The insanity of the Publishing Industry: Part 1
There has been an ongoing whine that SF as a genre is dying. Stirling has stated his problems getting real SF published. I would like to explore via occassional raps why I feel this is happening.
Case in point the first:
Silverberg editorial in latest Asimov [April/May 2005]: topic is thoughtcrime in modern US.
Now there is a very evident narrowing of what various groups on traditionalist right and PC anti-hate speech Left find acceptable. The hammer that descended on Summers, the Harvard President, over daring to say that sex differences might in the macro exist should be a poster child. It happened after the article was written but there have been similar incidents down through the years. <http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html>
Equally we could have listened to the question of free speech in wartime. In an age when private citizens can kill three thousand people by misusing common technology when does advocacy of attacking the US [ Ward Churchill forex] became actionable Wrecker conspiracy.
Instead the two cases mentioned show a complete lack of ANY understanding of what is happening.
The first involves the bizaaro kiddie porn laws. Teen sex seems to freak this culture out BIGTIME. We market teen sexuality from Britany to Buffy to runway models regarded as 'old' at 19. We sell tween [10-12 year old] fashions in every mall that would have been extreme for street hookers at the Hudson tunnel exits in the early 60's. Then we make depiction of sex by those under 18 illegal despite over half the states in the Union having a lower age of consent. Skitz and I have posted on the Eye endlessly on the disconnect [that I could be arrested for taking bathing suit pictures of females I could legally boink]. So the first example Silverburg uses...[glyph of dramatic drum beat] ...a man who wrote kiddie [under 10] and adult porno and kept it on his own computer. No website. No sending by emails. No publication of any sort. But this is not thoughtcrime per se. It is the idiot kiddie porn laws and their essentially random enforcement. Yes it is stupid. Yes it is a waste of police resources. However, the issue isn't thoughtcrime but rather the teen sex disconnect. Hell, this even came up on a VERY small writing group I'm in. Had several series of stories I did playing with mood on two possible future game lines - a 70's-90's demimonde and what amounted to a rewrite of my initial proposal for what became Bloodshadows back when I had WEG. Both feature teen characters who were sexually active. Absolutely no actual depictions of sex - sex itself doesn't fit my sort of RPG worlds. But characters who had social connections via past, present or possibly future sexual entanglements. And several members of the group freaked. Did not want to deal with the stories unless EVERY character was over 18. Totto, America [and the UK given home of some members] is not in Kansas anymore. They are in a Galaxy far far away where we can hypersexualize fashion, lifestyle and media for tweens and up but the same youngsters will all remain virgins associating with other virgins until their 18th birthday. ROFL.
The second involved a writing assignment at a college in SF. Assignment was to do a story from the point of view of an evil character - very American Psycho. One dweeb does too good a story. The instructor plays CYA and kicks it up the chain of command. Cut to the chase...student is booted out of school, instructor's contract is not renewed. However again this isn't thoughtcrime or even PC run wild. The subtext shot through all of this was the shadow of Columbine and the endless fear of legal liablity. The ravenous tort bar, plus unlimited theories of extended legal liablity, has made everyone gunshy. We are reaching the point where safe is always going to be better than sorry for an institution with deep pockets. Final Sword Productions is safe. If someone won a judgement and seized the nominal assets it wouldn't be worth the time of the shyster who filed the suit. However we live in a feminized, NIMBY society that sues everyone in sight whenever bad luck happens. As there are no clear rules, no legal safe harbors everyone is running scared. It is a mess. It is a societal tragedy. It is not the thoughtcrime problem.
No THAT problem is clear. Ward Churchill is obnoxious but clearly not advocating anyone in particular to do anything in particular. He is engaged in provo, in posturing but probably not in agitating much less conspiring. At the other end, Osma again uses words. He has probably never fired a shot in anger at an American. However if we catch him and try him, we will hang him. The deeds were done in his name, with his knowledge, at his direction. He is as guilty as a Mafia don who gives the kill orders through cutouts but doesn't pull the trigger himself anymore. Fine. Those are the goal posts. Now define where beyond Churchill mere words and advocacy reach criminal action. We are left with the old definition of porn: "I know it when I see it". Except a jury in Macon Georgia is going to see it in a different place than a jury in the US Court for the Southern District of NY in Manhattan. And that court post 911 will see it more strictly than a Federal jury in SF. These are death penalty cases we are talking about and we cannot define exactly what conduct gets you the jump. This is a mamouth step back from rule of law to 'be good or else'. Essentially to thoughtcrime. As a society we are in the position of having to write extreme penalties for crimes we essentially cannot define, crimes that definitely cut to the heart of what the Framers meant by political speech. Now I'm from the Levrenti Beria School of Internal Security Studies. I can live with the result. I can even agree with the process that gets you to the result. However this is thoughtcrime beyond even the worst ever attributed to Joe McCarthy. It is a trend driven by tech. Tech that makes life wonderful in so many ways but enables a handful of malcontents to do more than throw iron bombs Haymarket style. This is where SF should be exploring thoughtcrime. Instead we get Silverberg, a recognized old master, dealing with two legal-political quirks in the system. The failure of imagination is breath taking. We have reached a technolevel where Wreckers [to use my DNOS term] can kill cities. How much risk for how much freedom of thought. Imagine what a Heinlein could have done with this material!
If SF dies it will be because it's writers have gotten upper middle class and civilized enough so that they simply cannot relate to writing stories how the impact of technology and society. And then SF will deserve to die.
posted by scott 11:03 AM