An Update on the Great Science Fiction Civil War
If you have any doubt there is some vitriol flying around the genre these days, let me submit two examples.
Exhibit A
There is a screed here by William Lehman equating the lack of real science fiction with the lack of engineering degrees amongst the writers. (And for my fellow engineering-degreed writers, I indeed used a no-follow link.) It’s a call for the engineering types to take back the culture, take back the conventions from the “SJW Glittery hoo ha crowd.”
Problem is, the universe isn’t that simple. I have an engineering degree, and I’ve written fiction with an almost exclusively inter-racial female cast of characters and the day saved by a little girl from Togo. Uh-oh, engineering-degreed writer made glittery hoo ha. So, Mr. Lehman’s theory is disproven. John Scalzi took a more verbose path to disproving his theory.
Science fiction isn’t just gadgets. It’s about people, and how we treat other people in addition to what we do to our environment. On his Facebook page, David Gerrold had some cogent remarks on this, as well.
Exhibit B
The other incident that occurred recently is a challenge issued by K. Tempest Bradford to stop reading straight white male cis authors for one year. For all practical purposes, this is a call to boycott straight white male authors.
I’ve followed Bradford’s activities for years. She’s a strong woman with goals of eliminating gender and racial gaps in fiction, as well as in life generally. I’ve watched her tenacity in admiration for a long time. In this instance, I don’t believe the ramifications of this call to arms has been fully thought through. Allies and enemies alike are under attack where they make their living.
I’ve never met K. Tempest Bradford. I’ve never even spoke with her online to my recollection, but I don’t believe Bradford wants to watch anyone bleed to death. Last year, when an award ballot was exclusively female, women rejoiced in a way that a lot of men parsed as ‘we have crushed the men’ when in reality they only meant ‘hooray for us.’ I can’t believe Bradford is any different. I have to believe she wants people who are different from the majority to have the same rules and same opportunities. Surely she seeks a colorblind society, and there are a lot of obstacles preventing a change in the status quo. But, I don’t believe this attack on a segment of colleagues is a productive approach. And we are colleagues, whether we like it or not. We write. We create worlds, people, situations, and stories. We authors need each other. And we need everyone. All genders, All races, all variations of cicness or not cisness.
My Take
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m in an inter-racial marriage and have parents who adopted children from more than one racial category. Indeed, my mother was adopted, so I have no concrete knowledge of half my own ethnicity. I look white, but I’ve been asked multiple times if I’m Hispanic. I honestly have no idea.
Ask Tobias Buckell if looking like you’re white makes you white.
That doesn’t make me immune to privilege, but at least it gives me a bit more perspective than average. Incendiary challenges don’t help any more than calling writers without engineering degrees SJW glittery hoo ha. It’s just stirring a hornets nest to watch the results, and that’s not productive for anyone.
I’ve said in the past, there are enough chairs at the table for everyone. A guy like Vox Day (speaking of an author who posts incendiary material) has his audience, and I’m willing to bet K. Tempest Bradford isn’t really all that concerned about gaining those specific people as new readers of her work. And vice-versa. I’m not telling you to boycott either of these authors, or their allies. Go ahead, find some of Bradford’s work and read it. You might like it. Go ahead and read something of Day’s, too, if you’re after equal time. When you are done with those, there are thousands of other authors out there waiting to be read. Some of them are straight, white, male, cis authors. A lot of them aren’t. A lot of very good ones aren’t.
Listening to a sermon when you aren’t in the choir can enrich you, even if you vehemently disagree with everything that is said. Explore a little and don’t be afraid to reach out to material by authors you don’t know anything about. Don’t be afraid to try something outside your comfort zone. You can still read your old favorites, but how does one find new favorites without trying anything new?
Added 4:00PM MST
Just now, I saw this post by K. Tempest Bradford explaining her point of view a bit more thoroughly (though I have no idea the connection between the comments on this blog and the general challenge I linked to above). I’m pointing out her blog post because it reenforces what I said above about this not being a straight white male cis hate-fest. The penultimate paragraph in her blog post makes that very clear. And neither does the final paragraph prove me wrong. Reviewing a segment of a genre is not spitting on everything else.
