So let's just imagine for the sake of argument

[bellatrys]

...that a small bunch of fans got together and put together their own fanfic archive - it has been known to happen, now and again - volunteering their time and using a donation model to pay for bandwidth and server space and it gets a number of submissions and a bit of a name among all the other fanfic archives out there, but it's not a household

Comments

[jonquil]

Oh, HELL.

My hearty sympathies to all involved. (Maybe even PP, who seems to have been doing a reasonable job in his/her/its archive-maintaining persona.)

we stay FAR away from the wretched hive of Freepers, scum and villainy

For the win.

[jonquil]

I am confused. Is all of this an allegory for the Helix situation, or is it a parallel event?

This is just an allegory btw

[bellatrys]

inspired by the Helix situation, but also by the contrasts between fanfic mores and pro publishing mores again.

I seriously can't imagine anyone thinking they could *socially* get away with refusing to take down stories in fandom - altho' I think that Sanders' reneging on the $40 bribe demand is a good thing overall, since now there won't be the whole ethical conflict and stratification among authors over "do I/don't I?" - "Why are you still there? Why did you give in to blackmail and pay him for being a jerk?" messiness.

Re: This is just an allegory btw

[jonquil]

Rock, meet head. Gotcha.

Although, stripped of the allegory, it remains true that Sanders seems to have been doing a reasonably good job until unmasked.

Well, maybe--

[bellatrys]

Sanders seems to have been doing a reasonably good job until unmasked.

But he's called into doubt his entire editorial policy, in his claims that he was just pandering (as he saw it) when he *was* posting stories from a diverse authorship, and his bigotry calling into question his fairness in picking stories when he *wasn't* explicitly seeking cookies for being multicultural/gender-egalitarian. So that makes being selected for a Helix invitation a worthless honor, except in so far as we the readers concur that the stories were good in themselves, regardless of what Sanders says as to why he chose them.

Not to mention the apparently-valid suspicion that he just started Helix to get prizes in pro-fandom, following the revelations that after he failed to win a Nebula he ranted in person about how he'd only joined SFWA to qualify for the award and he never liked any of them anyway and they could all go hang now...

[randwolf]

Time was, we could accept editor's and publisher's virtues without having to punish them for their flaws. I have my doubts that this new situation is an improvement. I think almost everyone in this business is a bit crazy and a bit of a jerk sometimes. It's a shame that we've lost someone because we can't deal with their flaws (or perhaps because they were overmastered by them)--if one must be a saint to be an editor, we will have many fewer editors.

[jonquil]

There's quite a large spectrum of behavior between "being a saint" and telling a Korean-American writer that he only bought her stories because of her race.

"Bit of a jerk" is like saying Amy Winehouse is "a bit indiscreet".

[randwolf]

I hadn't heard that part of the story! Sounds like he lost it pretty thoroughly.

[jonquil]

http://yhlee.livejournal.com/1187003.html

[randwolf]

Wow. Sounds like Sanders has the sort of temper that will say anything when lost, and hasn't learned how to apologize. Big flaws, in these these days of instant publication.

Then again, maybe the net is only for saints. I think I'm in a lot of trouble...

[jonquil]

I repeat, there's quite a large inhabitable space between 'saints' and 'outspoken bigots'. Saying "not a saint" diminishes the offense. I'm not a saint. You're not a saint. Sanders is an avowed and unashamed bigot.

[randwolf]

Well, but 60 years ago, most English-speaking writers--most English-speaking people--were unabashed bigots. We don't discard their work because of it. Also, there's bigots, and bigots. There's the insanely violent, and that I will not defend. On the other hand, there's people who talk like bigots, but it's all in theory, and in practice they are very decent. Sanders seems to fall somewhere in between. Understand, also, I'm not exactly defending him; I just have this feeling that instant publication has made his faults loom larger, and I suspect this is an unhealthy change, regardless of Sanders's personal merits and failings.

You need to learn more history, and read more

[bellatrys]

Specifically, the gossip rags, journals, and letters columns of old newspapers, and in-depth biographies of the writing circles of the past, such as the Algonquin Club, or Byron's crowd, or the Theosophists and the Golden Dawn, many of which got played out far more publically than this, and in realtime (in an era in which newspapers sent out hardcopy editions 3 or more times a day

Re: You need to learn more history, and read more

[randwolf]

What motivated my remarks is more a sense that this is turning into a kind of net.mobbing, all with the highest justifications, which means that no-one realizes they've gone overboard until too late. ("No, she's not a nice person, but she's not a witch, either; let's not burn her.") What set me to thinking about it was my mention of JWC in an earlier message--he was quite a crank, and yet his editorial work, which of course was social, was excellent, though often he alienated his authors as they matured and became more independent. Yet it is not possible to imagine modern sf without him; it would be a different field. Perhaps a better one, but who can say? A good friend counts as a mentor a very difficult and cranky conservative author; for my friend, at least, that relationship is a positive, and it turns out that difficult & cranky has his virtues, which I would not have guessed from their public persona. Difficult & cranky has become a good friend of one of the Scottish socialists--are you going to draw the line between them

Re: You need to learn more history, and read more

[jonquil]

You are intent on making this into a slippery-slope argument. If Author A is mobbed -- your term -- for heinous behavior, then nobody who behaves questionably is safe.

You keep trying to move the focus away from the heinous behavior. This isn't Author A being mobbed for saying 'niggardly' (ha!) or even 'Muslims are responsible for terrorism'. This is author A saying, explicitly, that "You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can".

That is indefensible. That is inexcusable. And it is a part of civilization to say "This behavior is outside the bounds." It takes more than one person saying "This is outside the bounds" for the behavior to change. Nobody paid attention to the Harlan Ellison thing until a group of female fans said, repeatedly, that this behavior was no longer acceptable, that what was tolerated from Isaac Asimov is no longer tolerable

Ellison & Sanders

[randwolf]

Ellison, it seems to me, is a red herring--he's a different sort of problem.

To me a heinous act is one of extraordinary cruelty or violence. Against that standard Sanders seems to me rather small potatoes; a jerk rather than a brute. I do think criticism of his conduct is appropriate, but I'm concerned at the way this has turned into a pile-on, and I suspect the pile-on has made matters worse--I don't trust net pile-ons, they bring out the worst in people. And I think we're confusing the writer (and editor) with the writing; probably more anon in a direct reply to the original post.