As you may or may not be aware, there is a maelstrom brewing under the surface of the internet regarding racism and sexism in the world of Science Fiction. Generally referred to as "RaceFail," the simplest way I can think of to describe it is as sort of a metaflamewar that's been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few years now. It's been going on so long and has involved so many different players that I don't think anyone involved in it really understands the whole thing. To this gigantic clusterfuck of fevered egos, I have decided to add my own small contribution, in part to try to at least sort of map the whole thing, and also to try to talk about what I see as the real underpinnings of the whole controversy and where it comes from. No, it's not Nick Mamatas's fault.

I love the short story form. Unlike JF Quackenbush, Flash Fiction always feels incomplete to me, like an appetizer without a main course. And I love novels, but sometimes an idea can and should be expressed compactly; indeed often the joy of the short story is seeing how the author pulls off the full expression of something in so few pages.

There is a certain fragment of the literary world that drives me fucking bonkers. In my mind, it is epitomized by travel writers, freelance copywriters, Neal Pollack, Poets & Writers magazine, writerswrite.com, preditors & editors, and Nick Mamatas. This is the subculture within the literary community where the act of writing has become little more than a performative task that functions as a signifier rather than a craft that is merely a means to produce an end. In this subculture what matters is not that one has produced good writing but that one is seen to be writing productively. In this world the legitimacy of one's writing has nothing to do with its style or content or mastery, but rather that one can point to various facts that, separate from one's work, are taken to be markers of personal legitimacy in the claim to writerhood. Far from the true virtue of writing, ie the production of quality literature regardless of recognition or fiduciary recompense, this instead is a world of a different kind. Rather than the world of writing as artform, it is the world of what I have come to think of as writing as lifestyle, populated by a crowd of mental lepers suffering from Writer as Lifestyle Syndrome (WaLS). And I for one am totally sick of it.

Out right now: Best American Fantasy 2 (v. 2). This book contains some stunning stories, including "The Drowned Life" by Jeffrey Ford, which reminded me of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading; a story by Peter S. Beagle that's deceptively Borgesian in its investigation of identity; and Kelly Link proving yet again why she's the best short story writer working today. This is what good short fiction looks like, this is the kind of anthology you want to buy.

Seriously, go buy now. Especially you, Quackenbush.

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman points out that the GOP, once the party of ideas, has "become the party of Beavis and Butthead."

I couldn't agree more, but I think they're actually a little more Butthead than Beavis these days. See, apparently some C list pundit on CNBC went off on a tangent about the Boston Tea Party and how apparently he sees some link between The Stimulus Package and the Stamp Act or something, because he has called for Americans who agree with him to re-enact the Boston Tea Party in protest of it.

Apparently, the wealthiest 5% of americans are unhappy with the fact that under the Stimulus act with it's extension of the waiver for the AMT, they're going to save only somewhere in the vicinity of a few grand on their taxes this year vs current law, and really they think that they ought to be getting an even bigger tax break.

And somehow, and the way these scum do this never ceases to astound me, those wealthiest 5 percent have convinced a bunch of other idiots to go out protest with them that they didn't get enough of a tax break.

That's right folks, the conservatives are having themselves a good old fashioned patriotic street protest. Because apparently not happy with putting the economy in a tailspin with their disastrous dogmatic adherence to a bullshit economic theory that most of them don't even know the name of, they would now like to take this opportunity to whine about the fact that while the income by percentage of the population increases exponentially across the populations in the top ten percent of earners in the US, the tax brackets barely increase at all over that range. Meaning that a person who makes 300,000 grand a year pays roughly the same percentage of his income in taxes as somone making in excess of 2 million a year.

Of course, it's no secret that taxation is bordering on regressive in the USA. The Republicans have been trying to make that happen for decades now, and the result is the monstrous increase in deficits and debt that have been happening since Saint Ronnie Ray-Gun had the purse strings in the eighties. And, y'know, I've watched Fox News, so I know that these fucking scumbags are capable of getting their panties all twisted up at the drop of a hat.

But to actually stage a Nation Wide Protest because the aren't getting still MORE money? That's just ghoulish. They've turned into that douchebag who insists on splitting the check evenly at the end of the night even though he had three times as many drinks and the live Maine lobster while everyone else picked at appetizers. Seriously Republicans, we on the left, we know a little something about staging a protest. We've been at it a lot longer than you, and we picked up a few things over the years. One of the most important rules? Surprisingly enough, it's the rule that says you should never protest over an issue that makes you look like a greedy sack of shit. Funny how this one works out, but when you go out in public and make a lot of noise about what a greedy sack of shit you are, you don't win over a lot of new political allies super anxious to be your best friend so that everyone will think that they are greedy sacks of shit too.

But by all means, if you all insist on having your little jamboree, go nuts. But you really should be ashamed of yourselves.

UPDATE: I am sort of annoyed that more people aren't as annoyed by this as I am. Maybe it's just that word hasn't got out enough. Still, even if these things are a raucous success, it's not going to change anything. Obama is still president. Democrats still control the legislature. And conservatives are still too dense to realize how effete and privileged organizing a national day for a tea party makes them.

SF in Conversation: Epilogue

This is the final part of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

My review of the short fiction anthology Logorrhea has just been published on the New Haven Review website.

The New Haven Review incidentally is edited by Brian Francis Slattery, the very excellent author of Spaceman Blues: A Love Song and Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (which books you should read right now), and is worth checking out.

So people are freaking out about Facebook thanks to this story on The Consumerist.

I'm curious about it because the whole thing just, well, seems ridiculous. For one thing, I continue to find it baffling that people feel as though they can control works of intellectual property uploaded to sites that are indexable by search engines. One of the reasons I'm still a livejournal user is the fact that I can keep posts there locked and off of google.

Up front I should probably say something that Chris Walters, the blogger and chicken little at The Consumerist who apparently started this panic, didn't say in his article. I am not a lawyer and no expert on intellectual property rights. I did however study intellectual property rights and have about as much knowledge of the byzantine nonsense that is US copyright law as any layman can claim to have. I also, apparently, have a greater level of reading comprehension than Mr. Chicken Little Walters and the various other barnyard animals who have been parroting his "OMG DUDES FACEBOOK PWNS ALL YR STUFF NOW" conclusion in the above blog post.

Of particular importance is the part of the Facebook TOS that the sensationalist boobs at The Consumerist failed to read completely. Below you will find the entire relevant section of the TOS quoted in full, emphasis mine: