I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!
I know a lot of polymaths, but Ada Palmer takes the cake: brilliant science fiction writer, brilliant historian, brilliant librettist, brilliant singer, and then some:
Palmer is a friend and a colleague. In 2018, she, Adrian Johns and I collaborated on "Censorship, Information Control, & Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet," a series of grad seminars at the U Chicago History department (where Ada is a tenured prof, specializing in the Inquisition and Renaissance forbidden knowledge):
The project had its origins in a party game that Ada and I used to play at SF conventions: Ada would describe a way that the Inquisitions' censors attacked the printing press, and I'd find an extremely parallel maneuver from governments, the entertainment industry or other entities from the much more recent history of internet censorship battles.
With the seminars, we took it to the next level. Each 3h long session featured a roster of speakers from many disciplines, explaining everything from how encryption works to how white nationalists who were radicalized in Vietnam formed an armored-car robbery gang to finance modems and Apple ][+s to link up neo-Nazis across the USA.
We borrowed the structure of these sessions from science fiction conventions, home to a very specific kind of panel that doesn't always work, but when it does, it's fantastic. It was a natural choice: after all, Ada and I know each other through science fiction.
Even if you're not an sf person, you've probably heard of the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in the field, voted on each year by attendees of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). And even if you're not an sf fan, you might have heard about a scandal involving the Hugo Awards, which were held last year in China, a first:
A little background: each year's Worldcon is run by a committee of volunteers. These volunteers put together bids to host the Worldcon, and canvass Worldcon attendees to vote in favor of their bid. For many years, a group of Chinese fans attempted to field a successful bid to host a Worldcon, and, eventually, they won.
At the time, there were many concerns: about traveling to a country with a poor human rights record and a reputation for censorship, and about the logistics of customary Worldcon attendees getting visas. During this debate, many international fans pointed to the poor human rights record in the USA (which has hosted the vast majority of Worldcons since their inception), and the absolute ghastly rigmarole the US government subjects many foreign visitors to when they seek visas to come to the US for conventions.
Whatever side of this debate you came down on, it couldn't be denied that the Chinese Worldcon rang a lot of alarm-bells. Communications were spotty, and then the con was unceremoniously rescheduled for months after the original scheduled date, without any good explanation. Rumors swirled of Chinese petty officials muscling their way into the con's administration.
But the real alarm bells started clanging after the Hugo Award ceremony. Normally, after the Hugos are given out, attendees are given paper handouts tallying the nominations and votes, and those numbers are also simultaneously published online. Technically, the Hugo committee has a grace period of some weeks before this data must be published, but at every Worldcon I've attended over the past 30+ years, I left the Hugos with a data-sheet in my hand.
Then, in early December, at the very last moment, the Hugo committee released its data – and all hell broke loose. Numerous, acclaimed works had been unilaterally "disqualified" from the ballot. Many of these were written by writers from the Chinese diaspora, but some works – like an episode of Neil Gaiman's Sandman – were seemingly unconnected to any national considerations.
Readers and writers erupted in outrage, demanding to know what had happened. The Hugo administrators – Americans and Canadians who'd volunteered in those roles for many years and were widely viewed as being members in good standing of the community – were either silent or responded with rude and insulting remarks. One thing they didn't do was explain themselves.
The absence of facts left a void that rumors and speculation rushed in to fill. Stories of Chinese official censorship swirled online, and along with them, a kind of I-told-you-so: China should never have been home to a Worldcon, the country's authoritarian national politics are fundamentally incompatible with a literary festival.
As the outrage mounted and the scandal breached from the confines of science fiction fans and writers to the wider world, more details kept emerging. A damning set of internal leaks revealed that it was those long-serving American and Canadian volunteers who decided to censor the ballot. They did so out of a vague sense that the Chinese state would visit some unspecified sanction on the con if politically unpalatable works appeared on the Hugo ballot. Incredibly, they even compiled clumsy dossiers on nominees, disqualifying one nominee out of a mistaken belief that he had once visited Tibet (it was actually Nepal).
There's no evidence that the Chinese state asked these people to do this. Likewise, it wasn't pressure from the Chinese state that caused them to throw out hundreds of ballots cast by Chinese fans, whom they believed were voting for a "slate" of works (it's not clear if this is the case, but slate voting is permitted under Hugo rules).
All this has raised many questions about the future of the Hugo Awards, and the status of the awards that were given in China. There's widespread concern that Chinese fans involved with the con may face state retaliation due to the negative press that these shenanigans stirred up.
But there's also a lot of questions about censorship, and the nature of both state and private censorship, and the relationship between the two. These are questions that Ada is extremely well-poised to answer; indeed, they're the subject of her book-in-progress, entitled Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet.
In a magisterial essay for Reactor, Palmer stakes out her central thesis: "The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power":
States – even very powerful states – that wish to censor lack the resources to accomplish totalizing censorship of the sort depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They can't go from house to house, searching every nook and cranny for copies of forbidden literature. The only way to kill an idea is to stop people from expressing it in the first place. Convincing people to censor themselves is, "dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do."
Ada invokes examples modern and ancient, including from her own area of specialty, the Inquisition and its treatment of Gailileo. The Inquistions didn't set out to silence Galileo. If that had been its objective, it could have just assassinated him. This was cheap, easy and reliable! Instead, the Inquisition persecuted Galileo, in a very high-profile manner, making him and his ideas far more famous.
But this isn't some early example of Inquisitorial Streisand Effect. The point of persecuting Galileo was to convince Descartes to self-censor, which he did. He took his manuscript back from the publisher and cut the sections the Inquisition was likely to find offensive. It wasn't just Descartes: "thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial."
This is direct self-censorship, where people are frightened into silencing themselves. But there's another form of censorship, which Ada calls "middlemen censorship." That's when someone other than the government censors a work because they fear what the government would do if they didn't. Think of Scholastic's cowardly decision to pull inclusive, LGBTQ books out of its book fair selections even though no one had ordered them to do so:
This is a form of censorship outsourcing, and it "multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power." The censoring body doesn't need to hire people to search everyone's houses for offensive books – it can frighten editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers and librarians into suppressing the books in the first place.
This outsourcing blurs the line between state and private surveillance. Think about comics. After a series of high-profile Congressional hearings about the supposed danger of comics to impressionable young minds, the comics industry undertook a regime of self-censorship, through which the private Comics Code Authority would vet comings for "dangerous" content before allowing its seal of approval to appear on the comics' covers. Distributors and retailers refused to carry books without a CCA stamp, so publishers refused to publish books unless they could get a CCA stamp.
The CCA was unaccountable, capricious – and racist. By the 60s and 70s, it became clear that comic about Black characters were subjected to much tighter scrutiny than comics featuring white heroes. The CCA would reject "a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as 'too graphic' since it 'could be mistaken for blood.'" Every comic that got sent back by the CCA meant long, brutal reworkings by writers and illustrators to get them past the censors.
The US government never censored heroes like Black Panther, but the chain of events that created the CCA "middleman censors" made sure that Black Panther appeared in far fewer comics starring Marvel's most prominent Black character. An analysis of censorship that tries to draw a line between private and public censorship would say that the government played no role in Black Panther's banishment to obscurity – but without Congressional action, Black Panther would never have faced censorship.
This is why attempts to cleanly divide public and private censorship always break down. Many people will tell you that when Twitter or Facebook blocks content they disagree with, that's not censorship, since censorship is government action, and these are private actors. What they mean is that Twitter and Facebook censorship doesn't violate the First Amendment, but it's perfectly possible to infringe on free speech without violating the US Constitution. What's more, if the government fails to prevent monopolization of our speech forums – like social media – and also declines to offer its own public speech forums that are bound to respect the First Amendment, we can end up with government choices that produce an environment in which some ideas are suppressed wherever they might find an audience – all without violating the Constitution:
The great censorious regimes of the past – the USSR, the Inquisition – left behind vast troves of bureaucratic records, and these records are full of complaints about the censors' lack of resources. They didn't have the manpower, the office space, the money or the power to erase the ideas they were ordered to suppress. As Ada notes, "In the period that Spain’s Inquisition was wildly out of Rome’s control, the Roman Inquisition even printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing!"
Censors have always done – and still do – their work not by wielding power, but by projecting it. Even the most powerful state actors are not powerful enough to truly censor, in the sense of confiscating every work expressing an idea and punishing everyone who creates such a work. Instead, when they rely on self-censorship, both by individuals and by intermediaries. When censors act to block one work and not another, or when they punish one transgressor while another is free to speak, it's tempting to think that they are following some arcane ruleset that defines when enforcement is strict and when it's weak. But the truth is, they censor erratically because they are too weak to censor comprehensively.
Spectacular acts of censorship and punishment are a performance, "to change the way people act and think." Censors "seek out actions that can cause the maximum number of people to notice and feel their presence, with a minimum of expense and manpower."
The censor can only succeed by convincing us to do their work for them. That's why drawing a line between state censorship and private censorship is such a misleading exercise. Censorship is, and always has been, a public-private partnership.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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One of our lovely Patrons is doing research on fandom and fanfiction, and if you're located in the US, you can help out!
I’m Brianna Dym, a faculty member at The Roux Institute and am also a pretty enthusiastic participant in fandom. I research how marginalized groups use technology to empower themselves. I want to talk to fellow fanfiction writers about your experience writing fanfic, what you write about, and when you write fic.
Or! If you don't write fic but are an avid reader, I'd still love to talk to you. If you are interested in sharing your story or have questions about the study, you can reach out to me at [email protected] or by responding to this survey with preferred contact information.
The survey collects no identifiable information beyond what you choose to share. Your experiences can help contribute to understanding linguistic features of empowerment in stories.
Honestly, I think RR just has a really off colour / weird / sideways sense of humour. I personally don’t like or appreciate it, but lots of people clearly do (otherwise her books wouldn’t have ever been as popular as they are).
I also think she’s unconsciously racist. If you’re white, it’s impossible to escape, no matter how much work you put into tackling it. (Honestly, I think internalising racism is impossible to escape regardless of what racial category you live within.)
Most importantly death of the author is a thing. Her statements do not matter to my or your or anyone’s interpretation of her work or the adaptations of it.
The Game Changers books and Heated Rivalry show are in the world now. We own them. Not in the literal sense (the IP and revenue and royalties still belong to RR and accent aigu) but in the sense that we can do anything, anything at all, with her characters and her world, and as long as we’re not profiting from it, noone can stop us.
I don’t want to see your hot takes on RR.
I want to see your art and your fic and your meta.
(I mean, your blog is your blog. I’m not trying to stop you doing anything you want to. Go off. I just won’t be reading those posts any more.)
idk if this is a hot take but "cringe culture" (or whatever tf we're calling it) will wreak havoc on fannish archival practices.
current and former fans are deleting, archiving, and/or disavowing fanworks that aren't "problematic" or harmful simply bc they're afraid of being perceived as cringe. even when they are works for fandoms that had or have a long streak of harmful behavior, we need these fanworks - including fanart, fic, rec lists, criticism, etc - to be extant so that our fandom archives can be full and complete with context.
we lose a lot when all we know about harmful fandom behavior comes from secondary sources. in addition, we lose a lot when everyone is scared of being cringe and good, amazing fanworks are taken down simply for the crime of having the potential for cringe.
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Large Scale Fanzine Scanning Projects (Fanac): Fandom History
A special thank you to Fanac - a science fiction and fantasy fandom group that has been working to preserve their corner of fandom history.
Fanac focuses on literary (book) fandom, with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy fanzines from the 1930s-1960s. They maintain a website that hosts many fanzines in PDF format. This year they started offering scanning stations at science fiction conventions where people can bring their zines to be scanned. They will have a scanning station at Dublin Worldcon this weekend. They also have a wonderful YouTube channel: https://youtuber.com/c/FANACFanHistory
From their latest newsletter
"At Boskone 56 (February) and again at Corflu 36 (May), we arranged with the conventions to set up our FANAC Scanning Station. We bring at least one scanner and computer and ask that fans bring fanzines to the convention that we can scan and archive online. This has been pretty successful, resulting in our scanning over 2,000 pages at Boskone and over 3,500 pages at Corflu. We had many notable contributions of fanzines for scanning, including from Grant Canfield, Frederic Gooding III, Susan Graham and her scanning team at UMBC, Rob Hansen, Dan Steffan, Geri Sullivan (2019 TAFF delegate), Pat Virzi and especially Rob Jackson who allowed us to scan a large stack of zines that were later auctioned for fan charities. Since Corflu, we’ve put over 600 fanzines online. We’ve arranged with the Dublin 2019 Worldcon to have a scanning station there as well. If you’re coming, bring something for us to scan.
FANAC Fan History Project website: http://fanac.org As of today, we have 8,069 fanzines online, with over 92,500 pages. Of those, 2,902 are newszines (and thanks to David Ritter for the first volume of Taurasi’s Fantasy News!). Recently, we’ve tried to increase the number of fanzine titles for which we have complete runs. These are as varied as Joe Kennedy’s Vampire (1940s) to Karen Anderson’s Vorpal Glass (1960s) to Benford/White/et al’s Void (1950s-1960s). Other recently complete runs include Aporrheta (Sanderson), Bane (Ryan), Bastion (Bentcliffe), BEM (Ashworth), Blat! (White/Steffan), Epsilon (Hansen), Oopsla! (Calkins), Pendulum (Venable), Pong (White/Steffan), Spaceways (Warner), Starspinkle (Ellik), Telos (Nielsen Hayden), and Tolkien Journal (Plotz/Meskys).Â
As a sidelight, one of our favorite fans, Lee Hoffman, also published two of the earliest (if not the earliest) folk music fanzines, and we’ve put those online as well: Caravan (1957-59) and Gardyloo (1959-60). We’ve also been adding a lot of UK fanzines. These have ranged from the 1930s to the present. They include Maurice Hanson’s Novae Terrae (thanks to Rob Hansen for the scans), C.S. Youd’s (aka JohnChristopher) Fantast, plus the above listed zines BEM, Aporrheta, Bastion, and Epsilon. Others include: Weston’s Speculation, Clarke’s Eye, Joan Carr et al’s Femizine, Enever & Parker’s Orion, Berry’s Pot Pourri, and more. One more interesting item from the UK: thanks to Ian Sorensen, we have the transcript of the highly entertaining GoH speech that James White gave at the 1983 Eastercon in Glasgow, titled “The Scottish Influence on Sector General”. With our scanning station at Dublin 2019, we hope to add many Irish and other European fanzines.
You might also be interested in newly uploaded issues of Terry Carr’s Innuendo and Lighthouse, Riddle’s Peon, Geis’ Psychotic/Science Fiction Review, Alien Critic... and Harlan Ellison’s fanzines."
ok so heres a quick fan account of the sydney bts concert yesterday it was suCH A GOOD NIGHT
-management was a Mess, the fans had to help everyone else find their spots in the lines
-security was TIGHT (full body checks, police walking around, bag checks) which meant we had to line up longer but it was comforting after what happened in manchester
-once we got into the mosh pit it took 2 hours to actually start, everyone was proper hyped the entire time though like singing along to the mvs they were playing n shit
-so they didnt sell any merch for some damn reason that they wouldnt say so we didnt have a lot of lightsticks but fans ended up like making like australian flag colours in the seated sections with their phones or whatever and we had a banner project for the encore which worked rly well
-the arena was sold out and fans were so excited, doing fanchants for all the members solos and the cute “i wish i could love myself” “WE LOVE YOU” shit i cried lmao
-the boys were GLOWING like they looked fuckin radiant like they talked abt how this was the first concert since the bbmas win and you could tell they were all so happy
-yoongi and jhope rly surprised me, jhope has so much energy and charisma u cant help but be happy when u look at him and yoongi is just so damn cute like his smile is adorable
-jhope and jin probably got the loudest cheers which was awesome even though we were legit hyped for all of them
-yoongi messed up when he was trying to say “you guys are legit” and asked namjoon for help and like cracked up it was rly cute
-namjoon said he enjoyed the scenery and weather while he was here which was nice im so happy they got to relax
-i had like. a proper Moment with tae yall ok so like during one of the talking sections on the outer stage when we were behind them, we could only see their backs so almost everyone was turned around filming them on the screens but like tae turned around and looked towards our section so i made a lil heart at him and he nodded and smiled at me i could cry just thinking abt it
-me and my friend got splashed with water twice during the songs like we were pretty close to the stage it was amazing
-the fire they shoot outta the stage is???? legit hot???? we were like 5 meters away from it and could still feel it like Fire was serious i was burning
