“

The parameters of ‘‘The Cold Equations’’ are not the inescapable laws of physics. Zoom out beyond the page’s edges and you’ll find the author’s hands carefully arranging the scenery so that the plague, the world, the fuel, the girl and the pilot are all poised to inevitably lead to her execution. The author, not the girl, decided that there was no autopilot that could land the ship without the pilot. The author decided that the plague was fatal to all concerned, and that the vaccine needed to be delivered within a timeframe that could only be attained through the execution of the stowaway.

It is, then, a contrivance. A circumstance engineered for a justifiable murder. An elaborate shell game that makes the poor pilot – and the company he serves – into victims every bit as much as the dead girl is a victim, forced by circumstance and girlish naïveté to stain their souls with murder.

Moral hazard is the economist’s term for a rule that encourages people to behave badly. For example, a rule that says that you’re not liable for your factory’s pollution if you don’t know about it encourages factory owners to totally ignore their effluent pipes – it turns willful ignorance into a profitable strategy.

‘‘The Cold Equations’’ is moral hazard in action. It is a story designed to excuse the ship’s operators – from the executives to ground control to the pilot – for standardizing on a spaceship with no margin of safety. A spaceship with no autopilot, no fuel reserves, and no contingency margin in its fuel calculations.

‘‘The Cold Equations’’ never asks why the explorers were sent off-planet without a supply of vaccines. It never asks what failure of health-protocol led to the spread of the disease on the distant, unexplored world.

‘‘The Cold Equations’’ shoves every one of those questions out the airlock along with the young girl. It barks at us that now is not the time for pointing fingers, because there is an emergency. It says that now is the time to pull together, the time for all foolish girls to die to save brave explorers from certain death, and not the time for assigning blame.

But if a crisis of your own making isn’t the time to lay blame, then the optimal strategy is to ensure that the crisis never ends.

—	Cory Doctorow: Cold Equations and Moral Hazard http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/

My God, It's Full Of Vile

I've recently found a link to a collection of incoherent hate-filled spewings editorials by John W. Campbell, the bigoted grandfather of modern science fiction (Here if you want it https://archive.org/details/collectededitori01camp ) and I have just finished the first ignorant frothing rant essay and oh my God it is awful. No matter how bad you think you remember that horrific old man as being, he was worse. The first piece in that collection was an angry rant about thalidomide - Specifically that a few thousand disfigured babies were a small price to pay for Progress, and how dare some mere woman have blocked that miraculous wonder-drug from distribution in the US just because it hadn’t been proven safe.

No, really.

Next up is an essay on the glories of segregation. I’m taking a break before I go anywhere near that one.

Just as a reminder, John W.Campbell was one of the founders of modern science fiction. He controlled access to the largest short-story market of his day - And he ruthlessly inforced a No Blacks, No Asians, No Non-Whites vision of the future. His bluntly misogynistic and white nationalist attitudes are still found in much of mainstream science fiction, and are still accepted by a lot of people as ‘just the way the genre is’. So if you’re wondering why anyone should care about the vicious spewings of a man long dead, just remember that he helped build the genre you see today - The genre where far too many people are happy to accept a Straight White Males Only vision of the future as The Future. Campbell was a bigot even by the standards of his era, and yet over a century after his birth we still have people happy to accept his ideas as the status quo. Campbell matters today because he went out his way to teach bigotry to his readers, and far too many modern science fiction fans are happy to absorb his lessons.

The Gernsback Genre

In 1981the Burning Chrome anthology published a short story by William Gibson called The Gernsback Continuum. In this story a photographer, overwhelmed by images of a future that never came to pass, slowly begins to slip into an alternate continuum (Or madness) - A history based on all those alternate tomorrows of the past, the Popluxe atomic future of the 1940s and 1950s, all torpedo-rocketships and mile-high Art Nouveau towers. Overcoming his fears he begins to embrace this reality, until he encounters the natives of this Gernsbackian alternate future, a pair of whiter than white Aryan Americans. The sterile mindset of these Gernsback Continuum inhabitants sends the protagonist racing back to the safety of his continuum of origin, embracing pornography and news of crime to drag himself back to reality. He feels himself lucky to have escaped this pseudofascist white Gernsback-reality, with its implied holocaust carefully hidden beneath a veneer of giant airships and utopian idealism.

Which is all a bit odd, given that Hugo Gernsback was a Jewish immigrant who didn’t become a naturalized US citizen until he was in his twenties and who worked in publishing, one of the most notoriously vice-fueled industries the US had to offer at the time. He worked in electronics importing for a while, got into publishing magazines and catalogues for that industry, and discovered that he would rather print stories about scientific adventures than publish wiring diagrams. Hugo gets blamed for a lot in science fiction, even or especially the things he had nothing to do with. But Hugo Gernsback did create science fiction, so some of the blame of the genre must fall on him.

Mary Shelley didn’t write science fiction. She wrote an allegory about the responsibilities and failures of parenthood, disguised as a tale of horror and drawing influence from the medical science of his time.

Jules Verne didn’t write science fiction. He wrote adventure stories that focused on extreme engineering projects.

Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t write science fiction. He wrote action stories set in exotic locations filled with beautiful princesses and ancient ruins.

Science fiction is a genre, and genres are marketing categories. Hugo Gernsback created the genre of science fiction. He worked in publishing, liked stories with lots of engineering detail and interesting gadgets, and liked to play with extrapolating current technical developments into the future. He invented the marketing term ‘science fiction’, along with his preferred clunkier term ‘scientifiction’, to describe the works he enjoyed and wanted to publish. Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction, specifically to publish the sort of stories he enjoyed. He also encouraged his readers to get in touch with one another to discuss stories and share ideas, and the first SF fandom came out of those contacts. That fandom grandparented Shelley and Wells and Burroughs into the genre after the fact. Hugo Gernsback promoted a specific form of scientific storytelling, invented a literary genre to sell those stories under, and pushed the creation of a community to read and create those stories.

Naval adventure stories set in outer space are science fiction because Hugo Gernsback said so. Medical thrillers based on cutting-edge biosciences research are science fiction because Hugo Gernsback said so. The consensus-future of science fiction looks like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis because Hugo Gernsback said so. Advanced societies are full of bureaucrat-ordained names like Ralph 124c 41+ and Jor-L and 0B1-KN0B because Hugo Gernsback, born Hugo Gernsbacher, said so.

He also ripped a lot of people off. Pretty much everyone he worked with, really. This is hardly surprising, given the state of pulp publishing in his era, but that did make it easy for John W. Campbell to dominate the new SF publishing field just by being somewhat less awful than the blatantly crooked Gernsback.

Hugo Gernsback published the first stories of a Russian Jewish immigrant, an anarchist feminist woman, and a formerly-suicidal gay teen on the verge of dropping out of college, all of whom became major figures in science fiction. In the 1970s Brian Aldiss accused him of lowering the literary standards of the genre. In the 1980s one of the new luminaries of the deliberately reactionary sub-genre of cyberpunk blamed him for the all-white authoritarian future of John W. Campbell. Today he’s mainly dismissed as a crook who mis-ran a lot of magazines.

We Didn't Get Here By Accident

Three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility… .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset… .It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it… .) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry….

It’s not me, of course, it’s the audience. Those poor dears just aren’t ready (In 1967, in 2015, in 2062…) for anything other than a straight white male protagonist. That’s just how the world is, and I, the person responsible for selecting the stories the world sees, am powerless against it.

The arguments for exclusion haven’t changed a bit in fifty years.