Hi, all. It’s been a while since I updated this blog! Figured now was a good time, since I just became SFWA’s newest Grand Master! I got an award for it at the Nebula Conference this past weekend, but I couldn’t fit it in my luggage so hopefully it will arrive soon.
Here’s the draft version of my accetance speech. I made some handwritten edits while waiting for the banquet to start, so what I said on the podium is slightly different from what’s here. (Also, I couldn’t see the text very well on the blue-lit stage — tried to turn the podium light on and nearly set fire to the SFWA banner — so I ad-libbed more than usual.) The differences are mostly cosmetic, however. Enjoy!
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Greetings, fellow authors of the Torment Nexus. Warning for potentially offensive language, including “shit,” “fuck,” “woke,” and “inclusivity.”
I. Introduction
I did not want to be here, at first. When SFWA President Kate Ristau said they wanted to make me Grand Master, my reaction was, “I’m not old enough!” As far as I knew, becoming a Grand Master was a lifetime achievement award — i.e., an honor that should come at the end of your career. I’m only 53, I’m just hitting my stride! So I told her thanks, I’m deeply flattered, but please don’t put me in the creative grave yet. Let’s try this again in twenty years.
Fortunately, Kate talked me down. She basically made her case by throwing a lot of my own career-long complaints about SFF right back at me. And she was right: if I’m calling for change, I have to speak when a platform presents itself.
So thank you, SFWA Presidents present and past, for making me the 47th Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. It’s a true and mindblowing honor that I honestly never expected to achieve. But now that someone has once again given me a microphone, I’m gonna run my mouth.
Let us speak first about tradition.
I am often called a radical for the ways I push against the SFF status quo. I’m not, because I am at least old enough to see value in tradition, sometimes. For a lot of us — me included — the gateway drug to SFF was classic science fiction, with its sensawunda and so-cool ideas and apparent welcome to all. There is an inherent optimism in the idea that our species will someday reach other stars. Right now, as drug-addled billionaires systematically dismantle our space program and even our ability to educate new scientists, we could use some of that old-school hope. Classic stories of interstellar travel have positive implications for the future of education and technological progress, but they also predict that we’ll actually last long enough to get there — a thing not at all certain in this moment. That we will overcome our petty nationalisms and cowardly natalisms enough to survive, and maybe even thrive. We need this. We need to believe we’ll get better, because without belief, we won’t even try.
But there are those in our field who complain that classic science fiction, and classic medieval-European fantasy, are somehow under threat. Too many women who talk, maybe? Too many writers and readers who want something new, like medieval-Malian fantasy or a space adventure in which all the characters of color are actually treated with equal respect. But there are still plenty of stories in the classic mode being written, and read, and bought by Hollywood. Whole brand-new space adventures that haven’t been misunderstood by a techbro! Yet. We’ve got Murderbot. We’ve got the Three-Body Problem, and The Martian, and Project Hail Mary. There may someday be as many Game of Thrones adaptations as there are ports of Doom — so there is no threat to classical SFF. The complaint is a dogwhistle, of course. Propaganda. There’s no rational argument in it because that’s not the point; the point is to frighten people into rejecting social progress.
There is value in tradition, until it becomes a chain wrapped around a child. To people who feel that there is a threat to tradition, anything is better than growth, even death.
Sidenote. I’m told personal anecdotes are expected of and tolerated in Grand Master speeches, so…
I started an anime con with my friends back in the Nineties. Shoujocon, anyone remember it? Probably not. We were going to make a con aimed at the marginalized fans of that genre, the people of color and women and enbies and neurodivergents and all the rest. We were going to kick to the curb all the anime fandom traditions that made it harder for people like us to attend or enjoy ourselves. So I summoned a team of magical girls — my friends, I mean, not all of whom were girls — plus new staff from among people who joined our startup discussions. We got to work.
We did some really innovative stuff, too! Most cons relied on regional staff at that time but we did staff meetings via IRC, the Usenet-era equivalent of Zoom, so that anyone anywhere in the world could participate. We picked a dingy little hotel near a major regional hub of subways and buses and commuter rails, in Newark. We funded it with ebay auctions of donated rare swag and… uncensored things anyway we raised something like seventeen thousand dollars.
Now, there was always a small contingent of people who pushed back against a particular innovation from the very beginning. They could never really explain why they had a problem with being easily-reached by the biggest and broadest possible audience. They just didn’t like it. They kept pushing for the con to move upstate, to a hotel reachable only by car, in a town that was much whiter and wealthier than Newark. An SFF con had successfully used the same venue for years, so why couldn’t we stick to that tried-and-true site? So they argued. Newark was so dirty. We might attract too much of the wrong audience.
This group fought hard to move us to that site, but in those first two years, they couldn’t get enough support from other staff. Despite their dire predictions, the first year went beautifully — thirteen hundred attendees, if I recall. We recouped our costs and made enough to throw an even bigger con the next year. Which also made a whole bunch of money; we were on our way. But after two cons my co-Chair and I were exhausted, so we stepped down. The new con leaders ran it well for another year or so. Then the tradition-defenders converted enough people to take over. They moved the con to Car-DrivingWhitePeopleVille. The next con got a fraction of the attendees and, I’m told, couldn’t even pay the hotel bill afterward. The con died sometime after, I’m not sure when.
My entire career has been plagued by histrionic claims that I, personally, am destroying SFF through my work. Too much politics. Too many fancy literary devices, too many big words, too much healthy, loving sex — but if it wasn’t these things, it would be something else. Hearing claims like this has been a pretty common experience for any writer from a marginalized group over the last sixty or seventy years — counting from the start of Chip Delany’s career, so longer than that. We’re all so loud about the discrimination we face and the changes we need, too visible in our differences, too suspiciously successful. And unfortunately, the whistlers have managed to convince many otherwise sensible folks that people like me are an actual threat. They’re trying to drag SFF back to where it was decades ago, before all the improvements of this century. I predict that if they succeed, they will only make our small, niche genre even smaller.
Those people are whom I’m speaking to right now:
Speculative fiction has always been home to the literary avant-garde, and to rejectors of the status quo, and to progressive activists. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of us. Mary Shelley, a feminist raised by an anarchist, is our progenitor. We’ve been “woke” since Day One. So what’s got you so a-flutter, “tradition-defenders”? Cooties? I sure hope a think tank is paying you. Don’t tell me you’re being this foolish for free.
At this point I don’t really care why some seem hell-bent on “protecting” SFF to death. What matters is truth: that this space contains trans writers and immigrant writers and Muslim writers and Jewish writers and disabled writers and writers from every other group that’s doing some kind of “damage” to SFF. We have always been here, and we’re pretty good at cutting chains. We aren’t destroying anything — WE BUILT THIS TOO. And we are not going anywhere.
II. Transformation
But here’s another thing we should start to accept: that SFF is an actual art form.
I know, right? Strange to think of unicorns and aliens in the same sentence as “art.” But if Le Guin and Machado and Marquez aren’t enough to convince you, and if the homages paid to our genre by Miyazaki and the Wachowski sisters and Beyoncé mean nothing, if the critics of our genre like Farah Mendelsohn and Emily St. James and Abigail Nussbaum don’t make it clear enough, let me lay this out.
Art is a means of reflecting the world through a mirror, darkly or otherwise, to reveal hidden truths. Art can have its own language — as ours does: Worldbuilding. Magic Realism. Mythopoeicism. Art can be bad! Bad art has a useful role, if only in that it helps define the good art. Art can have popular appeal. Art can be personal: The fact is that one human being can have histories and experiences that are wildly different from another’s, 180 degrees apart, and yet we still find the same amount of comfort in the line and the tune and the word. Art is human.
We’ve all seen literary critics snub SFF as mere genre fiction, as if a thousand stories about depressed middle-aged white men doesn’t constitute a genre in itself. We’ve all heard stories about creative writing teachers who accept any genre except SFF. There is a pervasive belief in our society that SFF is good for only predicting future technologies — sometimes — and entertaining children. We’ve seen Booker and Pulitzer winners come to play on our ground, convinced that only they are capable of using SFF to its full potential. (We really need better PR.) Sadly, some of us have internalized the opinions of SFF’s detractors. We’re not supposed to be good writers, they insist. They genuinely believe it’s impossible for us to reflect the breadth and depth of the human condition. Even to try is elitism or grubbing for “diversity points.” We should just stick to rayguns and white dudes, amirite?
Those of us who aren’t listening to people who despise us know that SFF is a fantastic medium for exploring the human condition — better, even, than literary realism. They’re engaging with who we are. We’re covering who we could be.
I’ve been very fortunate in my career. An amazing agent believed in me, even after my first novels were roundly rejected for being too Black. An editor of color at one of the Big Five took a chance on me, and it’s certainly paid off for them. But these days the publishers are also listening to the so-called defenders of tradition. They’re canceling programs meant to improve representation on the editorial end. They’re pre-censoring books by queer authors and authors of color, as well as white authors who are trying to be more inclusive. They’re less willing to take chances on certain kinds of up-and-coming Grand Masters, like the beautifully inclusive slate of nominees sitting right here. How many other “mes” are out there, self-publishing and struggling to stand out, because the big publishing houses afraid of offending the book-banners? Those people don’t even read.
The problem with internalized self-hatred is that you stop trying to be better. You accept the limitations others impose on you. You take pride in your own ignorance and timidity, because at least that’s an identity, a support group. You attack yourself, or in this case, your own genre.
III. The Future
It’s time we started recognizing, and valuing, what we’ve already got.
That means listening to the people within our genre who are offering critique. There is nothing detrimental to SFF about Black writers starting their own magazine, or women writers demanding the firing of a sexually harassing editor, or poor writers requesting scholarships to attend events. That’s feedback. That’s how we get better. Booktok is not our enemy. It’s full of drama because have you seen the internet, but it’s also one of the best ways to understand our younger audience. We should welcome the romantasy writers without sneering at them. Romance is a genre that also has lots of detractors, but they’ve still managed to become the best-selling genre in America, bringing in 1.4 billion in annual revenue. They clearly know things we need to learn.
We’ve got a deep, rich history as a genre that is far more progressive than a lot of us acknowledge. We’ve got amazing writers, innovators of form and concept, who can run rings around any Pulitzer winner. Those writers have chosen to do their work here, amid the magic users and the menaces from beyond the stars, because they know this genre’s potential. Right now our society is trying desperately to unfuck itself: we can help with that! Some of us are as good at predicting social development as technological — read Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER if you haven’t, and realize she wrote that over thirty years ago. We need to do a lot more, don’t mistake me — but considering where we were back at the start of my career, we’ve made leaps and bounds.
There is no good reason for SFF to remain the small, niche genre that it is. We should revel in our growth, fellow writers. And as we grow, we can make the world better, too.
So once again: thank you for giving me this platform. I am humbled by this recognition. I love this genre, and I think I got here because throughout my career I have just wanted things to be better. I’ve shouted that at the sky, and wept over it, and dedicated all my creative power to it. I am glad to be acknowledged for this, but I’m gladder still to realize how many people are shouting alongside me, and combining our powers. We are improving, late but better than never. The chains are coming off.
Let’s see how much we can grow.