Months ago, before the enslatening, I posted in support of the Sad Puppies. It wasn’t because I read their kind of fiction, or cared who won the Hugos, or wanted less diversity in the field; it was because something about them made me feel I could breathe again.
Unfortunately, the air became more and more toxic as the summer progressed. But I still feel better than I did before the puppies, and it’s still for the same reason; I now know more about the range of opinions in SFF. It no longer feels like one uniform echo chamber.
There certainly are echo chambers out there, on all sides, and it’s obvious that many people therein are more interested in pleasing their own partisans than in having even the slightest appeal for outsiders. People say horrible, foolish, unforgiveable things in echo chambers. As an outsider, I’ve noped out of a large percentage of the SFF discussion venues I poked my nose into this summer. But before this summer, I didn’t even know that there were multiple echo chambers in SFF. That discovery alone gave me a big sigh of relief.
And then, I found people who were trying to maintain non-aligned spaces where folks were welcome no matter how they felt about the puppies. I saw efforts by conservative and progressive authors, self-published and mainstream, from different countries and races and religions. I discovered that some other people had been as unhappy as I about feeling trapped in an echo chamber, and that feeling that way – or being willing to pay attention to people who felt that way – didn’t mean you were a reactionary, racist misogynist.
I know what I want from SFF now. I want to hang out in places where that person you just answered could be religious or atheist, conservative, libertarian, or progressive; so you’d better make your statements as if the people who disagree with them are human beings, not stereotypes and the butts of echo-chamber quips. And I now know those places exist and there is nothing wrong with me for wanting them.
So whatever good or ill the Sad Puppies did otherwise, I will always be grateful.
