One way of looking at freedom of speech is atomic: treating each individual act of free speech as an equal component of the overall freedom of our discourse. That’s kind of the default position on Twitter, as well as in the section of American culture out of which it grew. It’s an assumption that is all but baked into the 140-character platform¹. It’s also the basis of a lot of arguments advocating an unmoderated online culture as a whole, or pushing back against individual acts of moderation all over the web.

The problem, as Twitter so ably illustrates, is that treating free speech as a collection of free speeches can actually diminish the collective freedom of speech. There are conversations I can’t have on Twitter, because I’m afraid of the atomic acts of free speech that I will get in response. Some of them will be genuine tests of the value of my speech, but others may be rape threats, doxxing, a flood of vicious and pernicious abuse. And yet more will inhabit the shady borderland between the two: arguably legitimate things disproportionately aimed at particular targets².

But because absolutes are easy, atomic acts of free speech are easy to defend, and are defended widely on the internet. Actual adults who can deal with nuance elsewhere can be surprisingly simplistic on the topic.

(musical interlude)

Jefferson:
We fought for these ideals; we shouldn’t settle for less
These are wise words, enterprising men quote ‘em
[…]

Hamilton:
That was a real nice declaration
Welcome to the present, we’re running a real nation.

I’m being a little unfair here. Many of the people who defend free speech on an atomic level do so because of the risks of controlling it for any kind of “greater good”. And they’re right: most of the greater goods that have been used to control atomic free speech have been neither great nor good. But the answer is not to give up, any more than the answer to bad government is no government. The answer is to do better.

Because the model we’re using is broken. The awareness of its brokenness haunts our entire discourse³. Indeed, many of the people who abuse the model draw their passion from a fear of being silenced, of not being heard.

(musical interlude)

Jefferson:
if New York’s in debt—
Why should Virginia bear it? Uh! Our debts are paid, I’m afraid
Don’t tax the South cuz we got it made in the shade
[…]

Hamilton:
Hey neighbor,
Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor
“We plant seeds in the South. We create.”
Yeah, keep ranting
We know who’s really doing the planting.

Jefferson’s portrayal of the South as a financially stable “land of the free” is, as Hamilton points out, based on keeping certain costs off the books. This is possible because in Jefferson’s Virginia the people paying those costs aren’t as important as the people reaping the benefits⁴.

In the same way, the “wealth” of atomic freedom of speech has costs that don’t appear on the absolutist balance sheet. No individual has the strength of heart and mind, the time and resources, to deal with the full range of possible responses to their speech. The fact that this full range is more likely to be deployed against certain speakers⁵ is the equivalent of Jefferson’s financial accounting⁶: important costs are being kept off the books.

Add those costs in, and it’s clear that our speech, taken as a whole, is actually desperately poor, deeply unfree, silenced, squashed.

I can’t solve the internet as a whole. I can’t solve our entire discourse. I’m a moderator on a few sites and a participant in a few conversations. But here, for what it’s worth, is my approach in those places.

• Free speech is a complex molecule. You can’t just pile up individual atoms of free speech and hope they’ll crystallize into it.
• It is an objective that we cannot reach, but must continuously strive toward anyway. That’s a form of adulting: we screw up, individually and collectively, and must then try to clean up the mess and to learn to do better in the future. It’s hard. But what worthwhile thing is easy?
• This striving takes the form of tuning the balance between competing discourses. Every decision we make protects some voices and silences others. If I as a moderator constrain the shouters, they are constrained, but the people who leave the room when the shouting starts may stay. If I let the shouters shout, those other people leave.⁷
• Inaction is also a choice. Choosing not to moderate is also silencing voices. It’s simply letting the mob choose which voices get silenced instead of doing it yourself.
• If you make choices, you need to hold yourself appropriately accountable for their consequences. This doesn’t mean the trolls don’t own their words, of course—they’re accountable for their own trolling. But you’re accountable for letting them stay in any conversation you control.
• Now while we’re at the adults’ table, let’s just admit that choosing the voices you protect and prioritize means choosing the conversation that will take place in your space. And that choice, like the choice of voices, excludes as well as protects. No community can hold all conversations.

And here we get to a problem I cannot solve with a blog post, a few bullet points, and a couple of stray Hamilton quotes. What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them⁸? Have we the tools or the will to foster the kind of genuine respect for disagreement, trust in disagreement, that that would require?

Probably not. But as adults, we still have to try to do our fallible best in a complex world.

I keep seeing it on Twitter, but I haven’t seen much in the way of heads-ups in less ephemeral fannish media, so here’s what I know. Note that I don’t have any insider knowledge; this is just assembling links and publicly posted information for the convenience of anyone who might have missed the chatter.

• Some (many?) people who are eligible¹ to nominate² for the Hugos and elected to receive information electronically don’t have their credentials, though the date announced on the MidAmericon page (February 5) is past.
• If you cannot find your credentials in your inbox, check your spam trap(s).
• If you still can’t find them, email hugopin@midamericon2.org³. They should get back to you within a day or two, though I’m sure that depends on traffic and volunteer time.
• Try out your credentials (or start nominating!) by following the instructions on this page. If that doesn’t work, try swapping your first and last names⁴.
• I’ve seen mention of some problems with some of the PINs sent out. If it still doesn’t work, contact them again and they’ll sort you out⁵.

Nominations close at 23:59 North American Pacific Daylight Time (GMT - 7) on March 31, 2016. You do not have to fill all the nomination slots or nominate in all categories to participate. If you are unsure whether a work is eligible, the rules are stated in plain English here. Hugo administrators will rule on edge cases.

Happy nominating! It’s been an awesome year for our genre; there’s a lot to choose from.

Mod note: Please only comment on this post about the process of getting your PIN and logging in, plus related matters. I’m going to unpublish or disemvowel conversations about the works to nominate, the ways people choose those works, and all mention of domestic mammals of any sort. I haven’t the spoons just at the moment.

1. As a reminder, you are eligible to nominate for Hugos if you are or were:
   

   a voting member of the 2015 [Sasquan], 2016 [MidAmeriCon II], or 2017 [Worldcon 75 in Helsinki] Worldcons by the end of the day (23:59 North American Pacific Standard Time/GMT - 8) on January 31, 2016

2. This is distinct from voting for the Hugo awards from the list of nominated works, which will happen later and under different eligibility criteria.
3. It scarcely needs mentioning that being pleasant and including all the relevant details on this email is Totally A Thing. People dealing with email workarounds to technical glitches are not, as a rule, happy and unstressed bunnies.
4. Pleased to meet you. My name is Sutherland Abigail (call me Suth) and I love merging data from multiple sources. (I’m seriously not bothered by this, honestly, having both Been There and Done That many times myself.)
5. vide 3

Updated to add: the MidAmeriCon II Twitter account posted this update:

Our Hugo team have identified an issue with our Hugo Pin mailing software which prevented some people from receiving their pins. (1/3)

— MidAmeriCon II (@MidAmeriCon2) February 14, 2016

We are working to resolve the problem and will be resending pins to everyone as soon as possible. (2/3)

— MidAmeriCon II (@MidAmeriCon2) February 14, 2016

We are very sorry for the inconvenience and delay this has caused. (3/3)

— MidAmeriCon II (@MidAmeriCon2) February 14, 2016

…so it’s worth waiting a bit to see if the PIN email turns up. You may still have to fiddle with names and numbers once it does.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I know it’s been a few days since it was requested, but here’s a SPOILER thread for Bujold’s latest installment in the Vorkosigan series.

It’s not been a great winter for taking in new things for me, so I confess that I haven’t read it yet. As a result, my image of the book at the moment is a conversation between two characters from elsewhere in literature…

Desire waited in the carriage. Again. The thing with Norton had been a setback, but this one should be easier. Royalty, taken as a whole, was pretty venal. That’s how they got to be—and stayed—royalty. And Pain was a good salesman. He’d even sold himself his own nostrums. Still, it was frustrating. He talked so quietly that only one side of the conversation was audible.

“You call that an offer? I’ve seen offers in comparison with which that would be a confiscation! Besides, queens never make bargains.”
(Cajoling from Pain)
“When I want a thing, that means that I lack it. But to lack a thing is not to have it. And if I see something, it’s mine, and what I cannot see, I cannot miss.”
(Slightly confused response from Pain)
“OFF WITH HIS HEAD!”

Pain returned to the carriage, carrying his head in his hands. The gore from his neck stained his shirt a deeper red. “That didn’t go very well.”

(I know I’ve mapped Gentleman Jole to an extremely unlikely character.)

It knows its systems and its systems know it.

I’ve spent the last two days in all-day work meetings, for Reasons. And although it’s not my main thing any more, I got rather emphatic—more than once—about the need for good documentation. It became kind of a Thing. It may haunt me in the future.

And then I come home to this in my Twitter feed:

Does anyone know if there’s a riff on Psalm 23:4 for technical documentation? I feel like this should exist.

— emma jane (@emmajanehw) January 27, 2016

Really, what’s a pastiche-monger to do?

Well.

¹The DOCUMENTATION is my guide; I shall not wonder.
²It maketh me to understand the necessary concepts;
It leadeth me through the installation process.
³It reassureth me;
It leadeth me on the happy path for my desired objectives.
⁴Yea, though I work through the advanced configuration menus,
I will fear no failures, for thou art with me
Thy FAQ and thy troubleshooting they comfort me.
⁵Thou providest examples to me in the context of mine use cases.
Thou explainest my expected outcomes.
My results are perfect.
⁶Surely good performance and stability will persist throughout the system life
And it will run within the parameters of the DOCUMENTATION forever.

On sale today in hardcover and e-book. Excerpt here. Author website here. Public launch event (tonight!) here. Author tour info here.

My flap copy:

From an early age, Patricia Delfine and Lawrence Armstead had different—and sometimes opposite—ways of seeing the world. Patricia could talk to animals and even turn herself into a bird, while Lawrence built a supercomputer and a time machine (that only went forward two seconds). As they navigated the never-ending nightmare that is junior high school, they become wary allies, until an enigmatic guidance counselor with a hidden agenda intervened.

They didn’t expect to see each other again. And yet ten years later, they’re both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the secret academy for the magically gifted, and Laurence is an engineering genius who’s trying to save the world. As Laurence and Patricia reconnect, they find themselves drawn into the opposite sides of a war between science and magic. And the fate of the world depends on them both. Probably.

Some notice:

“What a magnificent novel—a glorious synthesis of magic and technology, joy and sorrow, romance and wisdom. Unmissable.”
—Lev Grossman

“In All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders darts and soars, with dazzling aplomb, among the hypotheticals of science fiction, the counterfactuals of fantasy, and the bittersweet mundanities of contemporary American life, throwing lightning bolts of literary style that shimmer with enchantment or electrons. She tackles profound, complicated questions, vast and insignificant as the fate of the planet, tiny and crucial as the vagaries of friendship, rocketing the reader through a pocket-sized epic of identity whose sharply-drawn protagonists come to feel like the reader’s best friends. The very short list of novels that dare to traffic as freely in the uncanny and wondrous as in big ideas, and to create an entire, consistent, myth-ridden alternate world that is still unmistakably our own, all while breaking the reader’s heart into the bargain—I think of masterpieces like The Lathe of Heaven; Cloud Atlas; Little, Big—has just been extended by one.”
—Michael Chabon

“Charlie Jane Anders’ brilliant, cross-genre novel All the Birds in the Sky has the hallmarks of an instant classic. It’s a beautifully written, funny, tremendously moving tale that explodes the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy, YA and ‘mainstream’ fiction.”
—Elizabeth Hand, Los Angeles Times

“Charlie Jane Anders has entwined strands of science and fantasy, both as genres and as ways of experiencing life, into a luminous novel that reveals the exhilarating necessity of each.”
—John Hodgman

“Two crazy kids, one gifted in science, the other in magic, meet as children, part and meet again over many years. Will they find love? Will they save the world? Or will they destroy it and everyone in it? Read Anders lively, wacky, sexy, scary, weird and wonderful book to find the answers.”
—Karen Joy Fowler

“The book is full of quirkiness and playful detail—it’s not hard to imagine Wes Anderson adapting it, if he ever turned toward science fiction—but there’s an overwhelming depth and poignancy to its virtuoso ending, which tugs all of its rich cultural symbolism into a heart-wrenching whole.”
—NPR

Updated, 20 Jan, 4:00 AM, to add: I wrote this on the evening of Tuesday, January 19, but held off actually posting it because (as of then, and to the best of my knowledge, as of now) David has not yet actually died. Because of a misunderstanding, for which the fault is mine, another Making Light front-pager pulled the “publish” trigger on this while I slept. Kathryn Cramer has posted to the comments: “His heart is still beating, but he is being assessed for brain death. Whatever the assessment, he has had a massive brain bleed, which continues. He will not survive. He has not been breathing on his own since the EMTs arrived at the orchard house late this afternoon.” I apologize to Kathryn and to everyone who took my post as informed confirmation. I’m now putting the post back up, and I’ll amend this update as events warrant. —PNH

Updated, 20 Jan, 11:00 PM: For the elimination of doubt: David is gone.

Updated, 21 Jan, 8:00 AM: Kathryn Cramer’s post is here.

Updated, 21 Jan, 9:30 PM: One more post from Kathryn, and totally worth your time.

To call our relationship “complicated” is to understate the case. We were friends. We were also editors working the same patch—him older and more eminent, me younger and more energetic. (“Younger and more energetic”, those were the days.) Back in the impossibly-long-ago mid-to-late ’80s, Teresa and I worked on his poetry magazine, and we helped dream up his journal of SF criticism and quit it three issues after. (I named it and designed the masthead.) He declined to hire me as his assistant at Arbor House, saying that Terry Carr had told him “Don’t hire that guy, he’ll just get promoted in six months and you’ll need an assistant again.” Thanks, Terry. In a more recent century, he and I co-edited a pretty good reprint anthology.

Teresa and I first got to know him in the early 1980s, when he was attending tons of conventions on the Timescape / Simon & Schuster dime. When our friend-in-fandom Paul Williams sat us down in Seattle and explained to us how we needed to work in SF publishing—and how to do that—, step one was that I should wind up at the 1983 ABA (the thing now called BEA) in Dallas. Which I did, crashing on David’s floor, spending days in the crush meeting publishing folks. Evenings, I hung back and watched as David and Paul invented the Philip K. Dick Society and planned Dick’s wildly successful posthumous Hollywood career. All of which came to pass. Clearly here was a magician, albeit a crafty, subtle, and not always trustworthy one. Like all the best.

Over the years at Tor we had occasions to want to drop-kick him out a 14th floor window—and occasions to be gobsmacked by his utter brilliance. He was a true believer in the intellectual and emotional power of fantasy and science fiction. He was our field’s most consequential editor since John W. Campbell.

He is gone. It’s like a mountain range is gone, or nitrogen, or a verb tense. We can’t believe it. David. Goodbye.

Updated, 20 Jan, middayish East Coast time:

Thank you, Jo, for this lovely tribute in the comments. — Abi

Like nitrogen, supporting every breath
Always been there, it seems you always will
So vital, so involved, that is until
A moment brings inevitable death.

I know death finds us all, but you? But why?
You, in the midst of life, one moment there
Then dying flesh, and then an empty chair,
I can’t believe it doesn’t shake the sky.

Your life is over, not complete, feels wrong
To say “he was” and never “he will be”
When you were there like axioms so long.

What’s left is all you did and made, and we
So shaken at the gap where you belong
Counting your loss against eternity.

I’ve been dithering for a while now over posting here about Hamilton, the smash Broadway musical rap hit about the Founding Father on the US$10 bill. I’m not sure I can come up with anything to say that improves on Sumana Harihareswara’s post last November.

I’ve been kinda obsessed with this thing since I downloaded the cast album shortly after Christmas (it was, at the time, only $2 on Google Play, but I guess that was some kind of special rate, and it’s now $19, so I’m not bothering to link), and listened to it pretty much non-stop for two weeks. Its grip on my brain is finally starting to loosen a bit; I’ve listened to the new Bowie album a couple of times.

If you haven’t heard any of the music, it’s easy to dismiss the show based on a casual description. “A rap musical about Alexander Hamilton” sounds like the kind of stuff you routinely see (done badly) on YouTube. But Miranda’s musical craftsmanship is top-notch, and the performances are great. The show makes use of multiple musical styles — not just rap and R&B, but British Invasion rock, and at one point a minuet — and the rap numbers draw upon multiple rap styles, with different styles corresponding to different personalities in the story.

It was, for a while, possible to listen to the whole cast album for free on NPR’s website, and I think it still is on Spotify, but I’ll have to rely on someone more familiar with Spotify to tell you how that works in the comments. The album gives you pretty much the whole story; the actual show is sold out for the foreseeable future (unless you get lucky in the Ham4Ham lottery).

I also have to give a shout-out to Chris Quinones, who got into Hamilton way, wa-a-a-y back when Lin-Manuel Miranda performed the opening number at the White House, like in 2009. (They’re both Hunter College High School alums, and both Nuyorican, so she’s been following his career since his first show, In the Heights.) Despite all the raves I was hearing, I didn’t really pay attention till she played the cast album while we were visiting her brother for the holidays. I think she was shocked at how deep I fell in.

So Avram and I were going back and forth on Twitter last night, playing with Hamilton and Lord of the Rings. After a day’s steeping, this is what I typed out instead of doing what I should be doing right now. (Original here.)

[GALADRIEL]
There are prices that the stories don’t count,
There is suffering too terrible for songs.
You bear the Ring as long as you can.
The aftermath is unimaginable.
That moment at the end of things
It feels easier to fall into the fire.

[GALADRIEL/ELVES]
The hobbits return to the Shire
And learn to live with the unimaginable.

[SAMWISE]
I spend hours in the garden
And sit and smoke by the door.
And it’s quiet in town;
I never liked the quiet before.

[FRODO]
When I walk the woods in summer
A longing that I can’t ignore
I miss home.
That never used to happen before.

[ELVES]
If you see him in the woods
Walking by himself
Singing to himself
Have pity.

[FRODO]
Gollum, you would like it in the Shire
There is fishing in the Shire.

[ELVES]
He is working through the unimaginable

[RANGERS]
His skin is so pale.
His hands are so frail.
They say he haunts the woods like a spirit.

[FRODO]
And every year, I fall apart.

[ELVES]
Can you imagine?

[FRODO]
Look at where I am.
Look at me and Sam.
I know we’re only mortals, just hobbits.
But hear me out. That would be enough.

If I could leave this world,
If I could flee from Middle-Earth,
I’d be on the road right now
And I’d forget, and that would be enough.
I don’t pretend to know
The weight of what we carried.
I know the damage buried in my flesh.

And you go West.
But I’m not alone.
I walk with your people.
Just let me walk you to the shore.
That would be enough.

[ELVES]
If you meet him on the road,
Walking through the Shire,
Longing for the sea,
Have pity.

[FRODO]
Samwise, do you like it in the Shire?
It’s quiet in the Shire.

[ELVES]
They are trying to bear the unimaginable.

See them standing on the ship,
Ready for the trip.
Ready for the journey to the Havens.

[BILBO]
Is it you? Is it you, young Frodo?

[ELVES]
It is time to leave the unimaginable.

[GALADRIEL]
There are journeys that the Ring can’t shape.
There is a home too far away to leave.
We sail away from what we never cease to love
To leave behind the unimaginable.
They are standing by the mainmast,
Bilbo Baggins by his nephew’s side.
He lights his pipe.

[FRODO]
It’s quiet on board.

[ELVES]
The Grey Havens. Can you imagine?
The Grey Havens. Can you imagine?

If you see Sam at the shore
Waiting for the ship,
Watching for the ship,
Have pity.
He’s the last to bear the unimaginable.

You know the sheriff’s got his problems too.