My $0.02 on the Malzberg/Resnick/SFWA debacle

Ghu knows that there's been tons posted on the subject of the recent SFWA Bulletins over a very short time (a really good selection of some of the blogs that commented on M&R can be found via Jim C. Hines), but a series of paragraphs by the authors from one of the pieces in question irked me in particular.

The background is this: a number of writers and bloggers (quite a few of whom were fellow members of the SFWA) took issue with what they perceived as Malzberg and Resnick's dismissively sexist language from SFWA Bulletin 200 (more on which, here and here), which was on top of a chainmail cheesecake du jour cover painting to boot. Oops. And then there was that singularly odd Barbie reference as well. Double Oops.

The entire thing would've probably been deemed a minor brain fart by Bulletin editor Jean Rabe (who has since resigned), but no. Malzberg and Resnick - for whatever reasons - decided to pour gasoline on what was a minor spark from a malfunctioning 2' tall wind-up robot with predictable consequences in issue #202. M&R, below:

Consider: When all is said and done, we didn't run the kind of diatribe that you hear from almost every top-selling rap star these days. We didn't bring Henry Miller up to date. Or Rabelais. All we did was appear in a magazine with a warrior woman on the cover, and mention that a woman who edited a science fiction magazine 65 years ago was beautiful.

Fair enough, although the "what we wrote was nowhere near as bad as X" alternative strikes me as false: if you're irritated by what you perceive as a false reading of what you wrote, you explain why it's wrong and don't go with the old "well, gee, we didn't go so far as that" canard. It's akin to saying that punching a bully in the face wasn't as bad as, say, axe-murdering a family in another town instead. This is trivially true. It's also beside the point.

Unfortunately, the following is where the cookie crumbles. Or explodes. Take your pick.

If they get away with censoring that, can you imagine what comes next? I'm pretty sure Joe Stalin could imagine it. Of
course Schicklgruber the painter could imagine it. Even Chairman Mao could imagine it.

But could you? Could you write this kind of seemingly trivial censorship/thought control into a story without
having an editor reject it because those days are over and now that we have an enlightened populace they will of course
never come again.Or is this maybe, just maybe, how they do come again?

Okay, does somebody want to explain the concept of a false dilemma to these two? And quick?

If your immediate desire is to tell M&R to put a fucking sock in it, already, you're not alone. That was my initial reaction, and it had less to do with their feeling angry at adverse criticism they felt was unjustified (which is, after all, their right) and more with the fact that they characterized their critics as a politically correct lynch mob using some of the worst mass murderers in history as comparable role models. Hyperbole, much?

Their transformation of a number of authors and bloggers (quite a few of whom were female, some not) who took issue with a series of editorial gaffes by the Bulletin into an angry mob of feminist Gestapo agents strikes me as an misadventure in conflating criticism with censorship: for one thing, do bloggers actually have the ability to "censor" a publication just by taking issue with something that was written in it? Worse yet, you'd think that both Resnick and Malzberg were about to be dragged off to Lubyanka prison for their crimes. Near as I can tell, they haven't.

Also, considering the ridiculous number of feuds that have occurred in fandom and among pros since the beginnings of the genre, this sort of criticism and infighting is not a rare occurrence. Far from it. Are Malzberg and Resnick somehow unaware of that fact?

Of course, when the dread name of Andrea Dworkin is invoked, it means that the ante is upped almost to the point where odd little people who always type in caps ("ZOMG O NOES EVERYONE MUST AGREE WITH US OR IS A LIBRUL FASCIST JUST LIKE HER!!1!!") end up making their opponents' points all by themselves.

Almost all cranks insist that the Secret Police are coming to get them. Except when they don't exist in the first place, of course

Malzberg or Resnick are hardly cranks: it's just too bad they were all too willing to play the part.