Bloggasm

Go read this brilliant short story by Rachel Swirsky: Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind

via whatever

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Ok, I understand that critics and over-enthusiastic term-paper writers will often misinterpret author works, but it has been commonly understood for decades that Ray Bradbury’s novel Farenheit 451 is about the dangers of censorship. And as someone who has read the novel, I don’t see how anyone can come away from that novel and think that this is not the case.

But according to an article in LA Weekly, Bradbury now claims that the novel has nothing to do with censorship, but rather it’s a warning against the evil of television.

His argument for why television is destroying literature is inane and anecdotal. Like others, my respect level for Bradbury has gone down several levels.

I went to the internets superstar John Scalzi’s book reading tonight in Richmond. The small room was packed and we got to hear the first chapter of his unfinished novel. Afterwards, there was a Q and A period where people asked him about everything from his books to his blog to his home life.

Naturally, seeing as how I write for Bloggasm, I was interested in his thoughts on his ability to use the internet to promote his books. Could he credit his own site’s popularity, combined with the help of Instapundit and Boingboing, as the driving force to his success as a novelist? For some reason I thought he would give the internets their due but at the same time credit other major influences, like newspaper reviews or something, but he was surprisingly straightforward in saying that he thinks that the internet support created a tipping point (to borrow from Gladwell) that was the major factor in his success.

Anyway, in the above picture he’s pointing at me, accusing me of trying to catch him in an embarrassing act. In the one below, he accepts a famed bacon cat birthday card.

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Nobody could have predicted the breadth of the outrage.

At the bottom of a lengthy platform rant, Howard V. Hendrix, the current vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, wrote:

I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

Later in the essay, he labeled these webscabs as “Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch[s],” a name that would later come to haunt him.

The response was immediate. Within days, hundreds of websites, blogs and message boards had linked to the rant, and very few came to Hendrix’s defense. In an age when many writers publish their works in online magazines which are freely accessible, comparing such a person to a union worker scab allowed little room for mercy.

“What a bunch of bull,” one message board poster wrote. “[S]orry to say, but juxtaposed with his bio about driving a $50k car, living in old growth forest, having enough time to cut firewood all day for a toasty bath…and getting to snowshoe in the Sierra Nevadas whenever the whim strikes; I don’t have much sympathy.”

Neither did the rest of the writing community.

In the midst of all these outcries, Jo Walton, a 42-year-old speculative fiction writer from Canada decided to act.

“In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day,” she posted on her blog. “On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.”

Like the original webscab rant, the proposal was spread all over the web, fueled in large part when Cory Doctorow of Boingboing linked to it. Doctorow is considered by many to be the poster child champion of releasing your works for free, what with several novels and a collection released under a Creative Commons license.

After Technopeasant Day was all said and done, I asked Walton whether she had realized at the time of declaring it that it would become such a widely-adopted phenomenon.

“I wasn’t expecting anything like this level of response,” she said. “I thought some of my friends would go for it. I wasn’t expecting a mass movement.”

The date of the holiday — April 23 — wasn’t without significance. Walton originally planned to give her readers one day’s notice, but was eventually convinced by one of her friends to hold off. “So I looked at the calendar and saw that Monday 23rd was St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday, which seemed perfect,” she said. “The writer Laurence Schimmel lives in Catalonia and he had mentioned last year that St. George’s Day is called St. Jordi’s day there and is celebrated by people giving each other a book and a rose. That just seemed really appropriate.”

Though it’s hard to say for certain how many people participated in International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, one site was able to track at least 71 writers who did. Authors posted everything from short stories to poems to audio recordings to full-length novels.

Jay Lake, a prolific short story writer and novelist, was one such participant. He has published dozens of short stories in free online magazines over the years, but his official Technopeasant contribution was titled “Glass: A Love Story.”

After Hendrix’s statements, there were murmurs within the writing community that his views were echoed largely within the New York publishing world, especially in light of the recent lawsuits against Google and its book scanning program, but Lake didn’t agree.

“Obviously I don’t speak for anyone in New York. I live almost as far from New York City as one can and still be in the continental United States,” he said. “However, given that Tor has done very well backing Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross and John Scalzi, among others, with aggressive stances on e-publishing and alternative licensing and distribution schema, I have trouble imagining them aligning with the substance of Dr. Hendrix’s remarks.”

Lake, who’s an active member of the SFWA, believes that Hendrix falls within an “old boy’s club” in the organization, one that causes a sharp divide in every writerly argument ranging from the merits of posting your work online for free to whether selling short stories to small press magazines helps your career.

Sarah Monette, another novelist who played along on Technopeasant Day, seemed to agree with this notion.

“Not being a member of SFWA, I can’t presume to speculate on what they think about this matter,” she offered. “I do think it’s probable that younger writers are more likely to think about ways of promoting their work online simply because we’ve been exposed to the internet more at an earlier age.”

After it became apparent that his fellow writers were rebelling against his statements, Hendrix performed a minimal amount of backpedaling, but for the most part remained firm in his original assessments. In a lengthy letter he submitted to the publishing blog Galley Cat, he said that he “may well be wrong” for labeling people “webscabs,” but that ultimately “I don’t feel that free online posting of whole novels for promotional purposes will in the end empower authors as a class.”

Two days after Technopeasant Day, I contacted Hendrix to see if he would answer a few questions to give more insight to the controversy. He immediately requested that I repost his original response (you can read it here).

In our back-and-forth conversation, he claimed that he hadn’t read the mass internet response, that most of it had been summarized to him in “email correspondence.”

“The term “webscabs” was a bit too broad, and definitely too incendiary,” he admitted. “We at SFWA have long been concerned about authors’ rights. If my comments got people thinking about authors’ responsibilities, especially to other authors, then I am content and more than willing to deal with the consequences.”

When I asked him about whether he suffered from the “old school” labeling that so many authors had given him, he denied such a thing. “As I have said elsewhere, I’m not opposed to blogs, wikis, chatrooms etc. per se. I have at one time or another been involved with all of them to some degree,” he said. “… My concern was with the implications of the fact that volunteer officers of a volunteer organization (SFWA) were increasingly expected to not only spend time on the SFWA listserves, but also on numerous “topics” on SFF.net, as well as an ever-proliferating number of member blogs. It was a recipe for burning out our volunteers, and I felt compelled to say something about it.”

Hendrix explained that his opposition to posting free works online is “rooted in a concern that, as more authors make use of this promotional technique, harms of aggregation will ensue.” To him, this isn’t a question of an author’s rights, but his responsibilities. He described Technopeasants as subscribing to a libertarian’s messianic-faith-in-capitalism idea, a naieve one as he sees it. He asserted that the SFWA has been competent in keeping up with the shifting media landscape, and the elected officials aren’t adverse to the internet and the new avenues it opens.

“As for being “progressive” and “adapting,” I think it’s appropriate to recall that Charles Darwin long ago taught us Change is not necessarily the same thing as Progress — and that applies to technological evolution, too,” he said. “‘Adapting’ should not mean serving as a doormat waiting to be trampled.”

Despite his claim that he didn’t read the blogosphere’s response to his statements, Hendrix admitted that it might have severely affected his place in SFWA. “I would love to continue serving the organization, but I’m afraid that my comment on LiveJournal has probably ‘burned that bridge before I came to it.’”

But most the writers I spoke to didn’t hold his statements against him as a person.

“I have never met Dr. Hendrix, or encountered him online, and I don’t have anything against him personally, I just strongly disagree with his right to tell other people what they can do with their own work,” Walton told me. “And the word ‘webscab’ didn’t go down very well. I come from the South Wales coal mining valleys, where ‘scab’ is very strong language. I’m very glad he took that word back, and understand it might not have quite the same level of meaning where he comes from.”

Lake also seemed to think the entire ordeal would blow over.

“I think Howard should have just smiled and waved and gotten on with his life,” he said. “He stuck his foot in it hard, without really meaning to in my opinion, and reached a point where there wasn’t really a graceful exit available to him. Sometimes you just have to eat a little mud.”

Most people are pretty uptight about talking about how much money they make, but author John Scalzi wrote an entire entry going into extensive detail to how much money he has made writing science fiction: The Money Entry 2007: Science Fiction Income:

2006 was an interesting year for me in this regard, primarily because it’s the first year that, frankly, I’ve gotten any substantial amount of income from science fiction. To bracket this, allow me to note that I’ve been making income off of science fiction since 1999, which is the year that I first offered Agent to the Stars online as “shareware.” So from 1999 through 2006, here’s how the income came down. Note that I’m breaking down the income as to when it was actually received, ie., when I had cash in my hot little hands:

1999: About $400, from Agent readers
2000: About $1000, from Agent readers
2001: About $1100, from Agent readers and a short story sale at Strange Horizons
2002: About $1000, from Agent readers
2003: About $6000, from Agent readers and from first part of advance for Old Man’s War
2004: About $5000, from Agent readers and from first part of advance for The Android’s Dream
2005: About $15,000, from second part of OMW advance, first part of The Ghost Brigades advance, advance for Agent to the Stars hardcover, and short story sale to Subterranean Press.
2006: About $67,000.

As you’ll see from reading the entry, it took Scalzi several years to get to the point he’s at now. It merely shows that one shouldn’t go into science fiction writing expecting to make a full-time living. Even though Scalzi has managed to finally bring in a decent amount, he still has lots of writing jobs on the side in order to provide more security.

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Heather Lindsley’s short story Mayfly is one of those stories that stems from a concept–that women can be born and live their entire lives in the span of a week–and then branches off into the many sociological implications of such a life. The character literally has the life-span of a mayfly, only in this case, the memories of her ancestors are implanted in her brain before she’s ever born. This allows Lindsley to skip past the question of how a character can have so much self-inflection after only being alive for a week.

This condition only exists within her family tree, so the reader watches how the world reacts to someone of her kind, how she and her ancestors are forced to kind of blend in, and because they grow and mature so quickly, nobody really notices that something isn’t right. In order for their lineage to go on, each woman must find a mate to impregnate her after only a few days of life–usually on the third or fourth day.

Like most stories of this kind, the backdrop allows for a deep characterization that is quickly realized. The character must struggle against the notion that her life is so short and must find some sense of worth within the span of a week. There’s a scene where she briefly considers picking up and reading a Tolstoy novel to add a cultural inheritance to future generations, but at the same time realizes that the book is too long to justify reading it. Instead, she goes to see Hitchcock marathons and visits art museums. All so future generations can call themselves cultured.

The presiding theme here is selflessness. On the one hand, she realizes that her life is so short and that she wants to do the most with it, but on the other hand she knows her time is very limitted and she has to prepare for future generations. This creates an internal conflict that works well with Lindsley’s writing style.

This really is a wonderful story. I highly recommend it.

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Many people have been commenting on the fact that Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis at the Hugos. PNH put it most eloquently:

Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn’t funny and it wasn’t okay. I understand (from third parties; I haven’t spoken to her about it) that Connie Willis’s position is that Ellison has done worse and she can handle him, but I really didn’t want to watch it and neither, I think, did a lot of other people in the audience. Up to then the comedic schtick aspects of the Hugo presentation had been genuinely funny. After that, I think, many of us just wanted it all to stop.

Just as with George W. Bush’s now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison’s tit-grab is this: “Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you’ll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will.”

It’s not okay. It’s not funny. It wasn’t a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn’t want to watch it. It’s another thing that’s going to stop.

The thing is, many of the people who are reading these blog posts and acting outraged are the very same people who play vital roles in working and scheduling the conventions. Might the proper punishment for Harlan be to not invite him as any kind of guest-of-honor to any future conventions? If he wants to come to a convention, he can pay the fee just like any other fan and come in like anyone else. The reason he gets away with this shit is because he considers himself a star among SF fandom, and he’s let it get to his head for far too long.

It might not be a huge loss for the convention planners, since as far as I’ve read, he’s an asshole to the fans anyway. So not only do you get to punish Harlan for the groping, but you also improve the convention experience for fans.

Just a thought.

UPDATE: Harlan has since apologized. It’s up to you to decide how sincere of an apology it is.