Speculative Fiction Brouhaha
Thanks to The Bibliophile Stalker and this post of his, I learned of a controversy that erupted a while back in the speculative fiction world across the Pacific. The topic covers privacy (whether it's ethical to publicly post private correspondence or not), editorial professionalism (is it fair for an editor to say that he accepted a story even if he didn't understand it because he needed more work from non-Caucasians?), to religious and racial bigotry (you'll have to read the telling letter and myriad comments to make a decision for yourselves). Relevant links follow:
From Transriptase: What Happened
From SFFNET Webnews: The Editor in the middle of all this shares his take
From Asimovs.com: Don't Post It In Public
From Spontaneous Derivation: Summary Of A Train Wreck
From Tobias Buckell: Uncool, man. Just Uncool.
Each link above will lead you to more links, comments, and posts. This is stickier than what happened here, and the language, much harsher too.
From Transriptase: What Happened
From SFFNET Webnews: The Editor in the middle of all this shares his take
From Asimovs.com: Don't Post It In Public
From Spontaneous Derivation: Summary Of A Train Wreck
From Tobias Buckell: Uncool, man. Just Uncool.
Each link above will lead you to more links, comments, and posts. This is stickier than what happened here, and the language, much harsher too.
posted by pgenrestories at 7:07 AM
3 Comments:
Every editor has his own quibbles and prejudices. The nicer ones will point them out as personal weaknesses and will try to shore them up in front of everybody else. Others, on the other hand, will bottle them up and go with items that are more in the way of their strengths. Sanders' flaw just happened to lie in the phrase "sheet heads", and we're watching the firestorm right now because neither side was taking it very well.
Should Helix have anticipated the negative reaction to Sanders' statement? Yes. Did the world audience think that the editor could have been a little more professional in understanding why people wanted their works off the site? Yes. Was there a better way to handle things than automatically charging such authors a $40 pullout fee, or locking all contributions and stomping away in a huff? Yes. We get the picture -- and the question now is, what should we do about it?
I feel that we already have much of what we need to know, really. If we think that a publishing venue exhibits unprofessional and abusive behavior towards its contributors, then this simply presents us with a choice on whether or not to continue offering them our services. Oh, we can discuss all the reactions and deconstruct all the hate statements till we're blue in the face, I suppose, but we can't necessarily tell Sanders what his standards should be, or what he should say, and expect him to change. We really have only one practical course of action here, and that's the possibility of walking away and take our business somewhere else. End of story.
What surprises me, of course, is that I haven't seen any statements made in the defense of Helix in any of the links, nor on the first few pages of my Google search. With a firestorm of this size, it's difficult to imagine that somebody didn't at least issue a formal statement, or something like that.
That's true. It would be logical to expect their managing editor, Lawrence Watt-Evans, to issue a formal statement.
Someone over at pgenrestories.multiply.com requested for a summary of this. Here it is, copied and pasted, but you'll have to go through the links to get the details.
1. A writer, Luke, sends in a story to William Sanders of helixsf.com. In the story, the protagonist is a Muslim with violent tendencies and whose behavior is trending toward terrorist activities.
2. Sanders rejects the story in a private email because it lacks spec-fic sensibilities, and helixsf.com is a quarterly ezine that focuses on spec-fic. His email contains references that can be interpreted as derogatory to those of Middle Eastern or Muslim backgrounds.
3. Luke accepts the rejection, but seeks some clarification over at another writer's blog, that of William Preston. He asks what the rejection means about not being spec-fic enough. To help clarify this, he puts up Sanders' entire email rejection over on the comments section of Preston's blog. Preston then blogs negatively about the content of the email, especially the comments about Muslims.
4. This soon spreads, especially among the other contributors of Helix. Some of them, not wanting to be associated with Helix because the email offended them, ask politely to have their stories withdrawn from Helix's archives.
5. Sanders agrees, but the contributors feel insulted at the way he goes about this (as an example, his email to a Korean-American writer says that he only accepted her story because he needed more non-Caucasian writers, though he didn't understand the story; there are other things he did as well).
6. Other contributors end up blogging about how scifi and fantasy is really "white man's literature", and how hard it is for those who are not white or male to enter the genre, either as writers or readers. The discussion now takes on the issue of race and gender.
7. On forums like Asimov's, writers and readers alike heatedly debate on whether it was ethical or legal for Luke to have put up the private email in public, without permission from Sanders. They debate about religion and race too, especially about that "scifi and fantasy are white man's lit". Luke deletes his post on Preston's blog, but others have copied it already by then. So now the issue extends to include the morality and legality of Luke's actions. Preston deletes his post and some of the comments on his blog as well.
8. Sanders shares his side on SFFNET Webnews in a style which others still find insulting and bigoted, which promptly elicits more reactions from writers and readers on their blogs.
9. The Helix contributors, some of whom have had their stories pulled, some not, decide to put up a new site, transcriptase.org, where they (legally) put up their stories from Helix. This is legal because these writers own the reprint rights. These writers on transcriptase.org do so as a sign of protest either to what they feel is Sanders' bigoted attitude, or his lack of professionalism in how he dealt with those requesting to be removed from the Helix archives.
10. I think it's pretty much ended now, but there are bad feelings lingering all around. Helix is still up, but there have been calls to boycott it and to stop donating to it.
Many of the commenters are editors, writers, critics. You'd recognize their names if you read the various spec-fic magazines and ezines available.
There, that's it as far as I can understand. You'll have to go through the links yourself to get the details.
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