So in yesterday's post I swore off flame wars and such. Time will tell if I keep to my word. But while I've sworn off these miserable wastes of time, I couldn't help thinking about them in a somewhat analytical light. And I noticed some stuff. Or at least I think I did. I'm putting it out there to see if people agree, as well as what they think.
When it comes to the big debates in the speculative community on the internet, the ones that really get people's hackles up, is it my imagination or does it seem that lately many of the biggest ones have revolved around stuff going on in the short fiction community? And doesn't it seem that it's often a fiction editor at the heart of the controversy? Take a look at the last year or so and here's the stuff that comes to mind for me (note: I'm going to try to provide links with a wide range of views to keep this as impartial as possible):
1) Whether Gordon Van Gelder was reading women's submissions with an unfair bias for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Here we have the publisher and senior editor of the one oldest and most respected print magazines in our field being called into question.
2) Not long after that came the much anticipated and updated article about whether there was gender bias among the major speculative magazines, which comes back to all the editors of these magazines. There was much pre and post-discussion regarding this one.
3) I'll add that I've had a spat or two during this period regarding issues with short fiction, but I'm an assistant editor as opposed to an editor. Also, I don't think my spats earned such widespead attention that they can be mentioned in the same e-breaths as these other examples. Of course, if anyone would like to call me out on these matters (friend or foe or other) say so under comments and I'll dig up links. I'm not going to pretend to be squeaky clean, but IMO these other examples really did draw greater attention.
4) Then last month we had the controversy surrounding Jonathan Strahan only having one woman appearing in the TOC of his anthology. So we've moved away from magazines in this scenario, but we're still dealing with an editor of short speculative fiction.
5) Even more recently (as in a couple of days ago) there was the controversy surrounding William Sanders, one of the co-editors of Helix Quarterly, when he used an offensive term in a rejection letter to a writer, and the writer posted said rejection online (and subsequently took it down). As you might expect, this one isn't even close to winding down yet. And this one deals with an online magazine.
6) And now we have the latest one. It's not a raging controversy just yet, but given the above examples I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into one, so I've decided to mention it. This one wonders if Gardner Dozois' rejection letters may have been less than savory because he focused on the legal implications of the William Sanders situation as opposed to the issues of bigotry. As I said, not a raging controversy just yet, but I'm seeing signs that it might erupt into something more. For the sake of completion, I'll note that this one targets the former fiction editor of Asimov's, and the editor of the last 25 editions of Year's Best Science Fiction, the current grandaddy among the speculative year's best anthologies.
So these are the examples I can think of off the top of my head. Feel free to mention others if they occur to you. I'm not commenting on any of them here, and I've tried to be as fair as possible in providing links to a wide range of opinions. Tempest (she of link # 6) and I don't even get along, but I don't mind giving her this bump in traffic (though I strongly suspect her blog does more traffic than mine overall) because I'm rather curious about this topic. So what do you think, folks? Is there a pattern here that should make us expect more of the same to follow with unfortunate regularity, or am I grasping at straws? And if there is a pattern, what do you make of editors being put under this constant microscope? Is it fair and right, and how much (if it all) is the internet distorting information or leading to miscommunications? The blogosphere is rather notorious for this sort of thing.
I realize that posting this sort of question and providing these links one on top of the next risks fanning a lot of flames, but hey, I'm the assistant editor at Realms of Fantasy. This matters to me. I'll ask people to keep things civil, though I worry this may not be a realistic request ...
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douglascohen
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FWIW, I have yet to get a truly nasty rejection (out of ~500 submissions) I suspect most editors are decent people, and these things stand out by contrast.
I sometimes wonder if I should pay more attention, but then again, perhaps ignorance is bliss.
Like you, I tend to see a lot of accusations of "You're not publishing enough women".
If this is the case, the fault could occur at several points.
1. Editors are choosing more male-written stories because they prefer male-written stories. (Maybe one could be doing this, but a handful? I seriously doubt it.)
2. The slushpile contains a higher percentage of saleable stories written by male authors. Without seeing slushpile stats, I can't say for sure. Also, what makes a story "saleable" is also pure opinion, and again, comes back to the editor's preferences.
3. Women aren't submitting enough publishable quality stories. The supposition of this has, in the past, led to such activities like the August Slushbomb.
(Interesting thing regarding the Slushbombs. I vaguely recall a comment somewhere from GVG (or maybe JJA) that he was not terribly impressed with the quality of the stories.)
The quality of the stories in a slush pile, in the end, come back to the submitter (regardless of gender).
So when I see the various flamewars accusing editors of gender bias, I find it hard to truly believe whether or not there is a bias. I simply don't have enough information to make an accurate judgement.
Is an issue/anthology with fifteen men and two women a sign of gender bias on behalf of the editor, or is it reflective of the quality of the slush pile, and the editor is simply working with what he has available to him?
I'm not sure if anyone (not even the editors) could have an unbiased opinion in this.
I missed the fights where race was mentioned. I'll be more careful to miss more of them in the future.
How on earth does one tell the race of the writer from a submission? Or are some people just trying to find an excuse to be angry?
So it's an issue of someone acting unprofessionally more than anything else.
"What do you make of editors being put under this constant microscope?"
I don't mind it. As a consumer nowadays I put many more things under the microscope. 20 years ago many companies would not have bothered about appearing or being eco-friendly but now they might because they know the can risk a huge backlash if they don't. In Canada this week an enormous consumer backlash (due to their terrible rates) against the company launching the iPhone here prompted the cellphone carrier to lower its rates. Why? Consumer activism.
Consumers are a lot smarter and demanding. They are more aware of their rights and their power. And it's not just people saying "save the seals" and marching outside a fur store these days. You can mobilize a lot more people through the net.
So every market (including magazines) should be aware of this. This should also inspire them to have better and more transparent relationships with their consumers.
My thinking is, anybody who puts anything out there for consumption is going to be up for criticism. Editors, writers, musicians... the internet seems practically built on people sharing their opinions (whether you want to hear them or not). More often than not, their opinions are negative. For some reason, people who are displeased are more motivated to speak publicly than those who are not--not sure why. (to speak generally on the phenomenon).
Some people are definitely sensitive about issues of race and gender. I think they're very much justified in being so. The only way things get better is by people challenging injustice. Sometimes it's just a misunderstanding. Sometimes it's a correlation does not equal causation kind of thing. but I'd rather see people bring it up and challenge it, even if it's a misunderstanding, than not challenge these things at all.
I think we all, writers, editors, etc have to get used to the fact that what we say and what we do is completely open to criticism, often in ways we never dream of. We're under no obligation to listen/read any of it, but I don't think its existence is indicative of any general trend that hasn't existed long before I was born anyway.
The Internet allows us to promote ourselves and connect with others. It also opens the doors to criticism and scrutiny from a wider audience.
Drop and give me 1000 words, man. :p
Similarly, people have been writing angry letters to companies for a long time. But now they can go to a website where everyone else will tell you how much that company sucks.
So I think that more of this will happen. I'm not an editor, but my take on it is that this resembles story critiques. If one person criticizes an editor's method of handling a situation, well, you can't please everyone. If everyone has the same criticism, or a cluster of related criticisms, the editor might want to consider carefully whether this criticism has merit.
(Adjust as necessary, of course; sometimes one person's criticism is very insightful. Or the editor is right and needs to stand up to the crowd for what s/he believes in.)
I don't think so, for a number of reasons. It seems like most people who support themselves primarily or wholly through writing are too busy to partake of flame-wars. Not universally true, but I see far more readers, neopros, and new-ish writers participating than Established Figures. Maybe this is just a factor of who spends more time online.
While I'm not always able to hold myself back (I'm trying to get better, really), I generally don't want to participate in these debates. This being the Internet, there's more than enough people who are going to represent my point of view. And, to be honest, most of them have a greater stake in it than me.
Debates happened on departmental listservs all the time in grad school, and they got vicious, petty, and political usually in the span of a few e-mails. And it was usually grad students involved -- professors either argued a subject in person over beers, or they got mileage out of it by publishing in a real venue. I'm not saying that short fiction writers are the "grad students" of writing, but so many authors start learning to write with short stories, then move on to novels, that it seems as if there's often some skew toward younger writers in short fiction (at least among we lowly sorts who make up the chattering classes).
Maybe it's easier to just start crusades over everything, instead of actually trying to help your society by doing something you can handle.
The racial issue with the Helix were just wrong. Well not only wrong, but it was an unprofessional letter that went back to a writer.
But has there ever been a time when there wasn't some sort of controversy going on?