seems to work fine to have the stories up permanently, but why not make sure you have an escape if you need it?

I've been getting comments from spam LJs recently, so I've enable CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) for LJs not on my friends' list. If the CAPTCHA is broken enough that this doesn't stop the problem, I may start moderating responses from LJs not on my friends' list. (It looks like requiring two separate CAPTCHA verifications may reduce the incidence of comment spam, but we'll see.)

Sorry for the inconvenience.

"Running Up That Hill" is the little black dress of mashups.

People who've been commenting on William Sanders' self-implosion may want to ban igorsanchez before he spams them with idiotic abuse and pornographic icons.

Don't click on his profile or LJ link. So not worth it.

William Sanders:

I am hereby making a change to the aforestated offer. Effective as of now, any Helix contributor who wants his/her work deleted from the archives will have to pay for the privilege. Specifically, it'll cost you forty bucks, payable to Melanie.

And that's IF Melanie figures it'll take her an hour or less to do the job. If you've had a whole bunch of stories in the magazine, and/or a lot of other related entries - award nominations etc. - to be taken out as well, then she's at liberty to charge whatever she thinks is right.

But forty is the minimum. This is not negotiable.

Come now - forty bucks, that's NOTHING, is it? I mean compared to the inestimable value of keeping your precious principles all shiny and pretty. Not to mention the basic principle involved at her end. Call yourselves feminists, do you? Then you ought to be ashamed of yourselves trying to exploit a woman's labor like that.

I'm not just jiving around about this. I'm serious as a rattlesnake bite. You want your stuff deleted, you can pay for the privilege. Not to the magazine - none of the rest of us will touch a nickel. (Though no doubt Lawrence will have to handle the transaction, unless you happen to have Melanie's mailing address.) If you're not sure how to make the check out, email us, we'll forward it to her.

Tobias Buckell is offering to help out anyone who wants a story removed, but I'd suggest following Kate Nepveu's suggestion to post the story elsewhere with an explanation instead. I object to Sanders' extortion, and I think David Moles is right that the price will only go up if people pay.

I don't have to explain why it's wrong for Sanders to pass along the cost of supporting his "principles" to protestors, right? This would be an unprofessional and unethical thing to do even if I agreed with Sanders and not the people wanting the stories removed.

Clearly, we have all been misjudging William Sanders, who has kindly been accepting substandard stories to increase his writers of color headcount.

eta: Story replaced with note "Story deleted at author's pantiwadulous request."

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...
...

Even sarcasm fails me.

In response to a query, Gordon Van Gelder informed me that David Truesdale has one more column to write before the end of his contract. It doesn't sound like the contract is going to be renewed. This makes boycotting F&SF for Truesdale's presence irrelevant, although the general issues for sf/f described by nojojojo, among others, are still pressing.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to request that genre editors in general shift to identity-masked submissions, at least for slush; it's customary for scientific papers, and I think editors at Strange Horizons have said it's their standard practice. [eta: Wrong on both counts. See comments for details.] I don't think it will be as simple for fiction as it is for orchestra auditions, since gender and racial bias affect the judgment of content as well as technique; but it might be a place to start.

1.
Writer Thomas Disch killed himself July 4. Reportedly, he'd been suffering from health issues, depression, the death of his partner of thirty years, financial straits because of the cost of his partner's final illness, and a threatened eviction from his apartment (because the lease had been in his partner's name). I have read a very odd selection of his work, not the novels or the short fiction or even the poetry, but The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, and a peculiar and delightful fable called "The Happy Turnip," which no one else seems to remember, but which I would snatch up in an instant if someone put it out as a children's book. I have several of his novels, and have been planning to read them; I have been planning to read them, and sometimes I would pick them up and look at them and put them down again.

Because I found his LJ, you see. I found his LJ, on which he published much excellent and bitter poetry and, on one of the days I happened to check, a rant against Muslims. I decided I didn't need to read his books just then.

I decided I didn't need to read his books just then, or his LJ at all; but I didn't respond to his posts, either in his LJ or mine, and I didn't decide I'd never read his books. I still haven't made that decision. I still haven't sold them.

2.
Maybe Disch, famous for his biting and bitter wit, would have killed himself anyway, but he shouldn't have had to worry about eviction in the meantime. It is unjust. It is laughable, almost, in New York City, the city with the most tenant-favorable rent laws in the entire country; laughable, with the kind of laughter that hurts.

Heterosexism: if Disch had been married to his partner, if Disch had been able to marry his partner, he would have automatically inherited all his property, including his lease. This is why marriage equality is so important.

Classism and capitalism: Regardless of marriage, regardless of income, no one should have to beggar themselves to provide medical care for themselves and their loved ones. This should be treated as a basic human right, not a privilege reserved for the middle class, the propertied, those employed by large corporations. No one should have to fear losing their home. This is why marriage equality is not enough.

3.
I've loved so many things that hurt me: so many books, so many TV shows, so many stories. So many things that tell me women don't count or brown people aren't human or Jews are disgusting. I love them still. I take what I can and leave the rest, or I try to; the hurt is hard to leave behind. But I do get how reasonable people can hate what William Sanders said and still support the magazine he edits, why people of conscience were still considering submitting new work to Helix yesterday, why I'm still reading John Milton and Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, not to mention watching rather less transcendental TV shows about ghost hunting brothers, not to mention keeping Thomas Disch on my bookshelves and planning to read his work sometime.

But. But. I am so tired, people. I am so tired of the hatefulness, the racism and sexism. I am so tired of looking in the Asimov's forums being a slap in the face because all the decent people in there can't drown out the racism and sexism spewed by S.F. Murphy and David Truesdale. I'm tired of having to forebear it.

Look, I understand why people have published with Helix in the past, especially people who were unaware of Sanders' history. But if you know and you continue to publish there, then you're continuing to support Sanders' racism. I really can't separate the personal from the political support aspects of this--I'm not sure I should, but it's an irrelevant question, because I can't. Sanders didn't separate the personal and the professional. He sent out a piece of professional correspondence with a racial/religious slur in it. Even ignoring the implications of his comments on the types of fiction he'd be willing to buy, what this says is that he expects people to accept and support his racism/religious bigotry during professional interactions. What this says to me is that supporting his business transactions is supporting his behavior as acceptable professional behavior in the sf/f field.

I won't do that. And, to be honest, I don't think other people should, either.

And also -- and this is a lot scarier to write, because it is a much bigger bridge to burn -- I do not think people of conscience should be supporting The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as long as Dave Truesdale's columns continue to be published there, either by buying the magazine or submitting stories to it. It would be another thing if he were publishing fiction or even if he were publishing nonfiction unrelated to his sexist and racist behavior on the Asimov's forums. But he's not. The same venom and prejudice displayed in his attacks on K. Tempest Bradford are displayed in his columns about science fiction, both as a literature and as a community, and clearly and demonstrably affect his reviews of books and short fiction.

[ETA 7/12 11:55pm: In response to a query, Gordon Van Gelder informed me that David Truesdale has one more column to write before the end of his contract. It doesn't sound like the contract is going to be renewed. This makes boycotting F&SF for Truesdale's presence irrelevant, although the general issues for sf/f described by nojojojo, among others, are still pressing.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to request that genre editors in general shift to identity-masked submissions, at least for slush; it's customary for scientific papers, and I think editors at Strange Horizons have said it's their standard practice. [eta Wrong on both counts. See comments for details.] I don't think it will be as simple for fiction as it is for orchestra auditions, since gender and racial bias affect the judgment of content as well as technique; but it might be a place to start.]

4.
I'm afraid to post this, honestly. I'm afraid people I respect will think I'm being rigid and inhumane for suggesting a boycott; I'm afraid people I respect will think I'm inethical and uncaring--that friends will think I'm not giving enough weight to their oppressions--for not feeling able to support a boycott for all cases of bigotry.

I don't think it's an easy call, or a simple call. I'm not planning to shun people who disagree with me on this, or argue against them or their work. But I am asking them, publicly and plainly, to reconsider what they're doing and whether their actions are contributing to the kind of community and literature they want sf/f to be.

{Via BlackAmazon}: I haven't been able to follow this closely, but Renee at Womanist Musing posted on race at Feministe and has been getting the usual response. If you're as tired as I am of seeing WOC bloggers chased offline and out of feminist blogging circles, you might want to stop by, check out her posts, and see if you want to comment in support or engage in more substantive discussion. It looks like this post is getting some of the usual, too.

Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of SPIN STATE AND SPIN CONTROL Chris Moriarty's THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE, about Sacha Kessler, a young Jewish kid from New York's Lower East Side, part of a Manhattan in 1905 in which each ethnic immigrant community boasts its own brand of witchcraft, and the city government is intent on stamping out all "Un-American" brands of magic, to Reka Simonsen at Holt, in a significant deal, in a three-book deal, by Scott Hoffman at Folio Literary Management.

♥ There should only be labor strikes! Golems and labor strikes! ♥

Another book meme! I know, I am full of thrills today. This is from David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, which came out c. 1984 or something, thus explaining part but not all of the list's limitations. I do not have 100 Best SF Novels. I have Horror: The 100 Best Novels, even though I read and love science fiction, and generally do not read and do not love horror, because Horror had essays written by Neil Gaiman and Diana Wynne Jones, and Science Fiction did not. I forget what Gaiman wrote up, but Diana Wynne Jones wrote up The White Devil by John Webster (not a novel, but still awesome), which is one of the reasons why I love her.

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