Frontiers In Intolerance: Indie Publishing

     While writers who’ve elected to go independent, exploiting the 21st Century’s gatekeeper-free outlets for publishing our fiction, have a variety of reasons for doing so, the retention of control over our works is prominent among them. Conventional publishers seldom permit a writer that degree of control. They demand changes of all sorts, ostensibly to improve the book’s marketability. As publishing is a business, I can’t criticize their desire to sell their products. Still, having someone else meddle with my words would sit poorly with me.

     The colonization of established publishing houses by left-wing activists has resulted in an environment that’s decidedly unfriendly to anyone who differs with the Left on any subject. One of the consequences has been the emergence of a new trade: the “sensitivity reader,” who’ll scan your book to guarantee that it won’t offend any of the Left’s mascot groups. I wasn’t too surprised to see such persons offer their services, but I didn’t expect that they’d make any inroads among indies. That proved to be incorrect, which I found baffling.

     Maybe it’s not so baffling after all:

     In what seems to be the first attempted cancelation of the new Trump administration, Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) announced on Wednesday that it was removing author Devon Eriksen’s book from consideration for an award. The SPSFC said that it made the decision because Eriksen violated the competition’s code of conduct — which had been published to X the day before this announcement.
     “We apologize for the extended delay and radio silence. Devon Eriksen has been removed from the SPSFC effective immediately for violation of our code of conduct,” the SPSFC posted on X.
     […]
     That code of conduct stated that contestants could not harass judges or other authors, which Devon didn’t do — and couldn’t do — since he didn’t even know he was entered. But one of the judges posted on Bluesky, in a message provided to The Daily Wire, that even though Eriksen “didn’t directly contact judges or other authors,” his posts were “driving away judges, authors and prospective contestants/members in huge numbers.”
     The background on the situation was first reported by Jon Del Arroz on his Fandom Pulse Substack and was explained to The Daily Wire by Eriksen’s wife, Christine.
     […]
     After dozens of authors had been cut, at least one began complaining about Eriksen’s inclusion in the competition based on his numerous blog posts and tweets, which contain comments about immigration and transgenderism that frequently offend the Left. Dozens of people on Bluesky and the SPSFC discord started calling Eriksen a “nazi” for his posts and published some screenshots of them on Reddit along with a summary of the situation at the SPSFC.
     Following the prolonged outcry, the SPSFC put together a code of conduct and then used it to boot Eriksen from the competition. But the code of conduct claims that its “goal is not to eradicate these ‘bad’ opinions” and that they are “not here to police people’s opinions,” they do just that after claiming Eriksen’s posts amount to “hate speech” and “backwards attitudes.”

     Until I read the cited article, I was unaware of the SPSFC and its contest. But it’s clear that those who have made conventional publishing houses inimical to writers who don’t subscribe to Leftist orthodoxy have fellow-travelers at work among indies and our emergent institutions.

     It’s actually rather funny. Eriksen hadn’t submitted his book to the contest. Perhaps someone else did do, thinking it deserved inclusion. The SPSFC’s slapdash, hurriedly issued “code of conduct” says nothing about politics, political alignments, or opinions on particular issues; it says only that contestants must not contact judges or other contestants. Eriksen hadn’t done any of that. Nevertheless, he was expelled from a competition he hadn’t entered, to maximum fanfare. It gratified me to see that other writers pulled their entries from the contest in sympathy.

     Fiction is a communicative undertaking. We who write do so to convey ideas to our readers, hopefully in an entertaining way. That’s especially so in science fiction, for decades the pre-eminent literature of speculation. When an institution that purports to serve fiction writers in some fashion displays hostility to ideas – any ideas – it crosscuts the point of the enterprise.

     I have no idea whether this particular episode is of major concern to anyone. I mention it out of my conviction that whenever the Left tries to get its claws into a free field, its attempt should be publicized, that it might better be combated. For as with the “sensitivity reader,” any intrusion on freedom of expression must be resisted a outrance. Once the camel’s nose is inside the tent… Capisce?