THEY WERE A LIFETIME TOGETHER
Others have already tweeted this, so just to confirm … I am told by family friends that Iain Banks died this morning. RIP.
— Charles Stross (@cstross) June 9, 2013
I wrote about him when he announced he had terminal cancer; what I wrote there about his work still stands, of course.
A sad day for science fiction and for literature; thoughts to his wife, family and friends.
You know, the one I was in, along with Jason Finn, Bobak Ferdowsi and of course Wil Wheaton. Let the chuckleations immencify!
Uh, mostly not, because apparently I was the only person in the US who assumed the government was already doing something very much like this? Because it was doing it under Bush, and if Obama had gotten around to stopping doing it, his administration would have made a big deal about it, no? And since the Obama Administration never said a single word about it that I can recall, it was probably still going on? So I guess what I would say is, yeah, seems not surprising in the least, why are you suddenly freaked out about it?
This is separate and independent from the question of whether the government should be vacuuming up every single bit of information out there in our communication channels, to which my reflexive answer is, oh, very probably not. Seems like a bad idea, for all the usual reasons involving rights and civil liberties, and the fact that our government, while nominally seen as liberty-loving, is not forever guaranteed to be so (and of course there are many who do not believe it is that way now). With that understood, again, since this has been happening since the early days of the millennium, it seemed to me unlikely that it had suddenly had stopped. Our government doesn’t have a whole stratum of secret legal and operational apparatuses for nothing, you know. It’s being used. It hasn’t stopped being used, because, again, if it had stopped, the current administration would have made a fine show of not using it.
I’m not personally thrilled with the possibility/probability of everything I do online being strained through the government’s baleen, as it were, but I’ve assumed it’s been doing so for the last decade at least. Inasmuch as I live my online life with the assumption that nothing I do there is private and unknown anyway (i.e., it’s all discoverable at some point, and in some way), this did not require a huge adjustment on my part. The question I usually ask myself before I do anything online is this: Is this something I can tell my wife about, and she would be cool with? If the answer is “yes,” then if someone else finds out, meh.
(This doesn’t mean I’m keen to share all the (generally really not all that exciting, sadly) details of my online life with all y’all, “all y’all” including the NSA, and I think quite honestly most of you are probably happy with that arrangement as well. But if it happened, there’s nothing there that would surprise Krissy, and at the end of the day she’s actually the one that matters.)
On a related note, I’m also aware of how much privacy I’ve already given up on a daily basis to private corporations. For example, I’m nestled fairly deep into the Googlesphere at this point; I use its GMail service, have an Android phone and tablet and otherwise use a fair number of its services. Google knows where I am all the time (so long as I have my phone and/or tablet), reads my email and tracks a lot of what I do online, and in return it does a lot of things that make my life somewhat easier (I don’t get lost anymore when I go on the road, for example).
This constitutes a loss of privacy, to be sure, but it’s also varieties of privacy that I don’t feel terribly awful about compromising because a) I understand what’s being compromised and what I get out of it, b) Google doesn’t actually give a shit about my e-mail or other private information other than for keywords to offer me ads and services (and again I’m aware of that particular trade), c) a decade plus of dealing with Google has given me a good idea what I’m in for. Likewise Apple, Microsoft and Verizon, all of whose devices I use on a regular basis and have for years, and whose user agreements I actually do read.
Do I want Google (or anyone else) to allow the government access to their information on me without appropriate legal procedures? No (note Google’s flat denial of participation in a PRISM program here). On the other hand, again, simply as a matter of course, I have assumed the US government was getting my data one way or another. At the end of the day, the Internet was born out of ARPANET, and the US government has never been keen of letting the Internet go entirely private. Once more, I’m slightly surprised people seem surprised.
And again, this lack of surprise is separate and independent from my thoughts on whether this assumed suctioning up of my data is correct, just or right. What I’m saying is that I’m not especially outraged at the moment. It’s hard to be outraged for an entire decade. At least it is for me.
Continuing my efforts to catch up on the books that have come in while I was on tour (and since), here’s the second edition of what books/ARCs have come in recently. At least one more is coming! But in the meantime, let me know if there’s something here that catches your fancy. I’m sure something must.
Because I gotta tell ya, the ones that are posting here are letting me down. Consider this latest comment, expunged from its original place in a comment here but presented for your delight, from “ManCaveThrust”:
This place is horseshit. Anyone who tells the TRUTH about alpha game or feminism suddenly becomes a prime target for Scalzi’s black helicopter squad. Take your self-righteousness and stuff it. You and your rabbit poops can stay far away from me and my tight ass life.
Notes:
1. Tired rhetoric — “rabbit” references been done to death in terms of me, handwringing about feminism likewise, all this “alpha” stuff, game or otherwise, is just boring. Yes, yes, alpha this, rabbit that. Where’s the originality? Where’s the pop? Where’s the craft?
2. For that matter, this fellow is clearly not keeping up with current events, otherwise he’d know that at the moment I’m (fairly, to be sure) not exactly in the finest possible odor with many feminists. I want my ranting comments fresh and contextually aware, thank you.
3. A single all capped word? If you’re not going to commit to an all-cap lifestyle in your comment, don’t bring the all caps at all. And again, here we are with the craft issue.
4. Metaphor usage is not up to snuff. “Black helicopter squad?” If this dude was paying any attention at all, it would have been “pastel helicopter squad” — most people would have realized it was a play on “black helicopters” but the “pastel” bit would have more in line with the attempt to frame me as an emasculated tool of the matriarchy; real men won’t ever be seen in pastels, they’re clinically proven to shrink one’s testicles.
Now, granted, if I were actually an emasculated tool of the matriarchy, I would not be allowed helicopters at all, pastel or otherwise. But let’s not overtax this fellow by asking him to think his metaphor all the way through. Asking him for a little surface consistency, however, is not too much.
5. “Rabbit poops”? Really? I get this this is supposed to be insulting, but, honestly. It sounds like an eight-year-old unfamiliar with how swearing works jamming words together, Mad Libs style. It doesn’t really sync with the swaggering, hypermasculine tone this dude was clearly intending. I mean, he uses “horseshit” earlier, so we know he’s down with the swearing thing; “rabbit poop” is a bit of a come down. This is the opposite of sticking the dismount.
6. I’m not sure what kind of vibe this fellow was intending to send by calling himself “ManCaveThrust” and discussing his “tight ass life,” but I am pretty sure it’s not the same one I got.
7. Going to someone’s site to tell them to stay away from you? Dude. Come on.
Verdict:
Sloppy. Lazy. Inchoate. Any actual attempt to assert alpha-ness, or to accentuate my not-alpha-ness (or whatever) undermined by complete lack of composition, flow or sense. In short: Disappointing effort. But as with so many of these dudes, “disappointing” seems the best he can manage.
To be fair, I wouldn’t have let this comment stay in the comment thread even if it was brilliantly composed, because I have better goals for the site than to have it cluttered up with panicked boys trying to be all tough on the Internet, where they don’t actually have to look anyone in the eye as they type out their posturing. But at least I would have been entertained before I deleted the comment. All I get out of this one is a sense of pity, and a desire to put the fellow through a writing workshop. And that’s just not enough.
Author Bradley P. Beaulieu wraps up his “Lays of Anuskaya” fantasy trilogy with novel The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, and on the occasion of its release, he’s moved to look back on the entire trilogy and think on what it means to him, and how it relates to our own real world.
BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU:
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh concludes a trilogy that began, at least in my head, some eight years ago. In it, a prince and princess of a Russo-inspired Grand Duchy join forces with members of a violent extremist group whose stated goal for decades has been to destroy the Grand Duchy and its influence in the region. Unlikely allies indeed. Much of the story is about healing a world that is broken, but another part, a much more layered and nuanced part, is about seeing the world as your enemy sees it.
The Lays of Anuskaya is centered on a group of three elemental sorcerers who centuries ago attempted to bring the world to a place of enlightenment. They not only failed, they failed in spectacular fashion, and the world itself paid the price. As the trilogy opens, one of those very sorcerers has been reborn. Through his dreams, and through the brave efforts of others, we find the source of the world’s ills: the fabric between the material world and the world of the elemental spirits has been weakening. Rifts have begun to form.
The true nature of these rifts, and how they might be fixed, is a matter of some debate. The rifts are causing blight and disease and war throughout the Grand Duchy and the neighboring empire, and still the dukes bicker amongst themselves, causing delays at a time when the world can least afford it. The Flames of Shadam Khoreh begins as the pain and destruction from these rifts is becoming dire. Everything now depends on the ability of one boy, the sorcerer reborn, in finding the truth of how the rifts might be healed once and for all, for if he doesn’t, the entire world will suffer the consequences.
One thing I’ve rarely talked about is the fact that 9/11, the Iraq War, and the surrounding conflicts were one of the primary sources of inspiration for this story. Like so many people—not just Americans, but people all over the world—I was greatly affected by the events of 9/11. There was rage and confusion and a deep desire to “get to the bottom of it,” to understand why the perpetrators of that crime had done what they’d done. The more I searched for answers, however, the more I realized that it’s an endless story with endless causes and endless consequences.
Look, I’m a pragmatist. There are hard truths in our world. I’m fully aware that there are legitimate reasons to use violence to achieve an end, but it also seems that too often violence (or the threat of violence) is the first thing we reach for in our arsenal (a funny word to use when you’re trying to broker peace, but somehow it seems apropos; and by the way, when I say we, I mean the entire human race). So much of our politics is posturing and refusing to give in for fear of being seen as weak or “appeasing” the enemy.
This is true in many conflicts around the world and was true of the conflict in the Middle East, and as I watched the conflict unfold, it built within me a frustration that was hard to reconcile. It was in that frustration that the seeds of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first book in the trilogy, were laid down. Those seeds started to bear fruit as I fleshed out the conflict that’s told in the story, one that has roots in generations past but that’s coming to a head just as Winds opens.
The heart of the story—a tale of irreconcilable differences—didn’t change very much in the telling. It continued to be the primary driver of what happened. But I was able to show where some people, if they try hard, can meet in the middle, and I was able to bring that new perspective to several different characters. That was one of the more gratifying things for me, to show a tale in which the characters learn and come to understand another culture from a perspective that was beforehand very limited. Not everyone ended up agreeing with the other side—that wouldn’t be a truthful story—but they certainly understood more if nothing else, and all of that came from my inner desires for us, in this world, to do the same.
So what’s the Big Idea? The Lays of Anuskaya isn’t about our world. It isn’t about the conflict in the Middle East. But it was born there, certainly, and so it’s hard to escape some parallelism. I suppose if I had to formulate the roiling of inner desires that led to this book, I’d say it’s a plea for us to look further than today.
It’s a plea for peace, as told through a tale of war.
—-
The Flames of Shadam Khroeh: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Smashwords
Read an excerpt (scroll down for links). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.
This is me today. Aaaaaaand probably tomorrow, too.
Books and ARCs came into the house even while I was away on tour, and now I’m catching up on some of what’s come in, for your perusal and delight. Here’s the first stack, with another two or three to come in the next couple of days. Anything here catch your eye? Share in the comments.
I don’t have it listed on my tour schedule, on account that it’s not open to the general public, but: If you happen to be going to the American Library Association conference in Chicago at the end of June, I will be there and will be doing a ton of events. Seriously, I’m all over this thing. Tor.com has been kind enough to compile my schedule and the schedule of several other Tor authors (including Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear) into a single handy document right here. Go and check it out. And if you are coming, I look forward to seeing you there!
Lexington is full of sepia today. It might be a serious condition. It should get that checked into.
In other news, hello, I am in Kentucky. Hope to see some of you tonight at seven at Joseph-Beth Booksellers here in Lexington. Dress in modern attire if you wish!
I meant to do so many things already! But now I have to drive to Lexington.
So whilst I drive and do other non-being-on-the-Web site things, a question to keep you busy:
Tell me your favorite piece of media when you were twelve.
That could be a TV show, pop song or video, video game, comic book, whatever. The only rule is that it had to be the media-related thing you couldn’t live without.
Tell us! We all wish to know.
This was probably it for me, by the way.
Yeah, I know. I REGRET NOTHING.
Yes, this is very much like the notice I gave yesterday, except that it’s an entirely different location in an entirely different state! Be that as it may, Lexingtonians, I will be in your fair city! And I will read to you! And answer questions! And sign books! And stuff! Especially stuff. Because I know how much you enjoy stuff. Well, and so do I.
Please come. Bring friends. Have those friends bring friends! And make friends with those friends! And we will all be friends together. Just as it should always be.
Lauren Beukes’ latest novel, The Shining Girls, is hot. How hot? So hot that even before US publication, it was snapped up by Leo DiCaprio’s production company to be made into a television series. Why is it so hot? Because Beukes is one of the best writers of speculative fiction working today, and The Shining Girls a fine example of just how good she is. And to what does she credit for the genesis of this latest book? Why, the Internet, of course!
LAUREN BEUKES:
Writers write – that’s the most important thing, getting those pesky words onto the page. But writers also mess around a lot on the Internet. And sometimes, just sometimes, that can pay off.
Take me, for example. I threw out the idea that I should write about a time-travelling serial killer during a bit of silly Twitter banter. And then quickly deleted the tweet because I realized I had to write that, right now, before someone else thought of it.
I had the image of a limping man giving a little girl an impossible toy that hadn’t been invented yet and a promise that he would be back to get it when she was grown up. I knew he had a house that opens onto other times that allows him to stalk young women through the decades. And I knew that when he did come back to find her to fulfill his promise, that she would survive and turn the hunt around.
It’s nice to have a strong premise to start with, but “serial killers” and “time travel” are two genres with a strong tradition, from Silence of The Lambs to Twelve Monkeys. I’m a big fan of the remix and the best mash-ups riff off the best things about the original and subvert them in a way that hopefully says something new or interesting.
Which meant, alas, I couldn’t write Bill & Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree from the dinosaurs to the Dark Ages with a stop-off in World War Two to kill Hitler. Although that would probably have been a lot of fun.
And in fact there would be no killing Hitler. Not in my universe.
Between grandfather paradoxes, multiverse theory and the natural inclinations of subatomic mesons, I opted for classic Greek tragedy-style fatalism. By trying to resist your fate, you put into action all the events that will ensure that it comes about. Throw in some loops and snarls and paradoxes, and hey, voila!
You know what else has loops and snarls and ugly echoes that come up again and again? History. Especially recent history.
Which is why I decided to contain the time travel over 60 years, from 1931 to 1993 (thereby specifically avoiding cell phones, the Internet, CCTV, Google Streetview and Reddit jumping on board to solve the mystery in two days flat)
There are obvious parallels in the book; the Great Depression of the 30s and our current recession, surveillance society and erosion of privacy in the name of the War on Terror, mirroring the tactics of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the fact that women’s right to control their own bodies is apparently still somehow up for question according to politicians. But I was also interested in how cities have reshaped around highways, how the world has changed and how we’ve adapted, how all of that explains who we are right now. I could do that through the eyes of my serial killer, Harper Curtis, who is too cynical to see anything but ruin and rot, but we can pull focus to see the bigger picture.
I read a lot, watched documentaries and YouTube videos, listened to oral histories, re-visited Chicago, where the novel is set, to location scout and interview insightful people from Chicago architects to criminal defense laywers, cops, historians, sports reporters and music journalists.
On the other side of this remix, I had to contend with the stereotype of the serial killer.
I tracked the killings very carefully across the timelines with a murder wall above my desk full of notecards and red string and evocative photographs of the eras; Harper’s killing timeline, which gets uglier and more elaborate as he goes on, jumping all over the place so his MO is impossible to track, the actual historical timeline, the totem objects he leaves behind on the bodies and the novel’s timeline, playing out between his story, Kirby, the survivor’s, and the young women of the title.
I also did a lot of research. It was a sad horror reading up on true crime cases. The banal reality is that serial killers are generally not the Chianti-sipping diabolically sophisticated Hannibal Lecter predators of our popular imagination. Most of them are vile and violent losers with impotence issues and very little insight into why they do what they do.
But despite the lack of inner life, in the news and in fiction, serial killers usually get more attention than their victims. There are so many dead girls. Dead girls every day. At worst, the young women are a bit of violent titillation, the gorgeous tragic blonde with glazed blue eyes and her dress rucked up to expose her stockings, lying with limbs akimbo in a spreading pool of blood, or chained up naked in a basement having her eyeball gouged out.
At best, they’re just one more piece in the bloody puzzle the detective has to solve. A tragic loss, especially one so young and beautiful, but we usually don’t get to know a whole lot about who she was before she was a corpse.
All of which meant I was much more interested in “the shining girls” Harper goes after than writing about him.
Killers often have a general type – which could be vulnerable people at risk, like sex workers or runaway kids, or much more specific, like Ted Bundy’s predilection for co-eds with brown hair and a middle parting.
But what if it wasn’t a physical type?
What if my killer was attracted to young women with a spark, who stood out in their time, who weren’t afraid to fight convention, or were still afraid, but pushed through anyway, who had fire in their guts and a burning curiosity and the desire to set the world alight. That would drive my killer insane. He would have to cut it out of them.
Trigger warning. There is cutting. The violence in the book is terse, but it is shocking. It’s supposed to be. Because real violence is shocking. And we shouldn’t forget that, what violence is, what it does to us, personally, and the ripples it sends out through society.
There’s a moment in the book where Kirby says, “How am I supposed to let this shit go?” pulling down the scarf she uses to hide the scar across her throat. And she’s right. How can we?
I dealt with it by narrating the attacks not from the killer’s perspective, riding on his shoulder, complicit, getting off on it, but from the victims’, the horror hung on a few terrible details right at the end of a chapter that has been all about their lives. We’re with them at the end, in the shock and pain and fear and outrage.
I tried to make it about the emotional impact. To make it real. I worked to make the women breathe on the page, so you would feel the loss of them. Not just as mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, but as people in their own right, from a young activist to a bohemian architect accused of being a dirty Red, an African American Rosie the Riveter war widow or a burlesque dancer who literally glows because she dances in radium paint and Kirby, the one who got away, but who has allowed her life to become derailed by the attack.
Ultimately it’s a story about obsession, free will and determinism; Harper’s compulsion to kill and Kirby’s obsession with finding him, being trapped by fate or kicking back against it.
—-
The Shining Girls: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Read an excerpt. See the trailer (US|UK). Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.
While I was out on tour my daughter’s non-smart phone imploded, coincidentally right around the time she was eligible for an upgrade. We got her an iPhone, on the thinking it would actually be useful to her now. It is, although not as a phone; I don’t think I’ve actually seen her talk on it even once. What she does with it? Mostly, as far as I can tell, she uses it as a transistor radio: She fires up the Pandora app, selects her curated pop music station, and plays it as she moves around the house. She doesn’t use headphones, which I am actually fine with (too much time with earphones equals hearing damage over time); she just lets the music play through the iPhone’s speaker. It comes out tinny and mono — the exact experience of a transistor radio, minus a bit of static and commercials, and with the occasional bleep when there’s an incoming text.
I find this use of the iPhone endearing, actually, and a reminder that most teenagers, regardless of era, like their music immediate rather in brilliant 7.1 fidelity. It’s also a reminder that pop music is designed to be consumed fast and freely, on tiny, cheap speakers. It sounds better there. Maybe that’s just me. But tell me I’m wrong.
Hey, wasn’t I meant to do a contest? Why, yes, I was. Did I forget about it? No, I just ran out of time to look at the entries before I went on tour, because of things. Which from your end of things looks exactly like forgetting. Sorry about that. And now that The Human Division is out, getting a signed ARC of it is not a huge prize anymore.
But maybe getting a signed ARC of The Mallet of Loving Correction is! So now, in addition to giving away a signed edition of The Human Division, I will also give away a signed ARC of Mallet. Because I made all y’all wait. Because I suck.
And when will I announce those winners? Uh, maybe Friday, because tomorrow and Wednesday I’m out on tour again and I come back home Thursday. So, yes. Friday. Let’s say Friday.
Friday it is.
Yes, I know, you thought I was all done with my touring. But in fact I have four more stop, all driveable, and the first is tomorrow in Cincinnati, with my friends at Joseph-Beth. If you are in the Cincy area, why not stop by? I will entertain you! With tales of aliens! And churros! And possibly finger puppets! (Chance of finger puppets: Low. But you never know.)
The details are here (scroll down til you get to June). I hope you will come, and that you will bring many people with you. Promise them there will be finger puppets! Everyone loves finger puppets.
(P.S.: Dayton folks: Don’t worry, I’ll be at Books & Co. next week.)
The cat may be laughing at me. Well, we’ll see who’s laughing at feeding time, won’t we?
Below is a note I posted to SFWA members in our private forums this evening. Given the public interest in the topic, I am posting it here as well (it will also be posted on the public-facing SFWA site within a day (update: it’s here)).
As with all SFWA-related topics, I am disabling comments here. SFWA members who wish to comment on it may do so on their own sites or, of course, on the SFWA private boards.
—-
Dear SFWA Members:
I was on a plane ride home from a three-week book tour when the latest controversy regarding the SFWA Bulletin erupted, and had been largely absent from the day-to-day operations of SFWA while I was out on the road. When the controversy hit, I did two things immediately: One, as the person who by our bylaws is responsible for publications, I took responsibility for events and opened up a channel for people to comment and criticize, via my “president@sfwa.org” address. Two, I authorized a task force, headed up by SFWA Vice President Rachel Swirsky, to look at the role of the Bulletin within the organization moving forward.
Those two things dealt with, I went into SFWA’s private forums and onto the Internet to look at comments and commentary, to better acquaint myself with the scope of the issue, so that I could as comprehensively as possible, within a reasonable scope of time, get up to speed with the concerns of members and of others. I now feel I’m caught up with events, and so, have some things to say, both to the membership and at large. Let me offer these in a numbered list.
1. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is an organization that acts to support, inform, defend, promote and advocate for our members – all of them, not just some of them. When members believe that they or other members are belittled or minimized by our official publications, that’s a problem. Over the last few editions of the Bulletin, this has indeed been a problem, specifically regarding how many in the membership have seen the Bulletin handling issues of gender.
We could spend a long time here discussing whether the offense was intentional or accidental, or whether it is due to a generational, ideological or perceptual schism. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, too many of our members have felt their contributions and their place in the industry and within the organization belittled; too many of our members see other members being treated so. If we believe that we represent and serve all our members and not just some of them, then we need to listen and address those member concerns.
That begins with recognizing the problem. And here is the problem: SFWA, through the last few issues of the Bulletin, has offended many of our own members.
As president of the organization, I apologize to those members.
2. By our organization’s current bylaws, the president of SFWA has unilateral control of, and therefore is ultimately responsible for, the organization’s publications. This includes the Bulletin. This means that when all is said and done, I personally am responsible for the Bulletin and what is published between its covers.
I have said this before but it bears repeating: This is on me, and I accept both the responsibility and criticism for it. I have some read criticism of the Bulletin’s editor Jean Rabe, so I want to be clear that Ms. Rabe, in her role as editor of Bulletin, had my full support. She took over the Bulletin at a problematic time in the publication’s history, got it back onto a regular schedule and otherwise righted what was a foundering ship. When previous concerns about sexism regarding the Bulletin were aired, specifically the cover of issue #200, Ms. Rabe listened, understood and was responsive to them and solicited work relevant to the concern, in the hope of furthering discussion. She has always acted in good faith for the organization, and I have valued and continue to value her dedication.
As publisher, I was aware that there would be two articles in Bulletin #202 about the cover of issue #200, one by Jim C. Hines and one by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg. I did not read Mr. Hines’ piece and glanced cursorily at the Resnick/Malzberg piece but did not give it a significant read; I do not as a matter of course closely read the Bulletin before it is published. It’s possible if I had more closely read the article I might have alerted Ms. Rabe to portions that might be an issue. She might then have had the opportunity to take those concerns back to Mr. Resnick and Mr. Malzberg, who I have no reason to believe would not have taken editorial direction.
This did not happen. I as publisher gave the go-ahead – and once again, the responsibility for the event, and the offense it caused, falls on me.
So once again I apologize to the members who we have offended through the last few issues of the Bulletin. It is my place to accept the responsibility, and so my place to offer the apology.
3. It is my belief that SFWA has, under my tenure as president and through the actions of the board as a whole, become an organization with a more diverse membership, and also more useful and helpful to that diverse membership. However, it is also my belief that public perception of the organization matters, not only to the membership that pays its dues, but to those who could become members (and thus strengthen the organization) and to the public who sees the membership comment about the organization in social media. All the positive work the organization does for writers and members means little when things like this blow up.
When they blow up, I believe that we need to respond in two ways. First, own up to and take responsibility for the event. I have done so here. Second, put into motion steps that show immediately and concretely that the organization is committed to not making the same mistakes again.
The task force on the Bulletin is that positive step. It is immediate: It was formed within hours of us hearing our member complaints. It is also concrete: The task force will solicit comment from professionals in publishing both inside and outside SFWA as well as from our members, with the goal of offering to the president direct, actionable steps to make the Bulletin a valuable and useful magazine for our members – one that fulfills SFWA’s mission to inform, promote, defend, support and advocate for all of our members.
SFWA is an organization of 1,800 writers – all of whom with their own points of view and the ability to articulate them. The task force will have its hands full, especially as they do their work in a period in which we are transitioning from one board (and president) to another. Please be patient as they do their work.
4. As noted, much of this latest event began to happen while I was at the very tail end of my book tour. While I jumped in as quickly as I could, I would like to offer public appreciation for SFWA Vice President Rachel Swirsky for being on top of events as they spun up, and to incoming president Steven Gould for offering Rachel advice and support, and for being an active part of events. SFWA is more than one of its parts – and more than the sum of its parts as well.
5. I am aware that my apologies here will be taken any number of ways, depending on who is reading them and their opinion of events. That is the nature of an apology. Be that as it may, I believe that apologies matter, if they are sincere and they are followed up by right action. It’s what we are trying to do.
SFWA is an organization comprised of all its members; it must be seen to work for all its members. When we are both, we are a stronger and better organization.
To all our members, I say: You are welcome, you are valued, you are needed. We need you, and your voice and your willingness to make yourself heard when you feel that we are not the organization we can be. Be part of us, and help us be the organization you need us to be – that all science fiction and fantasy writers need us to be, and can be proud to be a member of.
John Scalzi
President,
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
A few notes and comments about being back home after three straight weeks of travel:
* First, a basic housekeeping note: If you tried to send me an e-mail in the last three weeks or so, you got an automated response letting you know that I was probably going to only respond to those e-mails which needed immediate attention (usually business-related e-mail) and that if you genuinely needed a response you should probably resend after I was home, which is now.
This still holds. I received several hundred pieces of non-spam e-mail while I was out and about, and the idea of trying to go back in to respond to them fills me with the sort of dread reserved for minor surgery on the mouth. So I’m declaring e-mail bankruptcy for the month of May — which means if you sent me an e-mail in May I haven’t responded yet, I probably won’t. Again, if you need a response, resend, but please ask yourself if what you sent really needs a response.
* The one exception to the above: Big Idea requests sent in the month of May. I have them and will be plugging things into the schedule over the next week. You don’t have to resend those. Thanks.
* Although I’m back at home and the main portion of my tour is over, allow me a quick reminder to note that there are still a few tour stops to go before the Human Division tour comes to a full and complete stop. This includes appearances in Cincinnati and Lexington next week and Dayton and the Cleveland area the week after that — none of which, thankfully, will require me schlepping my ass about on a plane. There’s certainly something to be said for tour stops within driving distance.
* For those of you wondering how I feel after three weeks of non-stop touring, the answer is: tired. Friday, my first day at home, I was basically an ambulatory wad of meat; yesterday I was only slightly more engaged, and my plan for today is to do a whole lot of nothing other than lie around and maybe strum my guitar a bit.
Touring is hard work; not in the “lift heavy objects repeatedly for the entirety of your adult life” sense, of course, but in the sense of “deal with the airport, be in a different place with different people, be nice and engaged with everyone, give a good show, eat when you can, go to the hotel, try to sleep, wake up and do it again” for several days at a time.
It’s fun and it’s worth it, but it does eventually eat your brain. About halfway through my last signing session, at Eagle Eye books in Decatur, I felt my forebrain collapsing in on itself and I barely made it through that session being able to spell everyone’s name correctly. Five days off will have given me enough time to recover before my Cincinnati event, but man, it was a close call.
* That said, it really was a fun tour with lots of highlights, including, in no particular order, investing Gene Wolfe with the title of Grand Master, having Nichelle Nicols admire my t-shirt, meeting and hanging out with really-funny-as-hell Jewel Staite, in the company of Mike Choi and his lovely wife Michelle, sharing Thai food with Amber Benson (who may be my new Favorite Person), taking part in a treasure hunt that ended with me physically malleting a (paper-mache) frog head, seeing people in my audiences from high school, college, and my AOL years, talking shop with Tom Warburton, creator of The Kids Next Door (with the introduction managed by Felicia Day), having lunch with Nancy Pearl, pitching movie ideas at the Fox and Warner lots, getting into hilarious hijinx with Wil Wheaton and getting to wander around Beale street in Memphis, soaking in rock and blues. Among many other things. Which of course includes seeing so many readers and fans, almost all of whom are entirely awesome.
Again, touring is tiring. But the compensation for it is all of this sort of stuff. Which makes it entirely worth it, in my opinion.
It was overcast much of the day, so seeing the sunset was an iffy proposition, but then, at the last minute, bam, there it was. So that was a good thing today.
The Blatherations of Others