Category: Reckoning

Do the Right Thing: A Hugo Rant

On by in Angry, Editing, Environmental Justice, Reckoning

(This is the uncensored, uncut version of an editorial piece appearing today at Reckoning. Content warning: a lot of swearing.)

Let me begin by repeating that Reckoning is actively seeking work by marginalized writers and artists, we would love to publish more work in translation, we pay translators the same rate we pay authors (10 cents a word for prose, $50 per page for poetry and art), and though we are not currently able to review or translate work written in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and a myriad of other languages, we can and do read in English, French, Swedish, and Spanish, and we get excited every single time we encounter in our submissions a new piece of translated work, or any work from part of the world or from a perspective we’ve never encountered before. We are very lucky to be able to say we’ve now got a native Spanish speaker on staff, who will hopefully open us up to many more of those experiences and enable us to publish even more diverse work.

I perceive the dangerous potential, as daily worse things seem to come out about the behavior of the Hugo admin committee responsible for fucking over so many great authors and the entire fandom of China not to mention various individual humans in their immediate vicinity, of writing them off as irrevocably evil outliers and therefore not representative of problems in our field as a whole. But how do individual people get this shitty? They get encouraged. If they’re entitled white men, that encouragement need amount to nothing more than looking the other way, because for entitled white men, silence is consent. (Important note: it’s not. Fuck off, entitled white men.) How do individual people get encouraged to be better? By positive peer pressure. By example.

I would like to encourage you to look around at your own section of this community and ask yourself, where is this trend leading and why?

I’ve grown accustomed over the course of my very minor career as a writer and editor in this field to being dismissed by idiots as being brainwashed by “liberal guilt”, engaged in handwringing, etc, a generally write-offable extreme outlier not worth listening to. I shrug it off. It’s easy, because I’m an entitled white man. I’ve also grown accustomed, due to the very minorness of my career and my pursuant utter lack of interest in being subjected to popularity contests of any kind, to not piping up like this about the latest crisis. I don’t want a Hugo. I have no skin in this game. But the trouble, the good trouble, with publishing a magazine featuring work by people I care deeply about and want to succeed is that it makes me care on their behalf. Nobody can sell to Reckoning all the time and call it a career. Our authors go on to appear in Clarkesworld and Asimov’s and F&SF, and they’re proud and happy, and I’m proud of them and want them to be happy. Some of them even dream of winning a Hugo, I daresay. I want them to be able to dream.

I also want the latest crisis to stop overshadowing the previous, ongoing crisis and the one before that. I want reassurances that just because the Hugo committee has provided us a great honking ugly scapegoat whose clutch on the reins of power is not so steely we can’t unseat him, we’re not allowing that to be an excuse to conveniently forget that, for one glaring example, the insidious shutting-out of Palestinian voices is still going on and does not have a clear, single figurehead responsible for us to point fingers at. There are so many compounded crises going on, anyone can be forgiven for not addressing every one all the time loud enough so nobody else forgets. But we can’t forget. Individually, we can and indeed must pick an injustice flavor of the week to try to address and make traction against if we can, with our voices, our donations, our votes, because if we don’t we’ll go insane. But we can’t let the flavor of the week blot out all the other injustice.

What is the antidote to trickle-down gatekeeping, to bureaucratic power-clutching and uninterrogated fascist creep? The antidote, like the problem, is manifold. We need awards run by non-assholes. Juried awards, with juries of non-assholes empaneled by non-assholes. The Ignyte awards are such an award. So are the Shirleys. Support them, care about them, pay attention to who wins, give them money. Our fellow Detroit-based indie press Atthis Arts bent over backwards this past year rescuing an anthology of Ukrainian SFF, Embroidered Worlds, from the slag heap. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Lift them up. We need magazines like Strange Horizons (who published a Palestinian special issue in 2020), Fiyah, Clarkesworld (who have long been in the vanguard of championing translated work and translators), Omenana, and khoréo (their year 4 fundraiser ends 2/29). We need magazines whose editors and staff are actively listening to, seeking out, boosting, celebrating, paying—and translating, paying, and celebrating translators of—Chinese, Taiwanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Congolese, Nigerian, Disabled, Neurodivergent, Queer, and Trans voices. Do I, in that litany, miss anybody currently getting oppressed and shut out? Undoubtedly I do. This work is unending. I choose to keep at it. Reckoning authors, readers, and staff keep signaling to me that I’m right to.

Our contributors routinely tell us what an exceptionally relaxed, kind, professional, supportive experience it is selling us their work. I do not generally talk about this, though it is among the most rewarding things about publishing Reckoning. I tend to feel pleased but uncomfortable about it, because from my perspective, I did not do anything special. I was polite. I told them out loud how much I actually liked the work I was offering to pay them for. I paid promptly, and if obstacles got in the way of that payment due to eyeroll-inducing, ass-covering corporate or international bureaucracy, I surmounted those obstacles as best I could. I celebrated their work. I submitted it for a bunch of awards I personally do not care about. The end.

No, not quite, I realize. There’s the editing, which can get involved, and for which the decisionmaking process is not always as trivial. Reckoning staff is great at this. It feels easy, mostly. Our authors are in earnest, they care about their work, it shows, it makes us care and want them to feel satisfied and valued. We want them to get what they want out of publishing with us. It’s not like that’s not challenging work, sometimes. The world is complex, justice is many-faceted because there are so many invested parties. But really, operating on those first principles, the steps almost always feel as if they’re just falling into place.

But we look around at the rest of publishing, we hear the discourse, and it’s confusing, sometimes, how difficult this work can seem.

The Hugo admins are the current glaring example. A very few people appear to have twisted themselves all up in knots making their job seem far harder than it should for terrible reasons. You’re supposed to help the science fiction fans of earth decide among themselves equably what is the best work in our field. You’re supposed to provide an example of how the utopian principles on which this field is founded can manifest in the real world. How are we supposed to get to the united—though still bureaucratically contentious and inescapably prejudicial—planet envisioned by Gene Roddenberry? What are we meant to take away from the vast, genius life’s work of Le Guin? How do we grapple with the criticisms of human nature raised by Octavia Butler? These are big, complicated questions, in the contemplation of which we cannot avoid self-scrutiny, we cannot help employing nuance, entering gray areas, turning a critical eye on these icons as well as the institutions who are responsible for making us love this field in the first place. I cannot help feeling like too many are shying away from those questions rather than engaging them.

The Hugo admins aren’t the only ones. The PEN Awards have recently been actively lifting up pro-genocide voices and suppressing Palestinian voices. A story we published, “All We Have Left Is Ourselves” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, won a PEN Award for emerging writers in 2021. How can you administer an award designed specifically to remedy the way the publishing establishment has systematically ignored marginalized voices and then side with imperialism? There’s an open letter from a bunch of not-assholes calling the PEN organization to task for this. Reckoning is among the non-assholes who have signed it.

Over my eight year tenure as publisher of Reckoning, I’ve heard complaints from a number of authors about a number of fiction markets which shall here remain nameless who insist on paying authors with PayPal and or not at all. PayPal recently auto-suspended Reckoning’s account because we used their service to pay a Palestinian author for their work (and then unsuspended us only after we called in the BBB and CPA, a tactic we glowingly recommend). They also have routinely shut us out from paying Mexican, Russian, Nigerian and Bangladeshi authors. Do we then throw up our hands and not pay those authors? No, we find another service, we pay the fees, we jump through the hoops until they get paid.

If you’ve been following the Hugos discussion, you’ve probably been admonished several hundred times by now not to pre-oppress yourself—wait and let the fascists do that. In other words, insofar as it is safe for you and those vulnerable around you, provoke fascists. Make them censor and oppress you by doing the right thing. Maybe you’ve noticed that the people out there at the protests chaining themselves to things and getting arrested tend to be the very young, the very old, and the very most directly vulnerable. In case you’ve wondered why: it’s because the young and old are the ones without dependents. Either they can afford the risk or they’re already so much at risk they might as well put their bodies on the line. Either way, we’re all in their debt.

I have discussed this with Reckoning staff, they have apprised me of the risks. I, an entitled white man, do hereby arrogate those risks solely unto myself in declaring these statements mine and mine alone (all use of the first person plural above is the editorial “we”, not the collective), and Reckoning open to all morally defensible points of view, up to and including that Chinese and Chinese dissident voices should not be discarded outside the gate to the field’s most popular award, Palestinian and dissident Israeli voices should not be suppressed because anyone is squeamish about genocide or the politics of wealth, English should not be the lingua franca of the future nor English speakers its arbiters, all tools at our disposal should be employed to circumvent that shit, translators should be credited and paid, figureheads and bankrupt institutions should be torn down not pandered to. Sitting quietly by is what allows these institutions to perpetuate across generations! Fuck complacency.

Grow a backbone and a conscience, my fellow gatekeepers. Thank you.

Everyone else: please send us your work.

Access to Nature

On by in Environmentalism, Reckoning
A field in Michigan

I’ve been reading a lot of Reckoning submissions, and inevitably, in enough volume, they do what they always do: make me want to write something about the collective attitude towards the inhuman I can’t help but perceive in them.

What is this great lament and fear that humans have lost touch with nature? I see it again and again.

A poem strives to devastate with the way children kill bugs as an indicator for the way “we” (humans? industrialized humans? colonizer humans?) kill everything. But the pain doesn’t land. All the children I know love bugs—some bugs, at least—and want to save them. The parents of the children I know, operating upon only the most rudimentary of understandings communicated to them by children’s tv and children’s books dumbed down and cuted up so as not to offend, cast about for milkweed seeds to plant in their neighborhoods to save the butterflies. Milkweed will only save monarchs, and the common milkweed everybody plants isn’t enough. It’s not even their preferred species; they like swamp milkweed and joe pye far better. But those are less weedy, harder to grow—and to understand the distinction between the three species, one has to pay a modicum of attention to plants. A lot of people don’t. But they’re trying. They care, they want to understand, they have been shown the writing on the wall and they believe it because of their children, who never learned to indiscriminately stomp on beautiful living things.

Stories and essays go on about the built environment and its inhospitability to nature causing us all to grow up unaccustomed to and therefore confused by and irrationally afraid of the natural world, leaving some of us (urban humans, those without disposable income) desperate and despairing for the kind of “pure” nature we can never have and can only even conceptualize with incredible inaccuracy, Everest, the Amazon, the Serengeti, the Great Barrier Reef, while simultaneously disdaining, ignoring, unseeing the elements of nature that are everywhere, inescapable: pigeons, sparrows, rats, cockroaches, ants, bedbugs, dandelions, purslane, a plane tree behind a fence, white mulberry, ragweed, mosquitoes, fruit flies, houseflies. The easy nature, the obvious nature, isn’t worth the name. We didn’t need to expend money and effort to see it, it’s not rare, so nobody told us to take it to heart, so we don’t.

But that’s wrong.

Anthropogenic nature is nature. Grocery store apples are apples, GMO corn is corn. The sky is nature. Weather and wind. And water: all water not sterilized and wrapped in plastic. Viruses are nature. There’s no getting away from it. Degraded nature, no matter how degraded, is still beautiful, amazing, it still has lifetimes on lifetimes of lessons to teach.

I know the role of privilege in this. I live a mile from the woods, and that makes me very lucky. I go to the woods all the time, I feel safe and at home there, I always have something to do in the woods, with the woods, besides just looking at it, whether it’s cleaning up trash, clearing invasives, foraging, or harvesting native seeds to distribute where there isn’t any woods in hopes of making more. I’ve lived within a mile of woods my whole life, except possibly the four years I was in college, when I could—and would, not infrequently—drive two hours to mountains. I kept choosing to live within a mile of woods. Even at my poorest, I managed to find a cheap, shitty, basement-level apartment across the street from the Park of Roses in Columbus. When I came to Michigan I ended up moving sight unseen into a place overlooking a parking lot and an auto body shop, and that was the least nature I have ever lived among, it was awful, it was torture, but I was more than desperate enough to find within ten minutes’ biking distance the tiny, three-acre rectangular woodlots and drainage easement marshes and linger in them, looking out at the alley behind the grocery store. But even that impulse, that desperation, comes to me from my upbringing. I was given the whereweithal to feel at home in the woods by my family. Among the components of that wherewithal are my whiteness, my able body, my financial solvency, my masculinity.

I can’t really feel what it’s like to grow up in urbanized India, like the author of one essay, yearning helplessly for the kind of woods I’ve nearly always been able to walk to. Perhaps if that author’s skills were better developed, I could? I go to New York and I have to search, desperately, for that one lone plane tree behind a fence at the corner of the next block. But I find it, and it comforts me.

I was given these skills. There were times they had to be forced on me, when my parents had to all but drag me away from books and video games, the built environment. But eventually those lessons took, and ever since, I’ve developed them. Now I find I am able to see nature in the dirty back corner of my basement, where the house spiders and centipedes hide waiting to eat the house flies and sugar ants and mosquitoes, where the microbes—some of which I have introduced—wait to provide me with delicious fermented sauerkraut and cider on demand. I can’t unsee it. I am a part of this web. I depend on them; they depend on me. I try to live with them, not against them. If, someday, some of my privilege is withdrawn such that I can no longer live within walking distance of the woods, I think maybe I could get a microscope or at least a magnifying glass and settle into the world of that tiny, everyday nature, take solace in it, learn more of its secrets, allow it to absorb and cradle me and remind me I’m part of something bigger the way I rely on the woods for now.

When I think about 2 degrees C, about mass extinction, mass habitat destruction, I can find comfort in the fact that there’s nothing we can collectively do to eradicate ants, cockroaches, rats, house sparrows, COVID and the common cold from our immediate proximity, let alone from this earth. But I had to be taught at least the rudiments of how to see the world this way. I had to practice. Sometimes against my will. Sometimes kid me just wanted to stay in the basement on a beautiful day and play video games. It was easy, comfortable, it was the path of least resistance. It was easy to believe I didn’t need anything from the woods then. Sometimes my kid wants the same thing. Sometimes I insist.

Reading these submissions from folks who didn’t have someone to do that for them—or who didn’t have access to woods to do it in—hurts.

Here I am, then. To whatever extent I came by them honestly, I am possessed of the skills. It’s twelve years since I moved to Michigan and had to learn to survive and find wilderness amid strip mall parking lots and the intermittent racket of machine saws. I want to say to everyone within the sound of my voice, come on, I will teach you this, I will show you nature. Care about nature, even the tiny everyday nature. It’s easy, look. Here’s how to go to the woods, here’s how to stay there and invest. I’m something of a hermit, it’s true. You’ve got to come to me. But I’m serious, come. Complaining about our disconnection with nature doesn’t help. I’ve tried. I’m sure you’ve noticed it, too. Do something about it instead. Please.

Come to the woods with me. Bring your kids.

Climate Tipping Points and Reckoning

On by in Angry, Environmentalism, Monumental Metaphor, Reckoning

We are close to the climate tipping point. Lots of people are talking about it. Others are ignoring the shit out of it. Do we hit it at 1.5C, and are we going to be there in 5 years, as the headline told me this morning? It sure does feel like it, with this ongoing wildfire smoke inhalation sore throat and my homeland of New England being devastated by flash flooding and everything else.

What is the tipping point, how irrevocable is it, and what’s the bottom of that curve? Not the end of all life on earth. That’s not on the table. Humans aren’t that important. We are the sixth mass extinction, not the last, and it’s hubris to think otherwise. The end of human life? I really doubt that’s on the table, either. But I begin to see a lot of treatments of those ideas, in Reckoning submissions and elsewhere. And the prospect of it is so horrific to me—the prospect of people contemplating it, even more than the actual prospect of the end of all life on earth, honestly, because the one is immediate and has immediate consequences for people and life on earth right now, whereas the other is a concept, abstract—that it begins to present something of a problem for me as publisher and nominal helmsperson aboard the ship Reckoning. What we do after the tipping point doesn’t interest me nearly as much as what we do now.

What does Reckoning do after the tipping point? Become a horror mag? That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, as far as the work of bringing new literature into the world is concerned. But the potential looms large for a Reckoning in such a world to become something I can no longer commit to, and which therefore must either leave my hands, become something different, or go the way of extinction. I don’t want to be a publisher of climate fatalism. I don’t want to speculate about burning this planet to the ground and abandoning it. I want to speculate about fucking saving it.

I can and do ask people—all the time—not to submit writing that subscribes to the idea of giving up. And we sure do reject a lot of it—more, lately? We also publish plenty of work that does engage with the idea that there could be a point of no return, and the emotions that proceed from it. It’s a fine line, and we will continue, as long as we’re able, to try to refine that line, to recognize and elucidate the ways human beings need to percieve and engage with the concept of our end in fire and flood and drought and pestilence because of the actions of an entrenched, omnicidal few, in order to go on struggling forward against them and in conjunction with all other life.

But it sure is hard, sometimes. And getting harder.