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

[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.