Let me elaborate a little. Let’s talk about Spiderman. The big quote that comes out of that project is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The inversion of that is, “With utter impotence comes radical freedom.” If what you do matters, then what you do matters. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. So does fiction have power? If it does, shouldn’t some responsibility come with it? Or can we say it’s powerful when it has the effect we like and say that artistic freedom is more important when it comes out wrong-way-round?
I know a lot of readers. None of us come here because the books are empty and meaningless and carry no weight in our lives. We learn about some of the most important things in our lives vicariously through fiction. I don’t know about you, but my opinions about love and fairness and what it means to be cool and what it means to be sad—how to grieve, how to love, how to think about God—all have roots in books. How Peter Wimsey saw Harriet Vane was actually important to me. I still have some verbal affectations I lifted off characters I read about in high school. My ideas about right and wrong track back to Senior English.
I’m not an outlier on that. I’ve known a lot of people for whom books have been profoundly important, and not always books I like. I know a fair number of folks who imprinted on the novels of Ayn Rand, for instance and the short stories of Anais Nin.
Fiction isn’t powerless. And if the author just ignores the politics of their work, that doesn’t mean the book becomes apolitical. It just means they wrote their own defaults. Think Black people are lazy and violent, but your work isn’t about that? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it’s in there.
Reading is the same way. Aidan Moher over at A Dribble of Ink, set himself a public challenge to read as many books by women as he did by men. That’s a moral statement. Just by doing that, he’s said that gender equality is important, and that work by women deserves the same attention and audience as work by men. And more than that, he’s said—again, just by doing it—that his own internalized sexism needs a conscious override. He’s trying to be a better man and to create (in a small way) a better world by the way he chooses what he reads.
I did something similar when I was in my twenties. For me, it wasn’t about gender, but race. It’s how I first read Langston Hughes, for instance and Colson Whitehead. I’d already read some Walter Mosley and Maya Angelou, but it was a good excuse to revisit them. And it was a moral statement, even if it was mostly a private one.
How we read and how we write will always have moral and political implications. The only choice we’ve got is whether they’re unconscious or considered. Period. End of story.
Only it’s not the end of the story, right? Because that lady I was talking about before? The Much Bigger Name? She’s not stupid, and she’s not narrow, and so there seems to be a contradiction there. And truth is that I’m large. I contain multitudes. I believe absolutely what I said. But that’s not all that I believe.
There are two movies, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They’re talky, intellectual romances that I love so much I almost don’t want to see the third one when it comes out in case they biff it. In the second movie—Before Sunset—Ethan Hawke’s character draws this beautiful and damning distinction between trying to be his best self and trying to be his authentic self. I don’t know if that speaks to other people as powerfully as it did to me, but I’m still a little devastated by it.
Wanting to live in a better world is great. Working for a better world is great. It only becomes a vice when it keeps us from loving the world we’re in—warts and all. My experience is that life is full of strong women and weak ones. Venal ones. Active ones. Passive ones. Complicated ones. Unhealthy ones. Men are just as varied and complicated and screwed-up. Their lives aren’t our societal best self, but they’re who we are, and losing sight of that is dangerous.
When I say that fiction is best when it is morally instructive, the image I get—and the one I’m betting most of you get too—is of an iron-spined Victorian woman who only reads Nice books. And the books I imagine her reading are thin, cardboard stories where everything comes out the way it ought to in a Miss Prism, The good ended happily, the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means kind of way. And because her imaginary morality isn’t mine, I find the thought horrifying. We’re right to distrust morally hygienic fiction, even when we approve of the morality that it’s championing. Hell, maybe especially then. It’s easy to forgive shallow arguments you already agree with.
I think there’s a tricky stretch when you’re starting out on something new, like learning how to write or paint or make art. The danger of fighting for moral standards in a writing class is that you might win. New writers are still forming themselves and their literary projects. Treating moral issues as if they were craft is asking for a literature of beautiful sermons.
Now, I love a good sermon. I reread Camus’ The Plague every few years, and it’s nothing if not a sermon. But I think Lolita is a good book too. And reading projects that pull you out into different kinds of authors and stories are wonderful so long as the moral aspects of your reading list don’t become more important than the joy you take in reading. It’s a fine line between thinking you should read something for moral reasons and thinking you should like it too.
I would never argue that the power of story—and it’s a real power—comes without responsibility. But I would say that responsibility is both to the better world to which we aspire and also the broken, compromised one we live in now. Both to the broader, deeper, sophisticated readers we would like to become and the guilty, familiar, selfish pleasures that brought us here in the first place.
About the Author
Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.
Editor’s Desk: Upgrades and Reader’s Poll Winners
Neil Clarke
A few months ago, I found out that my heart attack had placed me on the path to becoming a cyborg. Last month, my wife and I drove to the hospital and within a few hours the transition was complete. It’s considered minor surgery when they implant a defibrillator, but anytime they snake a wire into your heart, there follows an over-abundance of caution. I am happy to say that the procedure went smoothly and I was back at home the next day. My recovery is moving along and I feel good.
The oddest thing so far? The defibrillator has a built-in speaker. Yes, music can play from my chest, though it isn’t a good sign when it does.
In the interim, I’ve had a lot more couch time. I took the opportunity to play catch up on a few projects:
The third annual volume of our Clarkesworld anthologies (titled Clarkesworld: Year Three) is now available in ebook, with a trade paperback coming by the end of the month.
The fourth and fifth volumes of the Clarkesworld anthologies are 95% complete.
Four more back issues are now available in print. (September 2011-December 2011)
Clarkesworld subscriptions are now available in Germany and France via Amazon. (in English)
During my couch time, I've also been enjoying people’s responses to our annual reader’s survey, for which I am happy to announce the results:
Clarkesworld Reader’s Survey—Best Story of 2012
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
“Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson
The voting was close at the start, but in the end, “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard won by a comfortable margin. Aliette also deserves congratulations on her BSFA Award nomination for this piece. Something tells me it won’t be the last time we’ll be mentioning “Immersion” and “award nomination” in the same sentence.
Clarkesworld Reader’s Survey—Best C
over Art of 2012
WINNER: “New World” by Ken Barthelmey
2nd Place: “Sci-Fi Farmer” by Jessada Sutthi
3rd Place: “Breaking Through” by Julie Dillon
As the voting in this category progressed, several artists traded the top spot, but towards the end, “New World” by Ken Barthelmey ran away with the top honor and never looked back.
Congratulations to all of our winners!
One of the things that often came up in the survey comments was a desire to see us publish more fiction in each issue. As you know, I’ve expressed a strong desire to be able to make Clarkesworld my full-time job. I believe that in order to make that goal a reality, it requires that we continue to expand our offerings as opportunities arise. Previously, we’ve tied expansion to subscription levels and I think it is time to do that again.
To that end, I’d like to announce the first of our 2013 milestone goals:
Increase the number of stories per issue to four, when we pick up five hundred new subscriptions.
Our goals for the year don’t end there, but I still have minor details to work out. Hopefully, I can tie up all the loose ends at Boskone later this month. Maybe I'll see some of you there.
I’d like to close with a bit of a public service announcement: If you can nominate for the Hugo Awards this year, you should know that the requirements for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine have changed. While Clarkesworld is still eligible in this category (just as I’m still eligible in Best Editor Short Form), some familiar names seen on past ballots are not.
In an attempt to help with the transition from the old rules to the new ones, I’ve repurposed semiprozine.org as a place you can find information about the category and a growing list of magazines with their eligibility status. This unofficial resource is a good place to learn about some the many worthy contenders for this award. Check it out sometime and don’t forget to nominate!
About the Author
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 77 Page 6
