Genre Grapevine for September 2023
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Good News Everyone!
Don't let the world fool you – there's actually good news happening in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres and in the overall writing community!
First off, the world rejoiced at finally watching a good live action adaptation of a manga or anime. I'm referring, of course, to season one of Netflix's One Piece. While the linked article explains some reasons why this adaptation is so good, the bigger explanation to me is that the show never forgot that people care deeply about stories which move their emotions. This adaptation gave viewers a tale with heart, characters we love, great worldbuilding, a compelling plot, and hopeful dreams to follow. This series and the original manga are great examples of why good stories will always matter.
The Writers Guild of America strike is over and writers won big! Vulture has a good overview of what the writers won and how they did it. While it's good the writers won, we shouldn't forget the harmful actions of these major corporations and the many people they hurt. And in what may be the best viral take on the strike, The Corodon pointed out the obvious by saying "In retrospect you probably shouldn't go up against writers in a contest of who can keep doing something longer while not making any money."
Not sure if this is good news or not, but it's definitely amusing news. The Ahsoka tv show has been exploring more of the fantasy side of Star Wars, prompting screams of outrage from "true fans" that Star Wars is purely science fiction and fantasy has no place in it. Of course, for this to be true we must ignore the magical space wizards, the Force, and so much more. One interesting comment I saw in all this discourse came from UmbralKnightX, who wrote "You can't convince me that Star Wars hasn't always been more Science Fantasy than Science Fiction. Even the covers of … Marvel comics adaptations in the 70s said 'The Greatest Space-Fantasy Film of All.' The Force alone is a dead give away, not to mention other tidbits that are more fantasy than science (giant space slugs, etc). Nope, for my money, it's been fantasy in some sci-fi clothing from day one."
Frank Wu shared why writers should never give up on their dreams: "9 years ago: after a lifetime of trying, it was now or never. I gave writing one last try. That novelette became my 1st pro sale. Since then: 2 novellas, 4 stories, 1 novel, 2 Anlab Awards. Never give up on your dreams. They are one of the few things that are truly yours."
X-Twitter Driving Genre Community to Bluesky
Instead of everyone saying "X, the site formerly known as Twitter," we need to start simply saying "X-Twitter." Because with the platform's continued death spiral, X-Twitter is exactly what Elon Musk is doing to the once beloved social media site.
It's been almost a year since Musk purchased X-Twitter and showcased his ability to not only flush $44 billion down the drain but also destroy one of the world's best communication tools. And it feels like we are finally approaching X-Twitter's true end time.
In the latest knife to X-Twitter's gut, Musk hinted the platform would start charging users to combat bots. Perhaps John Scalzi best summed up the genre's reaction to that when he said, "Oh, honey. You're not getting a dime." X-Twitter has also started allowing paid Blue subscribers to "verify their accounts using a government ID in a bid to prevent impersonation and 'maintain the integrity of the platform.'" While it's uncertain if this new feature is optional or not, the fear for many people is this could be a test before rolling it out to all users.
What's funny is a lot of these changes result from Musk attempting to fix problems he created, such as making it easy for people to impersonate others on X-Twitter using a Blue Check subscription. And all this takes place right as Twitter's new privacy policy is going into effect. According to Stefan Simanowitz, this new policy gives X-Twitter "the right to use your posts - including DMs - & all your data - including phone, email, biometrics (e.g. face scans & eye scans) to train their AI & to share with any partner X wants."
It's no wonder people are fleeing X-Twitter.
In the days after Musk said X-Twitter may charge all users, Bluesky experienced the platform's biggest ever influx of new users. Bluesky is also continually seeing increasing levels of current user activity.
It appears Bluesky is starting to achieve the critical mass that other X-Twitter alternatives couldn't achieve. This is especially true in the science fiction, fantasy and horror communities, where in recent weeks viral discussions have appeared on Bluesky that used to appear on X-Twitter.
Unfortunately, Bluesky remains available only to those who receive an invite code. But if any Genre Grapevine readers want a code, simply DM me and I'll share my invite codes.
Should Artificial Intelligence Be Jailed for Theft?
Note: Next week I'll release another report in my ongoing series examining how machine learning/AI writing and art systems are affecting writers and artists.
Writing in The Atlantic, Alex Reisner described receiving a data set "of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others." Known as Books3, the data set is "based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years." You can now search the data set here for books written by individual authors.
In response to this, the Authors Guild and 17 authors including Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed a class-action suit against OpenAI. As the Authors Guild stated in a press release about the case, "The complaint draws attention to the fact that the plaintiffs' books were downloaded from pirate ebook repositories and then copied into the fabric of GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 which power ChatGPT and thousands of applications and enterprise uses—from which OpenAI expects to earn many billions."
There are already other pending class action suits involving artists, photographers, and authors. And the Authors Guild also released a useful guide on what to do if you found your own works in the Books3 data set. As the Authors Guild stated, "You don't need to be a named plaintiff in any of these lawsuits to participate because the respective named plaintiffs represent their entire class. Even if you don't fall within one or more classes, an outcome in favor of authors should benefit you by clarifying that books need to be licensed when used to 'train' generative AI."
I think OpenAI and other companies that used copyrighted works to train their AIs underestimated the power of authors, just like the Hollywood studios underestimated their own writers.
Assorted AI and Tech Outtakes
As Silvia Moreno-Garcia said, "The most bizarre part about the AI thing is a lot of the ads I see are 'let AI write for you!' Bro, i like to write. The bits I don't like about being a writer are shit like having to be on social to promote, make my own marketing materials cause the publisher won't, or even having to organize the receipts for tax season. Telling me the machine can write it for me is like telling someone who loves to bake that instead of making cupcakes they can get a cupcake delivered with Doordash."
The United States Copyright Office wants to hear from people in advance of a possible rulemaking around machine learning/AI systems and copyright. Make you views known using this form.
Pranesh Prakash, who is self-proclaimed on X-Twitter as a "Law+policy consultant," has been pushing the hashtags #AccessToCreativity and #CreativityPrivilege. Prakash's recently responded to someone on X-Twitter by saying "You have #CreativityPrivilege and can't see how the creativity challenged among us could be greatly aided by #genAI." This response went viral as artists and writers challenged that statement. Lauren Walsh shared a copy of the tweet and said terms like this are an attempt to "validate actual theft. Creativity is a SKILL that you can learn to improve. It's not innate. It's not 'god given.' It's not something you are born with. It's a SKILL."
Onyrica also responded to Prakash's comment by pointing out that "The discourse this whole 'creativity privilege' thing has generated is baffling. I've broken my body learning art for over 20 years, I'm constantly battling my mental health and self-esteem to make something worthwhile and yet these people make that out to be a fluke of nature." And Lincoln Michel added "'Creativity privilege' lol. Nothing funnier than watching someone try to pretend it is progressive to defend the largest corporations on earth stealing the work of humanity for their private profit."
Ray Nayler raised a great point: "Being concerned about technology and its tendency to be used in predatory, unethical ways does not make you anti-tech. It is exploitative and short-sighted middlemen who want to bend all innovation to their self-serving goals who are anti-tech and truly limit its potential."
With Amazon flooded by AI-created books, the company has restricted "authors" from self-publishing more than three books a day.
X-Twitter finally suspended the fake Haruki Murakami account that was continually going viral. The Blue Checked account tweeted quotes that may or may not have been things Murakami said. And actual quotes from him were often taken out of context.
The headline in Rolling Stone says it all: "These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI." This must-read article showcases how the people creating the world's machine learning systems aren't even close to representing the diversity of humanity and how their systems contain all their biases.
Short Fiction Magazines Enter World Without Kindle
I wrote an essay titled "Don't Let Our Current Golden Age of Genre Magazines Fade Away" to support the recent Apex Magazine subscription drive. As I said there, the SF/F/H's genre's current diversity of magazines is absolutely amazing. However, these magazines are also at severe risk right now.
This month Amazon ended digital magazine subscriptions through its Kindle Newsstand platform (previously covered here). This change is already hitting magazines hard. Last month, Fantasy Magazine announced they're shutting down largely due to Amazon's decision. Dark Matter Magazine also recently announced they will end their 3-year run with their November issue, although the editors didn't say if Amazon's Kindle change was related to this.
And there are fears more magazines could follow.
In some ways genre magazines are being hit by a perfect storm. In addition to Amazon nuking Kindle Newsstand, magazines have also been very dependent on X-Twitter to both promote themselves and to allow people to organically discover their fiction. The collapse of X-Twitter is hurting magazines at the exact moment they need the platform more than ever to reach new readers.
But in positive news, people are stepping up to support the magazines they love. Apex's recent subscription drive netted 199 new subscribers. But more support is needed. If you enjoy reading a particular magazine, subscribe to it today!
Book Ban News
As reported by author Ryan Estrada, "No Left Turn In Education just dropped an extensive list of things that they believe should get a book banned from any school." So what topics does this right-wing group believe should result in a good old-fashioned book banning? Anyone who's followed the news lately won't be surprised to learn No Left Turn In Education is absolutely in a tizzy over issues related to racism, gender, and sexuality. However, according to Estrada the group also wants to ban books that contains "profanity," "revisionist history," the startling idea that "the Confederates were pro-slavery," any "shower scenes (as in Psycho)," "taking excessive risk for glory's sake," "anti religious actions or discussions" and general topics such as mental breakdowns, paranoia, Armageddon, and much, much more. Who's going to tell the group that their list will nuke 99% of the Bible?
LeVar Burton and more than 150 other writers, artists, musicians, and actors have signed an open letter against book bans.
The book banners are too lazy to actually read books so they're using AI to do it for them: An Iowa school district "removed 19 books from school libraries, after the assistant superintendent entered a list of about 50 commonly banned books across the country into ChatGPT, an AI tool that can generate instant responses to a wide range of prompts, and ask(ed) it to determine which books contained depictions of sex acts." Among the books banned by the district were The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Awards
The 2023 Rhysling Anthology has been announced by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, listing the finalists for best genre poetry from last year. Below the list of nominees and finalists is an interesting look at the number of nominations per publication, with Strange Horizons having the most at 10. File770 also has the press release listing the overall winners.
The 2023 Dwarf Stars Anthology was also announced by the SFPA. This award honors poems of less than 10 lines. As with the Rhysling, below the list of nominees and finalists is a list of the number of nominations per publication. Star*Line has the most nominations with 14.
Finalists for the 2022 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Samantha Mills' short story "Rabbit Test" won the 2023 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman won the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Finalists for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award for Short Fiction.
Winners of the Horror Writer's Association 2023 scholarships.
Winners of the 2023 Dream Foundry Contest (as a side note, this is a great annual contest for new writers and artists).
Today's the last day to vote for the Hugo Awards. While the voter packet has been available since last month, two categories were missing: Fanzine and Fan Writer. As reported by File770, fans in China compiled their own packet of works by writers and fanzines in these categories as a work around and shared them on public sites. These missing categories were eventually added to the official voter packet in mid-September, only 15 days before voting ends. And Worldcon didn't upload the Chinese-translated voter packet from the Hugo Book Club until six days before voting ends. There's still no official word on why all this happened.
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest's self-admitted goal is to encourage people to write the worst possible openings for novels. Maya Pasic of New York won this year's award for the following masterpiece: "She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were." Be sure to check out all of this year's finalists.
Other News and Info
In a follow-up to last month's report about The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction accepting a story by an author connected with the U.K.'s National Front, Gordan Van Gelder announced the magazine would not publish the story. Former F&SF editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch also wrote a detailed description of the issues she experienced while working for the magazine, with many of her concerns matching what C.C. Finlay also described (see my earlier report for Finlay's comments).
According to the Associated Press, a court in Moscow sentenced Russian science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky "to eight years in prison, finding him guilty of deliberately spreading false information about Russia's armed forces. Glukhovsky, who is not in Russia and who was tried in absentia, … is the latest artist to be handed a prison term in a relentless crackdown on dissent in Russia."
The Dream Foundry is running a sweepstakes through October 23 to support their Con or Bust program, which issues cash grants to fans and creatives of color to help connect them with SFFH genre events and resources. Please consider supporting this fundraiser.
RiverFlow, one of this year's finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, shared a fascinating thread on Chinese fanzines. Evidently fanzines in China are usually collections of short stories and fiction, as opposed to western fanzines which typically focus on nonfiction and essays. That's one reason RiverFlow created the Chinese fanzine Zero G, which features reviews, essays and other non-fiction. As RiverFlow said, "There is a strange thing in China, most fans participate in science fiction either by buying books or writing novels, while other things are rarely done, perhaps such a guiding platform is indeed needed."
Earlier this year Victoria Strauss wrote an excellent examination on how fake literary agency scams work. Now she has written a companion piece on Writer Beware examining fake film company scams.
Victoria Strauss also created a great thread showcasing "7 fake literary agencies run by the same scammer, as shown by identical content on their websites."
Good article from The Atlantic exploring why the private-equity firm purchasing Simon & Schuster, and dumping $1 billion in debt on the publisher, is likely to seriously hurt S&S.
Saga Press announced a number of new additions to their publishing team.
Comic book author and artist Bill Willingham recently announced that due to conflicts with DC Comics, the "comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain." However, the Mary Sue reports that the series may not actually be in the public domain despite what Willingham said, and also asked if Fables can be saved from what they called Willingham's "iffy politics."
As reported by File770, "Sean CW Korsgaard, assistant editor and media relations manager for Baen Books, covered here in March for throwing shade on the Nebula Awards results, got his Twitter account suspended in July because he posted a fantasy about travelling back in time to kill directors Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith."
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is now accepting poetry and translated fiction as qualifying works for membership.
Lincoln Michel tweeted that the "Wheel of Time is easily the most confusing show I've ever seen. Impossible to follow without 5 browser tabs looking up the characters and groups that appear without introduction and also subtitles since every character has the same name." In response, Shiv Ramdas retweeted Michel's words, proclaiming "Rarely has a show ever captured the spirit of the books so perfectly."
Rose definitely wouldn't have made room for Jack on that Titanic door if she'd been a book lover.
Cthulhu has conquered the world of children's connect-the-dots books.
Opportunities
Fusion Fragment seeks submission of "science fiction or SF-tinged literary fiction stories and novelettes ranging anywhere from 2,000 to 15,000 words." Also, the magazine reports they are one of the genre's fastest fiction markets with regards to submissions. "We averaged a 2-day turnaround time last week, despite getting nearly 100 stories per day. And a lot of those stories got read more than once!" Details>>
A new magazine that caught my eyes is Wyngraf: The Magazine of Cozy Fantasy. While they're not currently open to submission, writers of cozy fiction should still check them out. Details>>
Uncanny Magazine will open to short story submissions from October 2 to 16. Details>>
Psychopomp.com, a small press that "seeks to publish otherworldly novellas (and eventually novels) about death, multiverses, time travel, and other strange lands," will reopen to novella submissions on January 1, 2024. Details>>