(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.