Current mood:	mellow
Entry tags:	marketing, reading, spec fic, writing

Gender-Imbalanced Cavemen
Neil Clarke weighs in on Eclipse-gate, inspired by some decidedly unsavory comments that have been made on the matter. (Jonathan Strahan's lengthy reflective comment here.) Clarke's essay is good, and I was especially pleased by:

It's ironic that a forward-looking genre can sometimes be so rooted in its ways. "But you might scare away the readers!" Wake up. The readers are already leaving. Yes, you might upset a few die-hard white supremacists, but a publication that represents a more diverse body of people may just appeal to a more diverse body of people. You might actually attract more readers.

I think this captures the situation very well.¹ The supposed death of short fiction is too often discussed, but short fiction's such a vanishingly small piece of the publishing pie that I see little margin in trying to hold onto Tried-And-True, especially if you have no stake in doing so.

The Weird Tales reboot is a good example. It threw me for a loop at first, as did their 85 Weirdest list. Some notable names of the old guard don't appear on it, which rather put me off at first, but once I "thought around the corner," I was fine with it. Weird Tales was, in its previous incarnation, Tried-And-Truing its way (back) to the grave, and I'm happy to see the new, paradigm-shifted version of WT going great guns.

As I've said previously, I am personally only interested in author diversity insofar as it leads to more Chinese lesbians a variety of good stories in anthologies or magazines.² I'm not as personally invested in this as some new authors trying to break in, for obvious demographic reasons. That said, if we want to get all label-y about it, the writers who have most rocked my work in the last few years are a Japanese guy and a lesbian witch. Whether the goods are made by neanderthals, austrolopithici, or homines habiles, I want my cave to be populated with things of all sorts, from obsidian sacrificial knives to sabertooth skulls to woolly rhinoceros hides. Otherwise life would be too boring.


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1. Disclosure: I read and submit to both Clarkesworld and Weird Tales. O for the day when I am so famous that people will simply know my bibliography by heart, and I need not worry about disclosures because everyone everywhere will know exactly what I've written. On the other hand, perhaps I just worry too much.
2. With the obvious caveat that I can't read the same thing all the time and wouldn't want to if I could.