Representation and appropriation

 A hopefully-growing list of creative writing type links.

• Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other
• Elif Batuman, 'Get a Real Degree'
• Jeannette Ng, 'Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice'
• Zadie Smith, 'Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction'
• Adolph Reed Jr., Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
• Charlie Jane Anders, 'When Is It OK to Write About Someone Else's Culture or Experience?'
• Nisi Shawl, 'How Not To Be All About What It's Not All About: Further thoughts on writing about someone else's culture and experience'
• Lila Shapiro, 'What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader is Really Like'
• Kit de Wal, 'Don't dip your pen in someone else's blood: writers and 'the other''
• Hiromi Goto, 'Wiscon38 Guest of Honor speech'
• Nisi Shawl, 'Transracial Writing for the Sincere'
• Itxy Quintanilla, 'Cultural Appropriation in Fiction' 
• FayOnyx, Decolonizing Games Resource List
• Bettochi, Klimick, and Perani, 'Can the Subaltern Game Design?'
• Kazumi Chin, 'So You Want to Play Someone of Another Race'
• James Mendez Hodes, 'Best Practices for Historical Gaming'

In terms of writing advice, these are a bit more leftfield but relevant in various ways:

• Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference
• Tuck and Yang, 'Decolonization is Not a Metaphor'
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists
• Frank B. Wilderson III, 'Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom'
• Decolonising Utopia resource hub
• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Angela Davis, Beyond Abolition Democracy
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel
• Barbara Foley, 'Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique'
• Vanessa Wills, 'What Could It Mean to Say, 'Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?''
• bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Stuart Hall, Maggie Steed et al., It Ain't Half Racist, Mum
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography'
• Birch and Heideman, 'The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism'
• Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Snippets:

“Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” -- Stuart Hall

"Bearing in mind that thoughtful pre-publication critique is your best defense against unintended resonances and associations, there are some steps you can take to ensure receiving helpful critiques—and some steps you can skip. To begin with, it’s worth noting that not all those who felt the story’s resonance with the Nazi Holocaust were Jews or descendants of other groups victimized by the Holocaust. That’s good, because it means you don’t have to have a preconceived idea about who you may be unintentionally offending. And you don’t have to run your manuscript by people with exactly the same ROAARS traits as your characters. What you need is a pool of reasonably intelligent, well-informed, and articulate readers." -- Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

"Against this revivalist definition of culture, we need a a materialist conception which looks at culture not as spiritual or religious heritage but as a set of material practices through which people live and produce the meanings of their lives. The starting-point for such an analysis is not the heritage of the past but the actual realities of the present, and one of the things that most crucially matter, then, is the degree of access to cultural goods — such as education or training in the arts — that different classes and social groups have in real life. When we look at culture in this way, we immediately recognise that social conflicts of various kinds, along lines of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, etc. actually leave very little room for all the people, or even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural goods, that may be shared by ‘a people’ or a whole nation to any significant extent." -- Aijaz Ahmed

"So I’ve tried to strike a balance in my own work, when I write about marginalized people whose experiences are different than my own. I aim for representation without appropriation." -- Charlie Jane Anders

"On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie." -- Adolph Reed Jr.

"One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives." -- E. Tuck and K.W. Yang

"Very often, I feel people are implicitly asking me for permission. And I understand, there is this weight of expectation and responsibility that you want to be free from. I desperately want to write with the freedom that I felt when I was ten, when I didn’t worry about what other people thought about my work or who was reading it. Self awareness can be uncomfortable, and you think perhaps this can help you return to that state of grace. [...] There is no simple fix that can be done once and allow you to stop worrying about cultural appropriation forever. It doesn’t work like that." -- Jeannette Ng

"You may notice that one profound difference has been left out of this acronym: class. This was a deliberate omission." -- Shawl and Ward

Prompts for economic SF

A version of this list will be appearing in FOCUS in early 2019.

As a writer responding to one of these prompts, you'll probably want to ask two questions: (a) why are things like this in the first place? (b) What are the implications?

• Think of an economic system to which you are politically opposed. Imagine, in as much detail as possible, a working version of this system. Make it a bit like utopia. Take all your objections seriously, but devise science fictional solutions to them. Use this as a setting to tell any kind of story you like.
• A story featuring a designer market or a complementary currency (see e.g. Bernard Lietaer) whose purpose is not to solve a specific set of social problems, but to create them.
• Your story is set in an intimately surveilled (or sousveilled) society. In this society, if an analysis of your behaviour suggests that you want something, you automatically buy it (even if that puts you into debt).
• Write a thriller, a love story, a murder mystery, a coming-of-age-fable, and/or a comedy of manners. Set it in the near future, during the transition to a Universal Basic Income system. Make sure there are lots of kinks in the process.
• Imagine an economy without economies of scale. Why don't they exist? What are the implications?
• Precarious workers in the gig economy start to gain a little more security by developing their own digital tools for distributed solidarity. What data do they gather and how do they share and use it? What might a social media platform look like if it were organised around workers' interests? How might algorithmic curation work if it were trying to drive not engagement, but class consciousness? 
• Imagine an economy in which all prices and wages have a random element. (Maybe things are priced in this format: something like $3d6 means the cost will be $3-18, but with a higher chance of it being $9 than $3 or $18. Something like $1d20 means the cost will be $1-20, with every price equally likely). Why? What are the implications?
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has dominated economic policy and politics, despite its many well-demonstrated shortcomings. Various alternatives exist; e.g. Bhutan uses a Gross National Happiness Index. Imagine a world where economic policy is focused on some unusual alternative to GDP. Perhaps the story is about trying to change to a different metric, and the unexpected consequences.
• Imagine an alternative timeline in which the 1973 Chilean coup failed or never happened in the first place. What next for Stafford Beer and Cybersyn? (You may want to read Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries first).
• Invent a few new cognitive biases, or exaggerate some existing cognitive biases, and extrapolate how they will reshape the economy. 
• Imagine an alternative timeline in which the Soviet Union pursued the project of a computational command economy in a big way. (You may want to read Francis Spufford's Red Plenty first).
• A tweet-based currency.
• Industrial disputes are handled algorithmically, and/or are gamified.
• An economy that has been designed with institutions specifically to disincentivize all kinds of rational egoist, homo economicus type behaviour.
• Set your story in a future where regenerative design, redistributive design, and generous design have become normalized. The economy is based on processes that revitalize the resources they need, that distribute value widely instead of letting it pool and concentrate, and that aim to create positive externalities (rather than just no negative externalities. Check out Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics to find out more about these terms). These features could be in the foreground, or just in the background. You could stress test the world you have invented in various ways. You could explore what happens when these principles are so ingrained, even the bad guys operate by them. E.g. how does a scientist supervillain, or a mercenary company, or a giant killer robot, try to abide by such principles?
• A reputation based currency but with some twist. The twist is up to you, but just for example, you can start by reading Cory Doctorow's critique of his invention reputation currency Whuffie (and this post may be handy too). How might things be different if you had several reputation scores, and any increase in one of your reputation scores meant a decrease in your others?
• Imagine a world in which all "markets" are actually networked barter systems. There is no money as such. Goods and services are "priced" in credits, but there's no such thing as owning credits by themselves. What you can do is request goods or services, and list your own goods and services in exchange. The system gets around the coincidence of wants problem by some kind of multilateral matching algorithm, and clears all requests as quickly as feasible. Think through the details of the system, and imagine how it reshapes the economy and people's everyday lives.
• What we usually call "ownership" is actually a bundle of rights, for instance the right to use something (in certain ways), the right to earn income from it, the right to transfer it, the right to exclude others from using it, the right to dispose of it, etc. Think of different ways of dividing up "ownership." Imagine a society in which these rights are not typically bundled together. 
• Similar to the last one: imagine a world in which it is easy to place complex conditions on how something will be used when it is sold. What kinds of conditions do people place? Why? What are the second- and third-order effects? 
• Again similar to the last one: technology gives most commodities a fine-grained modularity. Ownership as we know it is obsolete, but there are competing ideas about what new forms should take its place. Some producers, still seeking to maximize profit no matter what, want to extract value from micro-licensing long after they have "sold" something. Other actors are trying to establish a circular economy that is restorative and regenerative by design.
• Military science fiction featuring a company of high tech mercenaries that seek to reconcile their chosen profession with being green and sustainable.
• A world of great abundance -- perhaps kind of post-scarcity -- in which anything that is paid for is paid for with on-the-spot by micro-labour (never more than ten minutes).
• Imagine a universe without Nash equilibria.
• Imagine a universe without Pareto optimality.
• Imagine a universe in which Walrasian general equilibrium is not even theoretically possible, although partial equilibrium is.
• Imagine a democracy based on rotating through Nash equilibria rather than political parties.
• Imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo hoo ooh-ooh-ooh.
• All economic transactions are done through some kind of a Vickrey auction.
• There are already many LETS communities and time banks all over the world. Imagine one system growing until it fundamentally alters the nature of capitalism, or perhaps in some sense replaces it.
• Imagine an economy in which some or all goods aren't characterized by diminishing marginal utility, but by more complex curves that go up and down at different amounts. How? Why? So what?
• Imagine an economy where each quantum of cash bears a record of all the historical transactions it has been involved in. (So a bit like a blockchain, but imagine that the data is a bit more rich than what amounts were transferred).
• Create a magic system based on the stock exchange.
• Imagine a sophisticated form of economics that uses little or no mathematics. Maybe it is mainly visual.
• There is a small close-to-post-scarcity utopia existing at the fringe of a large capitalist society. How do the utopians deal with the arbitrage? 
• Build an economy in which every good or service has a different price depending on who's buying it. Among other things, think about how such an economy handles its complex arbitrage problems.
• Imagine a world in which certain categories of goods periodically "rotate," e.g. all instances of commodity a turn into commodity b, all commodity b into commodity c, c into d, d into e, and e into a. Why? And how do people adjust to this phenomenon?
• Imagine a society in which the division of labour is done in some radically different way.
• Imagine a functioning economy and financial system in which there is no interest (and also probably no arrangements like buy-to-lease which in some ways functionally approximate interest bearing loans).
• Imagine a world in which all transaction costs are zero. Or, imagine a world in which all or key transaction costs are exotic in some way, perhaps fluctuating predictably according to some irresistible external impulse.
• Imagine a society without what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs." Or imagine the difficult transition to such a society.
• Imagine a science fictional reason for an unambiguous positive correlation between inflation and unemployment.
• A world in which something called "smart inflation" exists. What is it, and how does it work? How does it reshape the economy and society?
• Some kind of biopunk world in which affect (feelings) can be transferred, commodified, bought and sold. 
• In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: one Left Accelerationist, the other Right Accelerationist. What happens?
• In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: a Promethean Leftist society, and a Green Leftist society. What goes down?
• Can you imagine a "Promethean deep ecological" society?
• Cash and markets come to an extremely advanced, complex alien society that has never had such things in all their history.
• Another variant on Doctorow's Whuffie, from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the novel, you can't really "spend" Whuffie to buy things. It just goes up and down depending what people think of you. But what if you could spend it? What if you gained credits automatically through conduct people approve of, which you can choose to deplete to buy things? The credits are erased, rather than transferred. 
• Design a blockchain utopia. Make it an ambiguous, critical utopia (think Le Guin's Dispossessed), and don't write it from an anarcho-capitalist perspective.
• Research (or find somebody who knows about) an extremely intricate, dull, and complicated episode of economic history. For instance, research rail fares in the UK 1970-2020. In what ways have they changed? Why? What choices were made? What lessons have been learned? What models are in operation? What challenges are now being faced? Now try to tell the most exciting science fictional story you can, preserving the underlying economic logic. You may want to change the subject matter entirely, but try to preserve (in particular) any insights into the design of policies, institutions and incentives, and/or the counter-intuitive, emergent behaviour of systems whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts.
• Imagine the transition to full communism from the perspective of someone working in a particular role in a particular organisation (whether it's a business, a non-profit, something else). Try to include the detailed, mundane challenges in your story -- the kind of stuff the protagonist thinks would be too complicated to explain to anybody who didn't do the job they do.
• A freak temporal storm transports Kim Stanley Robinson to 1900.
• It's a highly networked society, and all payments are digital. When you pay for a good or service, there's a suggested price, but you can pay whatever you want for it. If a good or service is unavailable, you can state what price you would have paid for it. Periodically (every month, say) there is a Rebalancing in which a sort of version of a Vickrey auction is computed. The price of the good or service is set at that offered by the highest bidder who would have lost, if this had been a normal Vickrey auction. Everyone's bank balances are then adjusted according to the price (if they paid more, they get some money back; if they paid less, they are charged a top-up). But how does the system deal with the fact that some people have already consumed goods which, if this were a normal Vickrey auction, they would not have any right to? What incentives are there to pay higher rather than lower prices? And what are the wider economic, social, and cultural ramifications of this system?
• The world is a computer simulation, and everyone knows it. It's also a democracy, and elections aren't just about choosing government officials, they're about choosing new realities. Between elections, the main form of currency is backed by story prompts for economic science fiction, and the economic science fiction based on those prompts.

The First Draft and the Academy

Creative Writing pedagogy and assessment is often (and for lots of good reasons) oriented toward the mature or final draft. Where the assessment requires some kind of reflective commentary, for instance, the process of redrafting and polishing creates lots of fruitful material for discussion. Besides, many skilled creative practitioners encounter their own tacit competence as an inaccessible opacity. So the existence of multiple versions of the same creative work, layered with feedback or theoretical input, may help to bring aspects of the writer's creative practice into the realm of explicit argumentation and evaluation.

There are those rare writers whose work really does spill out fully-formed, and they are presumably a little let down by this emphasis. But I'm not really concerned with them here (mainly I'm just well jels of them). I'm more interested in the more common type of writer, whose work by-and-large gets better the more they revise it.

At PhD or MFA level, writers have a chance to submit novels, plays, feature length film scripts, collections of short stories, etc.: drafting them, revising them, reflecting on them, and buffing them to a sheen. The last metaphor is more appropriate for some writers than for others. Some writers like to correct their draft manuscripts; others like to wrong them. But what about Masters level? There's a good case to be made for offering the writer the option to attempt a full-length work, even though student-teacher contact hours, and the practicalities of marking, don't really allow for it to be developed and assessed in the same way it would be on a terminal degree.

Can a first draft be marked as a first draft? Would something like this be, I wonder, bonkers? Is it anything like this already on offer somewhere?

5,000 word excerpt (polished)
+
60,000-120,000 complete first draft, 1,000-2,000 words synopsis + plan for further development (30%)
2,000 word reflective commentary (20%)

The excerpt is assessed as normal. The rest is rapidly skimmed, with careful reading of a few random samples scattered throughout, and is marked on a different set of criteria. How complete does the draft appear? Does it appropriately lay the groundwork for the second draft? Does it appear to align to the synopsis? Are its weak and/or inchoate aspects addressed in the development plan? Are there lacunae or obvious continuity problems? The examiner is not primarily focused on skill or imagination, but on the preliminary sweat-of-the-brow of building a framework for later acts of skill and imagination.

I'm interested in the practicalities of this, of course, and also, really, the wider questions about the quantification of the provisional. Although I'm not sure what those questions are.

Somebody write this

Speculative fiction writers. In this culture, whenever anybody speaks more than a very brief phrase -- more than three words, let's say -- they end their statement with an extra word. This word stands outside the ordinary grammar of the statement. Whoever answers is bound by deep cultural logic to weave this extra word into their answer. If they were to omit the word, then to the ears of this people, they wouldn't even have made speech, just babble.

How can SFF de-expensify itself? Lotteries! Lotteries! Lots and lots of lotteries!

1.

Science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive!

Okay, the books and magazines are expensive. But at least there are libraries. And so much of it is available free online nowadays. More than you could read in a lifetime, maybe.

But ... free time is expensive.

And ... being able to vote in the awards is expensive. Paying for the memberships that let you vote is expensive, and paying for those books and magazines and things, the ones on the longlists and shortlists -- the ones you can't get in libraries yet -- that's expensive.

Being able to participate in the conversation around the awards is expensive. Because if you're not voting, maybe you feel a bit stupid or poor or like a trespasser, hmm? You maybe get a smidge of imposter syndrome. Just a smidge. The smidges add up.

And the conventions. And the workshops.

The conventions are incredibly expensive! The workshops are incredibly expensive. Here are two great posts about the recent kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clarion West, the quasi-idiomatic expression "you want x, you NEED x" etc.: Ann Leckie's and JY Yang's.

JY Yang's is probably the more pertinent to this post. "[F]or somebody like me – living and working outside of the UK or US – different culture, different continent, different context – breaking into the SFF publishing scene, getting people to actually sit up and notice you, even getting better at your craft, is extremely. fucking. difficult." Yang talks about community. It's expensive to feel part of science fiction and fantasy.

It is expensive to visit the science fiction and fantasy Top of Mount Olympus, but there aren't too many other kinds of obstacle to getting there. You pay your money, you get on your Mount Olympus Funicular. For a lot of money, you can see, hear, touch -- I guess you shouldn't touch -- living legends. For a huge amount of money, you can have them read your stuff and suggest how to make it better. So long as you're not too picky about your living legend, one living legend or other should be available.

Part of the kerfuffle re Neil Gaiman, Clairon West, etc., is probably driven by the suspicion that workshops like that don't just give you sound advice, they give you even sounder contacts. "Okay, so you're a good writer. There are a lot of good writers out there. There are a lot of good, hard-working writers out there. The ones that know how to network, the ones that can pay to get close to the big nodes ... they're the ones that succeed."

That's the suspicion, anyway. I don't really share it? Not that I have some kind of naive ideal about canons crystallizing according to pure merit, or anything. But I do suspect that there's a third thing, that isn't exactly instruction and isn't exactly networking, although it's a bit like both those things, that you get from something like Clarion West. Or get from a coffeeklatch with a living legend, or whatever. It's the anxiety and pleasure of community. I think we systematically underestimate its importance in shaping, strengthening, and projecting writing outward into the world. Writing is intimately entangled with pleasure, with jouissance. Writing is intimately entangled with community, and perhaps extra intimately entangled with provisional, fragile, hodgepodge, competitive, mercurial, anxious, disputed, and disputatious community.

2.

Anyway: science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the future. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to imagine the otherwise unimaginable alternative. Science fiction and fantasy is supposed to keep some kind of fragile candle-flame flickering through the dark times. And science fiction and fantasy is incredibly expensive.

Because it's expensive, it's elitist.

It directly selects against those on low incomes. It directly selects against those living in countries with comparatively weak currencies. It indirectly selects against those groups who tend to have low incomes, or who live in such countries.

(If you're lucky -- lucky? -- you live somewhere like where I live, and science fiction and fantasy has its free fringe).

I'm sure people way more knowledgeable than me have talked over these problems a zillion times. I know for a fact there are all kinds of practical initiatives that go some way to ameliorating them.

But I'm just wondering: is there some neglected low-hanging fruit here, ripe and ready to drop?

Maybe focusing on the feeling of inclusion, and the anxiety and pleasure of community, might make it a bit easier to improve accessibility?

If it has proved hard to extend the full shebang, to extend the full masterclass-from-a-living-legend, to every talented and hardworking writer who in some sense deserves it ... maybe it's easy to at least extend the feelings of inclusion and of community? Extend it a bit?

UPDATE: Elsewhere, Sunny Morraine writes eloquently on similar subjects. "[...] at least in SFF writerdom, there is really no meaningful distinction between friends and colleagues [...]" (Fuck, cons shouldn't be something people feel they have to go to, should they?)

3.

One way you feel included in something, if that something is something which is cyclical, is if you even have a chance of going to that something. A free lottery ticket, each time it comes round. And/or if you feel like someone who's a bit like you just did go to it. You didn't win, but the person who did reminds you of you.

"Didn't make it last year, or this year, but one year I might, and in the meanwhile, I still feel included. I still feel invested."

Or: "I could afford it that one time, and with my memories of that one time, plus my ritual of entering the lottery, I still feel part of this thing. Which creates all kinds of positive feedback loops and virtuous circles in my reading and my conversations and my writing."

So the guideline is: for any SFF-related thing that involves money, take a moment to pause and think, Is there some spare capacity here that we could give away for free? Is there some aspect that could be hived off and given to whoever's name gets pulled out of a hat?

4.

So for instance:

(1) Could Neil Gaiman and some of his friends figure out a way to make Clarion more accessible, at least for a temporary span of time? I have no idea what the economics of Clarion are, although I bet they're flexier than the folk in charge of them will tell you at first. But for instance, could an instructor (e.g. Neil Gaiman) waive a fee and instead sponsor a low income attendee?

(2) More low income pass lotteries for cons please. Every major con should have tickets that get handed out at random to applicants on low incomes. I'm talking about cramming in a few extra bodies that otherwise wouldn't be there at all.

(3) If it's financially feasible, some lotteries available to everyone too, regardless of income. The important thing is: lots and lots of lotteries, so the more you want to go somewhere, the more scrupulous and energetic you can be about throwing your name in every hat everywhere. Okay, it's not perfect, but "I won the lottery to go to LaserswordCon, help me raise travel and accommodation!" ain't a bad way to Kickstart something.

(4) Associations should also do free membership lotteries. The BSFA could probably do with a membership top-up. Promote the lottery hard, and you'll get a big pool of applicants, and instead of giving some existing member a free ride, you'll get a new member you never would have had in the first place. Maybe they'll stick around. Voting rights in particular: it makes hella sense to me to engage more widely by offering partial memberships that permit voting. The cost to the association could be literally zero (sorry, no paper ballots for lottery-route members).

(5) Magazines should do more lotteries for free digital subscriptions. This is probably less important.

(6) I've forgotten what this one was. More lotteries, probably. Oh, maybe it was more online stuff. Clarion West on an Open University / Khan Academy model? (But beware the risks of the latest round of cyberutopianism).

(7) I know the e"con"omics (pretty good joke huh) generally rule out giving volunteers a free pass, but could some volunteers get a free pass? Or first time volunteers get half price, kind of thing? I'm sure many cons already do this kind of thing.

(8) Errr ... and of course if there are ways of making paying cons and workshops and awards and things a little less central to the affairs of science fiction and fantasy in general, that might not be a bad thing. And if we do multiply the lotteries throughout the lands, we should take care not to use that Good Thing as an excuse to do Bad Things; the more privileged participants in science fiction and fantasy should take care never to use lotteries as an excuse to understate or neglect persistent patterns of marginalization, take care never to use them as a reason not to energetically engage with and promote the work of non-Western and other marginalized groups of writers.

(9) Aaaaaaand of course while all this is going on, it's necessary to step back from time to time and think about how thinking about fairness and finance in the fandom context may operate as a distraction from, or sublimation of, fairness and finance in the wider world.

(10) Masked Clarion. Compulsory masks. Clari-anon. Everybody foxes etc. Who went to Clarion? We all did.

*   *   *

PS: Con or Bust is taking requests for assistance from fans of colour from Feb 15-25.

PPS: I really like something JY's post touches on at the end. It isn't just about making the core more accessible to the periphery: it's about the possibility of developing the periphery, shedding the periphery-ness, making new, alternate cores. Basically it's also about sf and fantasy localism, about growing vibrant small press scenes that don't necessarily kowtow to whatever aesthetics and politics and whatever which dominate mainstream sf and fantasy and, even more importantly, which resist and/or transform co-option by the more progressive venues and institutions of mainstream sf and fantasy. Just as a quick comparison, for some reason basically all the even slightly good poetry in the UK is published predominantly by small and micro presses.

PPPS: I notice that this post falls into that genre of "x costs money. y costs money."-straight-talkin' type posts. I didn't mean to talk straight and I'm sorry.

PPPPS: Some aspiring writers should be discouraged! I wish somebody had discouraged me! But I haven't quite figured out yet how to tell them apart, the ones who should be discouraged and the ones who shouldn't. Just putting a big discouragement buffet out there for people to help themselves to usually just further marginalizes the marginalized (within this particular context, although being marginalized in one context may free you up to flourish in another, which is what makes this whole thing so tricky. Hmmm).

PPPPPS: I also have the quasi-rationalized superstition that social contact with the authors of texts can sharpen your reading of those texts in a way that is also by the way frequently fruitful in your writing, assuming you are cultivating them as an influence. The Death of the Death of the Author is basically a done deal from where I'm sitting. Btw I heard a fantastic neologism today: not autobiography but bioautography.

PPPPPPS: [To do: are there some general good tactics to adopt when you find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core? Lessons from poetry and/or activism maybe? Simple things: if there doesn't seem to be the constituency to support a genre writing night, start off with a music and comedy and genre writing and open mic night. Or if you don't find yourself in the midst of building a counter-core, then what practical measures can you take to support those who are? What can the sort-of-established editors and authors and publishers, who still aren't happy with what they're established in, do in order to provide real solidarity with and support to these more local and distributed sff efforts, without de-energizing / appropriating / undermining them?]

[Also to do: I sense that "writing," although that term needs interrogating, can really flourish at the moment that you withdraw yourself from a "community" -- and maybe that's not quite the right word either, if it's something that functions most powerfully at the moment of alienation. But yeah: writing obviously isn't really a lonely pursuit, and it obviously isn't a social pursuit either. It has a particular characteristic status in the dialectic of individual and collective, which I need to think about more carefully some time.]

PPPPPPPS: The bit about "hiving off aspects" of memberships / passes etc. does of course raise the question of a tiers, or a sense of being present or participating, but feeling second class. That's a real issue, although at the same time, it is probably something to be sensitive to and try to deal with, not something that renders the whole notion untenable. What's the alternative -- simply keeping the barriers to entry high, just so the people who can't make it at at all are saved the risk of feeling like they're hard done by or interlopers or deserve the full welcome pack or whatever dammit? And it's not as if those feels aren't in circulation already. My Night Nurse is kicking in big time rn.