See what's become of me

[muckefuck]

Once again, there is discord within the ranks of the Science Fiction Writers' Association. And once again, I've gone and read up on it much more than I needed to. I don't recommend you do the same. The arguments aren't very edifying (same old garbled nonsense confusing editorial oversight with censorship and failing to grasp that the house organ of a professional organisation is not the same thing as New Worlds, let alone the world at large) and the pièce de resistance is a petition so wrongheaded and ill-composed that it's appalling to think anyone involved in it has ever been paid for copy in their lives. Reading the list of signatories is simply depressing. They include some Very Big Names, leading to some public teeth-gnashing about heroes falling off pedestals and such.

Even more depressing is the fact that these writers, in their time (someone calculated their median age at about 73), were among the more progressive voices in SF/F. So if there's any insight I've managed to extract from this clusterfuck, it's regarding the perils of ossifying in my views. I know, much easier said than done--particularly if I've got any ambitions of being preemptive about it and not waiting for a dozen people to tell me it's time to go home and sleep off my stupor.

Comments

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

discord within the ranks of the Science Fiction Writers' Association

Pointers? :-)

Honestly? I think it's really, really difficult not to ossify as one ages. I work with teenagers and I literally have to dig my nails into my palms to stop myself from saying, Why, Sonny, when I was your age...

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I also suspect that the attempt to avoid it is sort of like someone young trying to be very grown up: sometimes it may be productive or useful practice, other times it's purely ridiculous, but it will never be mistakable for the genuine article.

And it's not as if aligning with the young makes you more likely to be right or wrong per se. Among other things: which young?

[mlr.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree, but I think it's very important to try to 'stay young' for lack of better words. In other words: try new things, travel as much as you can, listen to unfamiliar music, read new authors, make new friends, and occasionally learn something new.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

The whole thing is such a tempest in a teapot that I find it strange how much it seems to be cropping up in my social media sights. (If there were ever a similar controversy regarding, say, the AALL Bulletin, I'm not sure that I'd hear about it.) And the rhetoric on both sides doesn't really tend to make me want to dig deeper.

That said, it doesn't strike me as terribly productive for any publication to have a board which consists of a whole bunch of people with the power to say "no". Odds are that they either micromanage to the point of making the publication deadly dull (insofar as a professional industry newsletter doesn't tend that way anyway), or, much more likely, they rapidly become a rubber stamp which just has to add their own apologies the next time a kerfuffle erupts. Because, realistically, a volunteer board of writers with their own (hopefully) paying work to do, which isn't involved in Bulletin production except for being expected to read the thing from cover to cover every single month (quickly!), is going to start to skim (at least) to hit deadline.

Especially with the diffusion of responsibility that being on a board provides-- if there's a problem, someone else will surely catch it.

(Worst case you get both-- a bunch of contradictory notes that have to be resolved by the end of the week, which distracts from the time bomb at the end that nobody got around to.)

I suspect that the best option is for there to be one person (e.g., the President of SFWA) who's responsible for picking the editor, and either dismissing them if they're deemed to have gone off the reservation, or standing behind them-- with the members ratifying the decision or not at the next election.

If there are enough people interested in volunteering, an editorial team that's actually all involved with selection and editing would probably be better in terms of different voices and multiple eyes on a potential problem. But I doubt there are that many people champing at the bit to do the job (versus kibbitzing at the one who does).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

See, those are all very reasonable objections to the proposed change. They are also (with one exception) not the objections I see being raised.

The exception is the dullness argument, which--as you point out--seems to misunderstand what sort of beast the bulletin of a professional association even is. None of the objectors gave examples of other industry newsletters which they felt had been neutred by political correctness; instead they trotted out examples of avantgarde literature, because censorship. Meanwhile, one of the single best responses to the controversy has been this.