Bad Pondering Tree! Bad!

Revised Rules of Discussion: 01-10-10

This will be seen as unpopular but my standard on this matter is well known. If you can not be bothered to take responsibility for your post and sign your name to it then it will not be posted.

I sign my name to EVERY post, even the unpopular ones, and the politically incorrect ones. I did this before I became an instructor and I still do this now that I am an instructor. I am also very well aware of the career risk I run in continuing this practice.

However, the standard remains. Sign your posts. If you don’t, they’ll won’t manifest.

And as of this moment, the comment moderation switch is on.

Signed,
Steven Francis Murphy
Murphy’s Pondering Tree

Entry Continues

Fail Fandom. If you do not know this term, I’ll explain it for you.

Around about the middle of the previous decade a community of internet activists within the American Science Fiction Community began to coalesce around issues such as racism, sexism, and other issues of discrimination.

For the record, let me get a few things off the deck before we get any further.

First, politically I lean right of center. However, I am not a Republican. I am often labeled as a “neo-con” because I support a robust foreign policy backed, if needs must, by military force. I support a strong, well funded, well equipped, military. And I am not the sort of person who believes that you can give the enemy the benefit of the doubt.

When one assumes that I am a “neo-con” they make a number of other assumptions about my political views, which may or may not be correct. I have never sat down and truly outlined my political views in detail but I will simply refer to former Secretary of State Colin Powell who once said that he was never really comfortable in either party.

Second, as a rule, I believe that judging a person by virtue of their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or life background, is wrong. I am aware that I am prone to my own prejudices but as a rule, I do not believe myself to be superior by virtue of my gender or my own ethnicity.

Third, I am a published science fiction writer with two publication credits to date. I do operate in this field as a writer, a consumer and a research assistant.

Back to the fail bit. In the middle of the last decade a number of controversies manifested themselves on the internet with regard to the issue of underrepresentation. The argument is that science fiction and fantasy are mainly dominated by white men. The argument further states that this domination must be a manifestation of an active or subconscious prejudice on the part of the writers and editors in the science fiction and fantasy community. The call to action, which has varied over time, ranges from accusing writers and editors of racism, sexism, bigotry and the like to outright boycott of incorrect members of the community. Additional sanctions have included shunning (whereby they simply act like you do not exist at all) and in extreme cases, going after the incorrect member’s livelihood in the world outside of science fiction and fantasy.

The fail has manifested itself into Racefail (google that) Boobfail, and the list goes on. Each of these cycles revolves around a charge against an editor or writer, perhaps a publication, of discriminatory conduct. In some cases, these charges have the patina of legitimacy. In other cases, they do not.

What is probably most reprehensible about these fail cycles is the veiled or outright accusation of bigoted behavior by members of fail fandom (some of whom are either writers or aspiring writers themselves). Even when these accusations are brought down by other members of the community, there is almost never a retraction of the original charges, never a true apology.

Why am I blogging about this?

Well, over the last two years I began to believe that there was no room for someone like me in the community. I am white (Irish-German-English-Dutch for the record). I am male and I am straight. I’m an unrepentant veteran of the United States Army (Signal Corps and Infantry respectively). I am politically right of center and I tend to disagree with affirmative action as a means of redressing very real imbalances in our society.

The message was pretty clear to me. Folks like Murphy need to go. Moreover, we don’t want stories like the ones Murphy or people like him write.

If you are wondering, I tend to write stories that are set in the American Midwest. The people who populate these stories tend to be Midwestern Farmers, who, for better or worse, are descended from European origins. Given demographic trends for the United States and the Midwest in particular, if I were to speculate on the future ethnic composition of the Midwest, I’d say we will see more Latino-Americans. And I’m working to address that concern.

That said, I write what I know. The objective of fail fandom is that I am supposed to feel some guilt about this. More to the point, I’m supposed to expand my horizons and write about something else. Perhaps I agree in principle but the problem is a very simple one for me.

I’m interested in writing about the American Midwest. I live here, spent most of my life here. It is what I know. I prefer to write in a rural setting because that is where I am most comfortable. I am also interested in writing military science fiction but previous experience over the last six years has demonstrated to my satisfaction that if there is a prejudice in the community, it is one against military science fiction in the short markets.

I am not particularly interested in writing stories set in an urban environment, which is a place I view, personally, as a negative. Sure, the historian in me sees the value of cities as producers of revenue, culture, industrial products and as consumers of what the rural outer marches produce but on a personal, gut level, I’d rather be writing this from a kitchen table on a farm rather than the table of a Panera’s at Crown Center in Kansas City.

So I began to think, especially after the various fails of the last two years, “That’s it. Game over. I should wash my hands of this and concentrate on teaching history.”

A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. I read a journal entry by Liz Williams called My Struggle. For those that do not know, Liz Williams is a respected and accomplished fantasy and science fiction writer from Great Britain. Nine Layers of Sky still ranks as one of my personal favorites and before I gave up my subscription to Asimov’s, I enjoyed her frequent contributions to that publication.

When I clicked on her entry, I expected to read yet another litany of poor behavior by men against women in science fiction. To my surprise, that is not what I encountered at all. Instead, Liz Williams wondered, in her entry, where all of the support from the feminist science fiction community was. She heard a lot of noise and saw a lot of light, but to sum it up, these folks rarely had her back.

If you’d like to read more of what she had to say and some of the comments, there is this link.

Elizabeth Moon, a former Marine, also had some interesting comments about her own experiences which I think are telling. Go check it out.

In any case, for the first time in nearly two years of this grief, I took heart. No one is saying that real problems do not exist in and out of the science fiction community. However, I think a lot of folks are starting to get very tired of the constant cycle of poisonous hysteria which sweeps through the community every six months to a year.

Then about a week later, Douglas Cohen over at Realms of Fantasy put out a journal entry concerning an all female issue of RoF which was accepting submissions. Apparently Douglas worded his entry in a fashion which rubbed some in the fail community wrong and the fail wave began to build yet again. He had previously been involved in the fracas over a cover which graced RoF alternately called Fishboob and Boobfail, etc.

It looked like Douglas was going to take a lot of grief again when the Fiction Editor of RoF started her own blog and took up his defense. Shawna McCarthy’s response can be seen in this link.

What do I take from these two posts?

Basically the message seems to be, “Is this trip really necessary?” Or maybe another way to think of it is, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” I’ve always been put off by this rampant McCarthy Era like fear mongering that spices these various fail waves up. It is reassuring to note that while folks are listening to the concerns of the fail folks, they are also getting awfully tired of it.

None of this addresses some of my continuing concerns about the community. I still feel as if Rednecks need not apply unless they are prepared to satirize and parody themselves for publication. I still get the feeling that the only acceptable military science fiction is the kind which uses The Forever War and The Things They Carried as their literary touchstones.

If you want to know more about my feelings, here is an earlier journal entry on the issue.

However, I do get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, there is room for someone like me in the tent after all.

We shall see.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri