bruceb

There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one.

The key question is, should an editor trying to sample the field widely pay attention to writers' personal backgrounds—their ethnicity and sex, for starters—or not? I want to argue here that an editor interested in the best sweep should for the simple reason that writers' lives matter.

Lives don't determine writing. There are lots of engineering magazine editors and only one Gene Wolfe, but he writes the way he does partly because of what he did at Plant Engineering. I don't know of any other trout fishermen and masters of frugal living who write like Howard Waldrop, but his life shapes his prose, and the way he writes them. Robert Heinlein didn't write The Forever War or 1968 and it seems like a safe bet that Joe Haldeman isn't going to write Starship Troopers, in part because each had such a different experience of war. The Draegera series wouldn't be what it is without a painful divorce along the way. And so on.

This is all a commonplace. We—that is to say, the readership that is mostly white and mostly male—recognizes all of this, as entirely true on the individual level. We are not surprised to learn that Caitlin Kiernan is a paleontologist or Peter Watts a biologist, and while we may be surprised to find that behind the facades of Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree Jr. were two people who knew the intelligence community from the inside, we take that information and see fresh things in their work. We accept it: lives matter.

The idea that, however, lives across the big social fault lines, like ethnicity and sex and gender and orientation, do not matter rests on nothing much more solid than the desire that they not. In spirit it's not wildly different from the creationist's grudging admission that, sure, breeds exist and breeding works, micro-scale evolution like antibiotic resistance in bacteria does happen, and all of that, but there mustn't be larger-scale evolution because there just musn't be. But lives keep on mattering. Steve Barnes has lived through things none of his co-authors have, and they've all had experiences he can't, because he's black and they're not. Alice Sheldon dealt with things Eric Linebarger didn't. And so on, and so on.

So yes, if you want to survey a field in search of the sweep of its current set of cool ideas, you need to cast your net widely enough to actually get out of your particular little cove, no matter how important it may seem from this vantage point. It may actually be important: you may be fishing in San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound, or off Cape Cod. But there are still bays and rivers and oceans beyond where you are, and if you don't make an effort to go look in them, you simply can't have any idea what you're missing.

I've been meaning to cover some more topics, but got distracted by some other business. To work!

Intersectionality is a word you'll hear if you start reading much by people involved in trying address prejudice in an organized, systematic sort of way. I think it's an ugly word, but then I'm not wild about faan, campaign, or yiffing, either; I'm not an archon of vocabulary (yet), so I play the hand I'm dealt.

The basic concept behind intersectionality is simple, and it's one of those ideas that people tend to assent readily to but forget in the crunch. Oppression stacks. The discrimination born of racism overlaps with and changes (and is changed by) the discrimination born of sexism. Likewise with class bias, religious intolerance, and all the rest. People of different backgrounds do not experience a particular instance or even a whole system of bias working against them because their backgrounds shape what it means to them and what recourse they have.

We can, and should, talk about kinds of bias, privilege, and discrimination separately. Lots to be gained by doing so. The point of emphasizing intersectionality is to make sure that we don't stop there, but rather to push us to reintegrate the pieces and see how they work in the totality that is a person's or community's life. People have sex, gender, age, race, class, and all the rest all at once, and these change how a life moves through and against the problems raised by any one of them.

And now you know.

There's a new LiveJournal-based community, Fen of Color United (with the great acronym foc_u). Tomorrow they're having a consciousness-raising event, and I'll be posting one of their nifty banners in support. Today I want to write a little bit about how I see the general topic of race and its representation in genre fiction, including the science fiction, fantasy, and horror that are my professional stomping grounds, and I want to do it with my author hat on.

The #1 lesson for me as an author of pallor is that my colleagues and I are really howlingly ignorant about our readers of color. I keep going back to the wild unicorn herd check in on deadbrowalking, and it staggers me every time. (27 pages and counting!) I recognize some of the sorts of folks represented—I grew up in an ethnically diverse community and schools, and with Caltech and JPL nearby, we had geeks and nerds in all colors. But there are others I don't have any experience with, separated as I am from them by (along with race) class, geography within the US, national boundaries, all kinds of things. And yet I recognize them at once as my fellow fans...and as people I'd like to sell stories to.

But how can I avoid putting my foot in it, when I didn't even suspect they were there as a potential audience? Well, I can start by listening. And then I can continue by listening. And then I can keep listening some more. Oh, and while I'm doing that, I can listen.

Since I've started, I've learned a fair amount about ignorant decisions that have driven off readers of color from books they might otherwise have enjoyed, and about the ways ignorant decisions can get reinforced, pass unchallenged, and end up damaging the work in ways they didn't have to. I've read some enlightening discussion about how to assess whether something is incidental or crucial, and about dealing with the realization that there are critical flaws in either part. I've seen great suggestions about important questions to ask myself very early on, and also some pretty heated debate about the merits of any particular formulation in light of someone else's experience.

All of this makes me a better writer. I've gone back over my notes about stories I might write, and had to toss several. But I've also seen unexpected potential in a couple others, which seem like they might go from iffy to having real potential if I rethink my approach to them and put race more centrally in the mix. Maybe something will come of these, maybe not. But the process is productive. It's also, I think, morally desirable. It's not just unwise to carelessly write off whole categories of people. If I want to say something through the symbols and possibilities of genre fiction—and I do—then I need to make sure I'm not tossing huge chunks of the species overboard without even knowing that I'm doing it.

Someone may want to start up a tone argument. I'm not inclined to have that argument now. And I'll explain why based on my own experience with disability. I have been, at times, in such pure agony and so impaired by other symptoms that I would indeed have gotten down on my hands and knees (if I could have bent so far) and begged for relief. But it's not just relief that authority figures sometimes withheld from me, it's basic paying of attention. I think of the doctor who cheerfully told my parents that he knew from the moment I walked in what my problem was, and so he didn't actually pay any attention to the test results, for instance. I have gotten angry and shouted at doctors, nurses, and bureaucrats. And I've been told that my getting angry just shows that I'm irresponsible and that I don't deserve to be taken seriously until I speak nicely.

You know what? The hell with that. That's wrong. I get heated because I'm the one suffering and they're not. If they hurt the way I did at that moment, and I was refusing to pay attention, they'd get angry too, and with good reason.

That's what I think about when I read white complaints that fans of color are being too mean or harsh or whatever. Maybe in some objective sense some are. Unfair, unfounded criticism certainly exists. (I've gotten my share in gaming and there's some that still makes me flinch, years later.) But I know what it's like to hurt and rage and be dismissed, and I think to myself, "I am not qualified to sit in judgment." I'm not the one suffering, when it comes to race. And I know for absolute, 100% sure that right now, fans of color do not need any more white people lecturing them about etiquette while failing to think of them during creation and driving them away with callousness after publication.

So, pretty much, I'm not doing any of that stuff. And I don't propose to host a discussion of how mean some fans of color are. Take that somewhere else. I'd rather put my time into learning important things and, yes, making some new friends, so that I can do my part to be less of the problem in the future.

Some of you have heard me talk about, among other unfulfilled projects, "Noise", a story of uncertain length about someone running into an Internet flavor of electronic voice phenomena. I had the idea about a decade ago and have repeatedly tried without success to make it work.

Well, Twitter is the answer. Or rather Twitter and oakthorne together. A complaint by Joe about people dumping Twitter feeds into LiveJournal posts gave me a sudden inspiration, and it looks like this story's finally gonna happen.

I don't have any idea how long it will be—I know how it needs to end, and I know some of the things I want to happen before that, but it's got a lot of structural freedom. We'll see, I guess. :)

Here's the first 2438 words, if you're curious, in PDF form.

Today I snagged the 3.1 patch from a mirror site and applied it, just in case there are things I want to do by way of administrivia or whatever before my account runs out in June, then moved WoW onto my external "stay there until I put you on CDs or something" drive. Since then I've spent almost all day experimenting with rearrangements of my working tools: what goes on the dock, what just goes into Overflow, reactivating Spaces and seeing what conceptual categories seem satisfying, and so on.

I realized that I'd sacrificed a fair amount so as to free resources for WoW's increasing overhead. With that off my plate as a consideration, I am freshly impressed by just how much this system can do without fuss, and reinforced in my sense that I did make a good choice last year when I settled on it.

At the start of the week, I said I'd write up my thoughts about DEVONthink, a personal database sort of utility, and particularly about DEVONthink Pro Office, the version I ended up purchasing. (Here's their various editions and their features.) Executive summary: wow.

So what's this all about, you ask? Or at least you could ask. Here's the deal: apps like DEVONthink and Evernote are repositories of whatever you'd like: text (and a variety of word processing formats), images, bookmarks, you name it. DEVONthink will take in whole PDFs and treat them like any other data. In fact the pro office version will, get this, do OCR on an incoming PDF. (See footnote below.) Evernote is, to my taste, better for casual quick note-taking, with an on-the-fly system of tagging. DEVONthink works off a single hierarchy you construct as you go, much like setting up the file system on a computer. But you can do what it calls replicating a file, making duplicate entries for it in multiple places, and they all update, if you don't want independently editable copies.

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Confound you, viktor_haag . Your repeated mentions of DEVONthink got me thinking that when I'm in unfamiliar territory, I should avoid being hasty. So I went ahead and downloaded the trial version of DEVONthink Pro Office 2, and fired it up...

I'm not entirely sure that I will want to shell out for this. But I'm quite sure that I don't not want to. :) If I'm understanding how this works, I either want this, or something that does pretty much all the same stuff, because I can see it genuinely saving me from some seizure-like episodes induced by neurotransmitter depletion from sustained intense concentration.

I will have a fuller comment in a day or two, once I've put it through a few more paces, but in the meantime, thanks.

The computer one, that is, though I've got the physical one in my sights too. Stuff I'm experimenting with:

Forwarding the .Mac mail to GMail, and Google Notifier going. Mail.app closed, and GMail only open when I've got new mail. (Google Notifier gives me a pop-up window for composing new mail in, which is nice for when I want to send something out and then move on.)

Chax letting me see multiple IM accounts' buddy lists in one pane. Adium closed.

RSS list fully consolidated into Google Reader. NetNewsWire closed.

Overflow installed. This came along with DEVONthink as a MacHeist freebie, and I tried it on a whim. I like it a lot. One key press to get a paned list of apps, a couple of clicks to launch. It's no faster, I think, than using the Dock, but it's more convenient because it comes to where my pointer happens to be. Dock trimmed and moved to one side.

The improved responsiveness of my computer isn't huge, but it is noticeable. Fewer things to go wrong and stumble over, too.

Next up will be experimenting with arrangement of writing apps to see what's handiest for my two major modes of writing, sustained primary though not exclusive focus and quick jotting of ephemera.

There's a lot to be said in favor of apps like Scrivener and Celtx that integrate the notes-taking and other stuff that accumulates around every long writing project (and many short ones). But I'm discovering that they don't actually help me write, because I get distracted by shoving things around, rearranging outline forms, and such.

It's possible that the right answer for me will be something like using Scrivener for the management and Nisus Writer Express or Pages for the prose itself.

Thanks once again to the estimable Sean Collins for a tip....

Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction is the title of a post at Groovy Age of Horror, a weblog whose writer centers on '70s horror and ranges in all kinds of interesting directions from there. Game writers, you want to read this one; so will others. I wouldn't make all his slams against literary fiction, but when it comes to looking at how genre fiction works, yeah, right on. This is good stuff.

And as long as I'm taking tips from Sean, he's got good comments on the network of comics bloggers and the absence of same for horror. This is my occasion to say something I've noticed about my own sustained reading.

The bloggers I stick with are the ones who seem to me to be interesting people who happen to share some interests with me and a knack for good expression. I find that it's the more focused-topic blogs that are most likely to drop off my list because either I got bored, or I got angry in unproductive ways. (Like my experiences with more and more political blogs, for example.) It's people who bring me back, and precisely because there'll be surprises, wanderings, and other stuff that I couldn't predict or categorize.

There are of course a handful of exceptions, like Dirk Deppey and the astoundingly good Journalista, which is a must read if you're much into any kind of comics or serial storytelling. But then Dirk does drop in asides like this one on his daily routine: "I finally haul my lazy ass out of bed somewhere between 1-3PM Arizona Mountain Standard Time — where we all understand that Daylight Savings Time is a plot by the Carlyle Group’s Zionist Masonic Bankers to floridate our water supply and turn us all into socialist homos! — and set a pot of coffee to percolating, presumably with unfloridated water. Goodness knows, I’m no socialist." His life and tastes and a strong sense of personality do emerge gradually...partly through gentle repetition, in fact, to tie this back to the earlier topic.

Anyway, I'm less interested in a bunch of blogs about horror than I am in blogs by folks who talk about horror along with other things, and from whom I learn something and/or get good entertainment.

This is one of the reasons I beat myself down whenever I start thinking about spinning off topic blogs, and instead make more use of LJ tags.