I am going to recuse myself from reviewing or voting for this story because it touches on a sensitive memory, where I was working on some collaborative work with someone I won’t identify.
And I came up with a plot point where the people on this one planet, which is a hostile dangerous planet, were in the habit of reproducing in batches. Young women would select young men to provide DNA (physical contact optional) in time for her reserved appointment with the birthing center, and nine months later they’d hatch, and robots would help mama tend them all and raise them to school age, at which point they’d be sent off to live with their fathers’ people, or boarding school if they had early aptitude. This was done to maximize their survival as well as minimize stress on the mother’s body, on a planet full of vicious animals and environmental hazards where you needed to be strong to survive.
My collaborator went ballistic on me. What a horrible anti-feminist idea. According to the Vorkosigan saga, machine birth is evil, and every science fiction writer ought to know this, and incubating this idea in my brain made me a terrible misogynistic person. The collab was dead. Plus I'm a vile dirty fascist.
And I went down to the pier to get a cheeseburger, but I didn't have much appetite, so I threw most of it to the seagulls. I didn’t realize it was the first of many such outbursts I’d be receiving as I continued on this path, but they in fact kept coming – accusations of ideological turpitude could come at any moment, from any person inclined to suddenly raise their voice and get dramatic. Because I disagreed with some pop star that a three-hour show is too long. Because I fact-checked someone’s internet meme. Because I should’ve known there was a huge discussion (that I never learned about) in the SF community about incubating humans.
And I could accept this if I in fact were transgressing, but most of the time it was about people pitching a fit and framing it within the context of political criticism because that’s the accepted social excuse in some communities for when you feel like raising your voice at someone without repercussions, and the accepted response is to sit there and take it while agreeing with the person crashing out until they finally run out of steam.
And I realized it was just how these people keep the gate, how they interact, how they determine who's in their clique. It’s not so much about an actual rule set that one must follow because they make that up on the fly, it’s about how some people are doms, and frequently feel the need to establish that, and they are the ones who get to crash out and fling accusations, but if you stick around long enough there’ll be a fresh stream of noobs for you to vent upon. Sort of like how a lot of religions operate. It was the same back in the days when Marion Zimmer Bradley was running around, and that was why I wandered away for a few decades, to see if things would get better.
I don't have the amount of “sit there and take it” energy it would cost to stay in their good graces. Especially when the daytime world rewards me for being a nitpicking pedant who points things out. That’s kind of what I’m going to Worldcon to investigate, and why I’m jumping back into Hugo reviewer mode after a long break. I'm too old to keep checking in and going "is this place cool yet?" It's more like wondering if there's any reason a person with an extremely casual interest in SF should stick around.
So here I am, looking at a human-incubator story getting nominated for a Hugo and thinking about those fat fucking seagulls who got way more cheeseburger than they needed that one day. Not voting for or against this one – which is otherwise quite well-written – or reviewing it in detail. Some people are allowed to discuss this subject in this crowd but I'm not among them.
But you can read it if you want, it’s over here.
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