Category Archives: Musings

On Mercedes Lackey and the 2022 Nebula Conference

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I was attending the SFWA virtual Nebula Conference this past weekend, and like many atendees was startled by Sunday afternoon’s announcement that Mercedes Lackey, the writer who had been named a Damon Knight Grand Master just the previous evening, had been removed from the Conference for using a racial slur while participating in a panel discussion on Saturday.

This got me thinking.

To begin with, I should note that Mercedes Lackey is 71 years old. I’m 64, just seven years younger than she. My initial “gut” reaction was that this was harsh. I can remember a day when the word she used was commonly heard, especially from the lips of older people, and am inclined to judge older people more generously. It really is hard to change when you get older!

But on further reflection, I realized that it’s been half a century since this term was common. Fifty years ago, I was a teenager and the people using it were in their sixties. Now I am in my sixties, but still unconsciously conflating people older than me, like Mercedes—who, I reiterate, is only seven years older than I am—with people who were in their sixties fifty years ago, that is to say, people who were born around 1910 and would be more than 110 years old if they were alive today, which they are not.

The television show All in the Family premiered in 1971, and on that show, Archie Bunker regularly used the same term Mercedes Lackey used. But even in 1971, his use of that term was intended to convey his insensitivity, and even within the confines of the show, African-American characters complained about it. Please note that when All in the Family premiered, Mercedes Lackey was 21 years old. I was 14.

So there really is no excuse for using in 2022 a word that was considered insensitive even in 1971. Moreover, the fact that one would blurt out such a word in a public forum is strongly suggestive that one uses the word privately with some frequency. I have never in my life used that word in that way, not even among my closest friends and family, and thus have never had the slightest difficulty avoiding it in more public venues.

Okay, but isn’t SFWA spoiling the occasion for Mercedes Lackey during what is supposed to be one of the high points of her career? Maybe, but then Mercedes Lackey spoiled the occasion for a number of Nebula Conference attendees, notably the African-American writer who shared the panel with her.

I have a confession to make: I watched that panel and the epithet in question went right by me. I didn’t even notice it. Of course, that’s because I am not one of the people who is hurt by that particular word. It’s much easier to be generous about this kind of thing when you aren’t personally affected by it.

Also, the very same circumstances that might make you inclined to give Mercedes Lackey a pass—that she’s an older writer with a distinguished career, that this was, in some sense, “her” special event and the rest of us are celebrating her—these are always the reasons given to let a slight go unaddressed.

It is the most powerful people, the most respected people, the elders among us, who are the most likely to get a free pass. But is that really fair? Surely the most powerful, the most respected, the elder leaders, also bear greater responsibility to lead us all in a better direction. To whom much is given, much is required, to coin a phrase.

We’ve tried for fifty years to rely on gentle persuasion to get people to become more sensitive, and you see how far that’s gotten us. Maybe The Mallet of Loving Correction (to coin another phrase) is more effective. And maybe demonstrating that even those who are bigger than we are have to answer for their use of language helps drive the point home.

That’s why I support the decision of the SWFA Board of Directors.

Thoughts on the Ukraine War

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I am not Ukranian. I am Pennsylvania Dutch on my father’s side; in other words, my father was descended from immigrants who came from the Rhine region of western Germany and settled in Pennsylvania in colonial times. My mother’s parents were Polish immigrants, but for a variety of reasons, I don’t normally think of myself as Polish-American, but lean into the Pennsylvania Dutch part of my heritage.

So no one is more surprised than I am that the unprovoked Russian attack on Ukraine a month ago is stirring up in me Polish passions I didn’t even realize I had. The Polish people have a long and unhappy history of getting pushed around by Russians, and the resentments run deep among those of us with Polish heritage—even if we don’t normally think of ourselves as Polish. Watching fellow Slavs get steamrollered by the Russians is all that it takes to reawaken those resentments. Folks in Poland are freaking out right about now, and I have no difficulty understanding why.

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, made a catastrophically bad decision in attacking Ukraine. Until now, he’s seemed pretty clever. Russia has been punching above its weight for the past decade in international affairs, because Putin has shrewdly played to Russian strengths. Russian intelligence officials have traditionally been masters of propaganda and disinformation, going back to Imperial times. (The anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an Imperial Russian disinformation operation that is still taken seriously, at least by the profoundly ignorant, more than a century after it was created.)

Putin’s government expertly melded traditional Russian disinformation operations with modern internet communication to create huge disruptions among Russia’s competitors. Brexit was almost certainly a Russian disinformation campaign that thoroughly kneecapped the United Kingdom. The UK is no longer even a second-tier power, and it will take it decades to claw its way back into international relevance, if indeed that is even possible anymore. That it was done in the name of making Britain stronger is just the cherry on top of Vladimir Putin’s sundae.

Similarly, Russian disinformation put a Russian intelligence asset into the Oval Office, with disastrous consequences for the United States, and the Russians have a better than 50/50 shot of doing it again.

A couple of years ago, Vladimir Putin must have been laughing at the leadership of the old Soviet Union. They believed that in order to keep the US at bay, they had to spend enormous sums on missiles, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and large armored formations stationed in East Germany, when he proved that for a fraction of the cost, you can set the Americans against each other so completely that they have no resources left over to oppose foreign threats.

But something happened last year. We can only guess what it was. I’ve heard that Putin’s health is deteriorating, and maybe crushing Ukraine was something on his bucket list that he felt he needed to check off before he departs for that Kremlin in the sky.

Whatever changed his thinking, it tempted him into making an egregious error. He shifted the field of battle from disinformation, where he held a huge advantage, to military confrontation, where he did not. Maybe he thought he did, but history also teaches us that the Russian military has frequently looked more fearsome on paper than it proved to be in actual conflict. Putin ignored that history, and now he (and his country) are paying the price.

You’d think a master of disinformation would understand that revealing too quickly what it is you really want will weaken your position. Yet here we are.

Putin’s public position seems to be that Ukrainians are not in fact a distinct ethnic group, but are in reality just Russians, and that the creation of a Ukrainian national identity is merely a Western plot to weaken Russia. That works great as a piece of disinformation, but what we’re seeing now is an object lesson in the dangers of falling for your own propaganda.

The reality is that there are some fifty million people worldwide who identify as Ukrainian, and they’re the only ones who get to have a vote on the matter. While it might be possible to gently persuade Ukrainians that their culture, their values, and their national interests are closely aligned with those of Russians, productive techniques for gentle persuasion do not include shelling residential neighborhoods in Ukrainian cities, or turning tens of millions of Ukrainians into refugees.

Far from tightening the bonds between Ukrainians and Russians, this war has driven a wedge between these two peoples, dividing them more deeply than ever. Take the word of this not-very-Polish Pole: the young Ukrainian children of today, made refugees and orphans by Putin’s war, will be lecturing their grandchildren in 2092 about the terrible things Russians did to Ukrainians. The bitterness and resentment created by this Russian invasion will became a part of the Ukrainian identity. They will also insure that Ukrainians will see Russians not as useful and culturally similar allies, but as a ruthless and untrustworthy foe, requiring Ukraine to look to nations more distant—geographically and culturally—for its protection.

Russia will certainly lose this war. Alas, what remains unclear is how much more suffering the Ukrainian people must bear before this truth sinks in at the Kremlin.

Juneteenth

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Today, as I write this, is the first federally-recognized Juneteenth holiday in the United States.

True, I really don’t know very much about African-American culture generally or this holiday specifically, so this is all new to me. But that’s fine. I’m 63 years old, but I still love new things. May that never change.

My family and I are not Chinese, but we eat Chinese dumplings on Chinese New Year. We are not Jewish, but we make it a point to eat latkes on Rosh Hashanah. We are not Mexican, but we eat fajitas on Cinco de Mayo. We’ll figure out Juneteenth soon enough. I mean, it’s a new holiday. What’s not to like? Who could possibly object?

Oh, right. The usual gang of naysayers, nitpickers, wet blankets, and party poopers. The people who are only happy when everyone else is miserable, and vice versa.

I’m going to put on my Historian Hat and point out that if one of those holidays is “based on race,” it’s July Fourth, and the people responsible for making it a race holiday were the Founders. It’s called “Independence Day,” but a more honest name would be “Independence for White People Day,” thanks to those who fought for the proposition that “all men are created equal” with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

And so we had to have a whole Second Revolution to include everyone. And Juneteenth is the holiday for everyone.

Chadwick Boseman and Black Panther

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The loss of Chadwick Boseman shocks me, as I’m sure it does you. First of all, 43 is too young to die. I’m old enough to have been his father, and my heart goes out to his family and those who loved him, who now must cope with their loss.

Like many people, I first became aware of Chadwick Boseman upon the release of Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and his subsequent solo film Black Panther in 2018.

I grew up a stone science fiction fan. The SF and fantasy I consumed in my youth was overwhelmingly white. It was written by white (male) writers for white (male) audiences, and usually assumed a future controlled and directed by white men. I never even noticed. I accepted it, unthinkingly, as the way of the world.

I recall that time now, and I am saddened to think of my Black peers who may not have been able to get into SF the way I did and have their minds and perspectives stretched the way mine were, because they were ground down by the weariness of constantly having to pretend to be white as the price of admission into those imaginative realms.

This is not to say that a reader (or filmgoer or TV viewer) can’t identify with a character of a different race. Of course we can, and we all do. But being asked to set aside one’s own identity, over and over again, in order to adopt the same other identity, over and over again, must wear down even the most committed fan, after a while.

No one should be asked to do such a thing all the time. But everyone should do it some of the time. White audiences are not well served either, when they are constantly offered up only comforting reflections of themselves, even in their fantasies, and never challenged to imagine something (or someone) different. This is why we need diversity in our stories and entertainments.

And this is what made Black Panther so groundbreaking. For white people like me, it gave us Black role models to look up to, Black fantasy figures who were wiser, nobler, and more generous than we were. We were left with a powerful and unfamiliar mix of emotions. For many of us, it was a first-time experience and a breath of fresh air. And it wasn’t even our movie.

A whole other rush of emotions then came over us as we watched the reactions of our Black neighbors. I still remember all those smiling faces, Wakanda salutes, and people lining up to take selfies in front of cardboard cutouts of the film’s characters in the movie theater lobbies. You would have to have a heart of stone to see such overflowing joy and not feel moved.

Black Panther was embraced by African Americans, and while they surely played a large role in its success, I am certain it was not Black audiences and Black ticket sales alone that made it the highest-grossing solo superhero film of all time.

It was Ryan Coogler’s vision and a spectacular cast that made Black Panther work so well, but at the center of it all stands the performance of Chadwick Boseman. The dignity and gravity of his performance as T’Challa (along with Michael B. Jordan’s as Killmonger) is the foundation that supports the film and turns a fantasy into a statement.

And now we all feel a whole new rush of emotion upon learning that Chadwick Boseman did all this while privately, secretly, battling stage IV colon cancer. What a generous gift he gave us all, at a time when anyone would have forgiven him for focusing on his own well being.

Rest in power, Chadwick Boseman. We will not forget.

Cathedrals and Democracies

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So this happened.

The fire at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris is a shocking moment. For those of us who love history, it is a disaster. As I write this, the fire is believed to be a tragic accident related to restoration work being done on the building. (Note the scaffolding in the photograph.)

The fact that an 800-year old building, so important to so many people, can be accidentally gutted in a heartbeat is horrifying to contemplate. Notre-Dame is so old, our lives are as flashes of lightning in a storm by comparison. We naturally assume the cathedral will endure long after we are dust. It seems so solid and mighty, a tangible symbol of French religious devotion. Some might have claimed it was protected by God.

But the reason Notre-Dame endured for eight centuries has less to do with the workmanship of the stonecutters or the faith of the French people than most imagine. Notre-Dame endured for the simple reason that forty generations of French believed it to be important. Whatever else was going on in the life of the nation, enough French people cared to ensure Notre-Dame was preserved. It took forty generations of care to preserve the cathedral; it only took a momentary lapse to lose it.

Americans take pride in their democracy and in their Constitution. We like to believe our Constitution endures because of the genius of our Founders, and that democracy, freedom, and equality are rooted so deeply in American culture that an America without them is unthinkable. Some might claim it is protected by God.

We are wrong. As with Notre-Dame, our democratic institutions endured not because of the workmanship of the Founders or the values of the American people. They endured for the simple reason that eleven generations of Americans believed them to be important. Whatever else was going on in the life of the nation, enough Americans cared about our democracy to preserve it.

But don’t be fooled by the seeming strength of the edifice. Eleven generations of preservation can be undone in a momentary lapse. If you seek proof, you need look no farther than Notre-Dame.

In Defense of Escapism

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A couple of days ago, Chuck Wendig posted a piece on his blog about being a writer and coping with all the terrible things going on around us. I posted a comment over there, but I want to repeat it here. (Especially since Chuck’s website appears to have eaten my comment. It’s not displaying.) It was this part of his piece that I was reacting to:

Fourth: Words Are A Door

Just the same: embrace the power of escapism.

We all need to escape, man. Every day I’m looking for a portal out of this donkey show and into something more fun, something so distant that I can’t hear the chaos through the walls. Nothing wrong with writing that escape, or seeking it. Use your own stories to provide an out for yourself and your readers; and read books, too, that give you that escape. No shame. Words can be self-care. They can be a doorway out, for a time. A portal to a Narnia where it’s not a circus orgy of sick chimps running around, on fire, throwing flaming shit at one another.

Nothing wrong with that escape. Absolutely. I am currently writing a young adult science fiction novel set 150 years in our future. The world my protagonist inhabits is not perfect by any means, but it is a much happier and safer world than this one. Visiting his world gives me peace.

The recently departed Ursula LeGuin wrote:

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

And J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

I wholeheartedly endorse escapism. It can be the only thing that keeps the prisoner sane, and who could object to that? Besides the jailer or the tormentor, of course. So read stories. Especially read science fiction and fantasy. Write them too, if you can.

I am currently reading They Both Die at the End, and find I am liking it quite a lot. I will post a review here when I finish it, but if you’re looking for something to start with, you could do worse. Don’t be put off by the grim title (even though it is accurate).

My Thoughts on National Coming Out Day

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I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s. One of my classmates was a guy named Steven A. Marquez.

I met Steve at a summer job, and we became pretty friendly. We didn’t have any classes in common, but we stayed in touch for the rest of our time at Penn. I can’t say we were really close; we never went out for beers together or anything like that, but I thought of him as my friend.

And I envied him a little. He wanted to be a newspaper reporter; I had dreams of becoming a writer. But while my dreams were just dreams, he was a positive zealot about becoming a newspaper reporter and was working hard to make it happen. And the paper he dreamed of writing for was the Philadelphia Daily News. He took English and journalism courses and was Managing Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the school newspaper. When a Daily News editor came to Penn to teach a journalism class, Steve was so there. He wrote a story for that course that moved the instructor to say that he wished the reporters working for him at the Daily News could produce work that good.

But it was tough to get work in journalism, even then. Steve told me senior year that he had mailed out his first batch of 100 resumes (that’s how we did it then) and gotten zero responses. (Today it’s much worse for journalists, of course, but still, that was pretty tough.) Just before graduation, he told me he had landed a job at the St. Petersburg Times. I wished him well, and we parted ways.

I never saw him again. I thought of him from time to time; I imagined him in sunny Florida, criss-crossing the Tampa Bay region, uncovering scandals. Then, eight years later, in 1987, I picked up a newspaper and read his obituary.

I was shocked. At the age of 29, you may have experienced the deaths of people much older than you, but that is way too early to be losing your peers. As I read the obituary, I learned that Steve had eventually landed his dream job at the Daily News and had returned to Philadelphia, where I was also living. He was making quite a name for himself at the paper (no surprise there), but then he had contracted a long and painful illness. He’d spent months in the hospital, slowly wasting away, until at last it took his life. He was 29, the same age I was.

He had died of complications from an HIV infection. He was mourned at the Daily News, and The Daily Pennsylvanian now has an annual journalism conference named after him.

Steve was gay. And I never knew it. He was dying nearby, and I never knew it. My wife and I had our first child in the same hospital where Steve was dying at the same time. And I never knew it.

The pain of his death, and the strange and roundabout way I learned of it, never left me. I am shaking right now, as I type these words. The shock of losing such a young friend is part of it. The regret I feel that I never got the chance to visit him in the hospital during his illness—which I certainly would have done, had I known—never diminished.

But the biggest shock of all was that Steve was gay and I had had no idea.

I had thought we were friends. I had thought I knew him fairly well. But only after his death did I learn that there was a whole side of his life I knew nothing about. And I didn’t know because Steve was afraid to tell me. He was afraid of what I might think. He was afraid I wouldn’t want to be his friend anymore. He was afraid of what would happen if his sexual orientation became common knowledge.

It was that fear that led to his not telling, which led to my not knowing, which led to my not being there at his side when he needed love and support, which led to the shock of my finding out about his death in a newspaper.

If you had told me, Steve, I would have been okay about it. Yes, the 1970s were very different, and I was a churchgoing young man from a rural community who had zero experience with LGBT people, and I probably would have freaked a little. But I wouldn’t have hated you. I wouldn’t have rejected you. I would have learned. I would have grown. I would have become a better person sooner, and a better friend to you. And I most certainly would have sat with you in the hospital, even held your hand.

But I don’t blame you. You had hard choices to make in the 1970s and you had career ambitions that were important to you. You wouldn’t have wanted anything to get in the way of that, and I fully understand. I blame the society that put you in that hard place. Sadly, both of us suffered for it.

And that brings me to #NationalComingOutDay. Coming out isn’t nearly the big deal it used to be. Times have changed quite a bit, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you. Coming out is easier, except perhaps for young people and people within certain communities.

But I share this story in the hope that it might reach someone who is still not yet “out.” I understand that you may be silent for good reasons. Your own safety and well-being may be at stake, just as it was for Steve. But I bet you also know someone in your life like me. Someone who might freak a little at first, but will not hate or reject you. Someone who will learn and grow from the experience, just as you will, and will stand with you when you need a friend.

Tell them.

If there is no such person in your life, then contact me. You can message me or email me or drop a note in the comments, and we’ll talk. i promise I won’t freak. I know it’s scary, but it’s the first step toward making it better. For both of us. For all of us.

It’s National Coming Out Day.

(UPDATE [3/26/2023]: See the comments on this post and on this one. I made an unwarranted assumption about Steve. I’m glad to set the record straight, though the above post reflects how I have been thinking for the past 35 years. Those of us who remember the early days of the HIV epidemic remember how stigmatized people with HIV were in those days. It boggles my mind that today we see TV commercials pitching medications to treat HIV.)

What If It’s All Spam?

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I just filtered out the ugliest, nastiest, most racist comment I ever saw at my website.

And here’s the thing: it wasn’t a real person. It came from Russia and was a spam comment intended to get you to look at fake Cartier watches. And this got me wondering. Do Russian spammers do this a lot? Is it possible that all the anger and animosity and turmoil going on in the US right now over racial and gender and cultural issues is actually being driven by Russian spammers out to sell counterfeit merchandise?

Sounds like a science fiction story.