ex_willshet in 
sfwa
Howard V. Hendrix, SFWA's current V.P.
Howard sent the following and ended it, "Thanks for taking the time to post the rant." I respect a good rant, so I'm glad to post it. He didn't make me change my mind about posting work for free on the web, but he made me consider the issue in a new light.
--Will Shetterly
About Howard V. Hendrix:
About My Work:
I've held jobs ranging from hospital phlebotomist to fish hatchery manager to university professor and administrator. My degrees range from a BS in Biology (Xavier University, 1980) to an MA (1982) and PhD in English Literature (1987), both from University of California, Riverside.
My first four published novels appeared from Ace Books (Penguin Putnam): Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), and Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001). My fifth novel, The Labyrinth Key, appeared from Ballantine Del Rey in April 2004. His sixth novel, The Spears of God, was published by Del Rey in December 2006.
My most widely available works of shorter science fiction can be found in my short story collection Möbius Highway (Scorpius Digital Books, 2001), the Full Spectrum original anthology series Vols. 1, 4, and 5 (Bantam Books), and in The Outer Limits Volume 1 (Prima). My publications also include some three dozen works of shorter experimental stories, among them the chapbooks Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 (EOTU Press) and The Vertical Fruit of the Horizontal Tree (Talisman Press). My more recent short fiction has appeared in the June 2002 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in the DAW Books anthology Microcosms (January 2004), and Aeon Two (February 2005), Aeon Five (November 2005), and Future Shocks (January 2006). My story “Palimpsest” will appear in the September 2007 issue of Analog.
I have also published numerous political essays, book reviews, and works of literary criticism, including a book-length study of apocalyptic elements in English literature from Langland to Milton, The Ecstasy of Catastrophe (1990). My most recent science fiction criticism appears in Projections (2004) and YLEM Journal (2006).
An avid gardener, I co-wrote a book on landscape irrigation, Reliable Rain (co-authored with Stuart Straw), which appeared in March 1998 from Taunton Press.
For book-length print work, my agent is Chris Lotts at Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd in New York. For film, his agent is Vincent M. Gerardis of Created By, in Hollywood, CA.
About my life:
I live with my wife Laurel, just shy of the 5,000 foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Shaver Lake, CA. We do not need summer cooling. Over ninety five percent of our winter heating is from a woodstove fueled with wood obtained from our own property -- salvaged from second- and third-growth forest long ago timbered-over and natural-fire suppressed. I do all the felling of the trees for firewood, all the cutting in rounds, and the splitting. Our primary vehicle is a 2003 Honda Civic hybrid, purchased in that model year.
We are firefighters with the Pine Ridge Volunteer Fire Department. We enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada, as well as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
About my work in SFWA:
I wrote the following when I ran for Vice President of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America a few years back:
"SFWA is full of busy people who, nonetheless, make time to keep our organization going. The strength of SFWA is clearly its volunteers and the service of those volunteers on SFWA's committees.
"The purpose of our organization lies not only in educating ourselves and our fellow science fiction and fantasy writers about the blessings and the curses of this business, craft, and art -- important though that is -- but also in being zealous in our defense of the respect, dignity, and financial fair-play we are due as professionals.
"Such an understanding -- that, at its best, SFWA functions as a trade association looking out for the common interests of our membership -- comes from my experience as SFWA Western Regional Director (2000-2003) and as chair of the Credits and Ethics committee during the late 1990s. It also comes from twenty years as a professional writer whose publications include several dozen shorter works, a couple of short fiction collections, and five novels. These works have appeared via large traditional print publishing houses, electronic and digital media, and small presses.
"On a more personal level, I am interested in the vice presidency of SFWA because the vice president works primarily with SFWA's committees. Nearly fifteen years ago, it was a committee of SFWA -- the Grievance Committee -- which came to my aid when I was in a tight spot. At that time, an unscrupulous agent who had "taken me on" as a client was holding my manuscripts hostage in hopes of extorting money (several thousand dollars) from me -- a trick, I later learned, which she had previously pulled on other writers. I contacted the Grievance Committee (chaired at that time by Sheila Finch) and presented to the committee the evidence of my situation. As a result, SFWA's lawyer hit the aforementioned agent with a "cease and desist" and the situation was successfully resolved in my favor.
"Despite a busy life and the sometimes crazy fractiousness of our organization, I feel a continuing sense of obligation to SFWA. If the membership sees fit to elect me to SFWA's vice presidency, I will do my best to faithfully discharge that obligation."
Since writing that, I have published another novel and served two terms as vice president of SFWA. I still believe what I wrote at that time. During my two terms as VP under President Robin Wayne Bailey (with whom I've been proud to serve), I have performed the traditional duties of the VP -- participating in all votes of the Board of Directors, serving as ex-officio member of many committees, and serving as chief "wrangler" for SFWA's numerous committees. I also began working toward a reform of bankruptcy laws and publishers' contract templates regarding those laws, as well as working to establish a permanent "Legacy" database so that contact info for the estates, heirs, and agents of SFWA members who have passed on might be more readily available to agents, publishers, producers, anthologists, publishers, editors and scholars. Both of these projects are ongoing.
Given my involvement with SFWA over the last ten years, many SFWAns have asked me why I chose not to run for the office of SFWA President. Some have even accused me of precipitating a "constitutional crisis" by deciding not to run -- uncontested ballot, write-in candidates, all that.
I will not comment on the interesting election this year (2007), although I do think that anyone who seriously contemplates running for higher office in SFWA should have already served in the organization for a least a couple of years. It shouldn't be "on the job training."
As to why I didn't run, there are several reasons. No, none of them were "a desire to spend more time with his family" -- the cop-out du jour in these difficult times. I will admit, however, that in my own case the last two years have been very trying: Laurel and I built a house in the mountains so I had to take on more teaching chores to help pay the mort-gage (French for "death pledge"), my mother-in-law went into terminal cancer, my mother was diagnosed with early stage dementia, and -- oh yes -- I had two editors (Steve Saffel and Jim Minz) shot out from under me at Del Rey. I'm beginning to feel about my editors the way Custer felt about his horses at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (two steeds were shot out from under Old Yellow-Hair too).
I didn't think I'd serve SFWA well given all these matters still pending. I though I'd call 2007-08 a "rebuilding" or "retrenchment" year. I had no idea that one result of that simple decision would be an uncontested ballot.
In another way too, though, I feel that the organization and I are moving apart at the moment. More and more of SFWA's business is internet mediated. I've spent several thousands of hours doing SFWA business online during my Western Regional Director and Vice President years. As a result I've developed an almost allergic aversion toward all things nettish, including what I'm doing right now.
I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious. For that reason I don't much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net. A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you "go along to get along" for too long, there's a danger you'll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.
I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) -- given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization's development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.
Will I answer your emails? Sure, if you look up my contact info in the SFWA Directory. But I won't blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, lounge or lurk -- and I'll be the happier for it. Writing this now, I'm well aware of the irony that zealot Ted the Unabomber Kzin-ski got the biggest audience for his antitech manifesto /on the internet/, but I persist in insisting that people have a right to push back against technology they perceive to be destructive to their ways of life and their beliefs.
This is my pushback. I'd rather be chopping wood for my woodstove, maintaining my own well, and working endlessly on our twelve acres of pines, oaks, and cedars than futzing with these electrons. And that, if you'll excuse me, is exactly the hands-on work I'll be doing after my term as SFWA vice president ends
Have a nice life.
-- Dr. Howard V. Hendrix
4/24/7: Please read the follow-up post and comment here.
--Will Shetterly
About Howard V. Hendrix:
About My Work:
I've held jobs ranging from hospital phlebotomist to fish hatchery manager to university professor and administrator. My degrees range from a BS in Biology (Xavier University, 1980) to an MA (1982) and PhD in English Literature (1987), both from University of California, Riverside.
My first four published novels appeared from Ace Books (Penguin Putnam): Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), and Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001). My fifth novel, The Labyrinth Key, appeared from Ballantine Del Rey in April 2004. His sixth novel, The Spears of God, was published by Del Rey in December 2006.
My most widely available works of shorter science fiction can be found in my short story collection Möbius Highway (Scorpius Digital Books, 2001), the Full Spectrum original anthology series Vols. 1, 4, and 5 (Bantam Books), and in The Outer Limits Volume 1 (Prima). My publications also include some three dozen works of shorter experimental stories, among them the chapbooks Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 (EOTU Press) and The Vertical Fruit of the Horizontal Tree (Talisman Press). My more recent short fiction has appeared in the June 2002 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in the DAW Books anthology Microcosms (January 2004), and Aeon Two (February 2005), Aeon Five (November 2005), and Future Shocks (January 2006). My story “Palimpsest” will appear in the September 2007 issue of Analog.
I have also published numerous political essays, book reviews, and works of literary criticism, including a book-length study of apocalyptic elements in English literature from Langland to Milton, The Ecstasy of Catastrophe (1990). My most recent science fiction criticism appears in Projections (2004) and YLEM Journal (2006).
An avid gardener, I co-wrote a book on landscape irrigation, Reliable Rain (co-authored with Stuart Straw), which appeared in March 1998 from Taunton Press.
For book-length print work, my agent is Chris Lotts at Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd in New York. For film, his agent is Vincent M. Gerardis of Created By, in Hollywood, CA.
About my life:
I live with my wife Laurel, just shy of the 5,000 foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Shaver Lake, CA. We do not need summer cooling. Over ninety five percent of our winter heating is from a woodstove fueled with wood obtained from our own property -- salvaged from second- and third-growth forest long ago timbered-over and natural-fire suppressed. I do all the felling of the trees for firewood, all the cutting in rounds, and the splitting. Our primary vehicle is a 2003 Honda Civic hybrid, purchased in that model year.
We are firefighters with the Pine Ridge Volunteer Fire Department. We enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada, as well as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
About my work in SFWA:
I wrote the following when I ran for Vice President of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America a few years back:
"SFWA is full of busy people who, nonetheless, make time to keep our organization going. The strength of SFWA is clearly its volunteers and the service of those volunteers on SFWA's committees.
"The purpose of our organization lies not only in educating ourselves and our fellow science fiction and fantasy writers about the blessings and the curses of this business, craft, and art -- important though that is -- but also in being zealous in our defense of the respect, dignity, and financial fair-play we are due as professionals.
"Such an understanding -- that, at its best, SFWA functions as a trade association looking out for the common interests of our membership -- comes from my experience as SFWA Western Regional Director (2000-2003) and as chair of the Credits and Ethics committee during the late 1990s. It also comes from twenty years as a professional writer whose publications include several dozen shorter works, a couple of short fiction collections, and five novels. These works have appeared via large traditional print publishing houses, electronic and digital media, and small presses.
"On a more personal level, I am interested in the vice presidency of SFWA because the vice president works primarily with SFWA's committees. Nearly fifteen years ago, it was a committee of SFWA -- the Grievance Committee -- which came to my aid when I was in a tight spot. At that time, an unscrupulous agent who had "taken me on" as a client was holding my manuscripts hostage in hopes of extorting money (several thousand dollars) from me -- a trick, I later learned, which she had previously pulled on other writers. I contacted the Grievance Committee (chaired at that time by Sheila Finch) and presented to the committee the evidence of my situation. As a result, SFWA's lawyer hit the aforementioned agent with a "cease and desist" and the situation was successfully resolved in my favor.
"Despite a busy life and the sometimes crazy fractiousness of our organization, I feel a continuing sense of obligation to SFWA. If the membership sees fit to elect me to SFWA's vice presidency, I will do my best to faithfully discharge that obligation."
Since writing that, I have published another novel and served two terms as vice president of SFWA. I still believe what I wrote at that time. During my two terms as VP under President Robin Wayne Bailey (with whom I've been proud to serve), I have performed the traditional duties of the VP -- participating in all votes of the Board of Directors, serving as ex-officio member of many committees, and serving as chief "wrangler" for SFWA's numerous committees. I also began working toward a reform of bankruptcy laws and publishers' contract templates regarding those laws, as well as working to establish a permanent "Legacy" database so that contact info for the estates, heirs, and agents of SFWA members who have passed on might be more readily available to agents, publishers, producers, anthologists, publishers, editors and scholars. Both of these projects are ongoing.
Given my involvement with SFWA over the last ten years, many SFWAns have asked me why I chose not to run for the office of SFWA President. Some have even accused me of precipitating a "constitutional crisis" by deciding not to run -- uncontested ballot, write-in candidates, all that.
I will not comment on the interesting election this year (2007), although I do think that anyone who seriously contemplates running for higher office in SFWA should have already served in the organization for a least a couple of years. It shouldn't be "on the job training."
As to why I didn't run, there are several reasons. No, none of them were "a desire to spend more time with his family" -- the cop-out du jour in these difficult times. I will admit, however, that in my own case the last two years have been very trying: Laurel and I built a house in the mountains so I had to take on more teaching chores to help pay the mort-gage (French for "death pledge"), my mother-in-law went into terminal cancer, my mother was diagnosed with early stage dementia, and -- oh yes -- I had two editors (Steve Saffel and Jim Minz) shot out from under me at Del Rey. I'm beginning to feel about my editors the way Custer felt about his horses at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (two steeds were shot out from under Old Yellow-Hair too).
I didn't think I'd serve SFWA well given all these matters still pending. I though I'd call 2007-08 a "rebuilding" or "retrenchment" year. I had no idea that one result of that simple decision would be an uncontested ballot.
In another way too, though, I feel that the organization and I are moving apart at the moment. More and more of SFWA's business is internet mediated. I've spent several thousands of hours doing SFWA business online during my Western Regional Director and Vice President years. As a result I've developed an almost allergic aversion toward all things nettish, including what I'm doing right now.
I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious. For that reason I don't much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net. A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you "go along to get along" for too long, there's a danger you'll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.
I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) -- given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization's development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.
Will I answer your emails? Sure, if you look up my contact info in the SFWA Directory. But I won't blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, lounge or lurk -- and I'll be the happier for it. Writing this now, I'm well aware of the irony that zealot Ted the Unabomber Kzin-ski got the biggest audience for his antitech manifesto /on the internet/, but I persist in insisting that people have a right to push back against technology they perceive to be destructive to their ways of life and their beliefs.
This is my pushback. I'd rather be chopping wood for my woodstove, maintaining my own well, and working endlessly on our twelve acres of pines, oaks, and cedars than futzing with these electrons. And that, if you'll excuse me, is exactly the hands-on work I'll be doing after my term as SFWA vice president ends
Have a nice life.
-- Dr. Howard V. Hendrix
4/24/7: Please read the follow-up post and comment here.
My immediate reaction is to think that right now, what SFWA needs are Web-savvy people who can and will take advantage of the modern forms of communication/social networking that have really gained such strength in the past few years. It strikes me as ironic that a science fiction writer should be so adamantly against online matters. I understand his aversion based on what he says above, but still, it's a rather curious thing to watch a science fiction writer push back against the oncoming future.
Your mileage may vary. :>
(I've been on the net since, ack, too long. I think I have a pretty pioneering and tech-savvy bio.)
And I would note that there are lots of SFWAns who use the net and seem to enjoy it, obviously a whole spectrum's worth, but I think SF writers are generally ahead of the curve compared to, say, other writers. Some SFWAns are at the bleeding edge. So as I said above, don't judge all of SFWA by any one member.
Me, I love technology and am extremely optimistic about it. :-)
I suppose he never contributed to a literary journal?
Giving away one's literary work for free is hardly an invention of the Internet, as any poet could have told him. At one time, I worked for a newspaper that was run as a cooperative and that paid its staff in cooperative "shares." It worked out to about ten dollars an article. None of us considered ourselves to be scabs to the staff at the weekly newspapers in neighboring cities, because our work was essentially different. We were a community enterprise, trying to provide information that no commercial newspaper (at the time our newspaper was founded) would have found worthwhile to cover.
Mr. Hendrix makes a mistake if he thinks that only the author who allows his work to be placed online benefits from such an exercise. An entire generation of readers is growing up that is accustomed to reading stories on the Internet rather than the printed page. That's a sad state of affairs (I say, having grown up with the printed word), but it's the reality. If science fiction and fantasy are to survive into the future, they need to reach these readers. Every time a reader encounters a work of SF/F for the first time on the Internet, chances go up that this same reader will buy a printed SF/F book . . . perhaps even one of Mr. Hendrix's works.
As for the idea of free literary works being inherently pernicious, I may have a little less sympathy in this matter than some authors would. That's because, before age eighteen (when I began to earn more than the dollar-a-week allowance I'd received since age ten), virtually all of my reading matter came from library books or used books. If I'd been denied free reading matter during those years, it's almost certainly the case that I wouldn't have ending up buying any of the many new books I now have on my bookshelves.
The Internet is today's public library. It's where readers are nurtured who will go on to buy authors' books.
I guess that makes public libraries the greatest travesty in the history of literature, eh?
Does not compute. What a writer does with their work (selling it to a big publisher, giving it to a literary magazine, posting it on their website, or sticking it in "the trunk") is completely the writer's business.
This strikes me as a central problem with SFWA. The leadership is clueless, stiff-necked, and often times insulting. They're ignoring the new realities -- the internet is going nowhere, so get used to it.
Go Scalzi! Who BTW, turned his webscabbing into a Hugo nomination -- what a (insert rude comment) he is.
So I want to just say this: this is despicable. Truly, actively, on several different levels, despicable.
I'd really like to know.
Someone go tell Eric Flint he was just called a scab. I'll get the blood ponchos for the first row.
(Anonymous)
Frankly, the intolerance for opinions expressed here, and the way people seem to want to infer that a single opinion expressed by a single writer can be quoted as if it were the opinion of SFWA, baffles me.
There's hundreds of viewpoints in SFWA. Thousands.
Get used to it.
Go lecture someone else.
A scab is a strikebreaker, not an independent writer who does what she wants with her work.
And I am being very, VERY restrained right now; I have other words (which I know how to use correctly) for people who use fightin' words like this with such a clear attempt to inflame and with such little understanding of history.
I'm very much hoping that this is the kind of attitude that SFWA as a whole will move away from. I think it's not only backwards-looking, but destructive to our careers and the state of our genre alike.
I utterly agree. (And I am running, again, in order to do something about it. I think if folks look dispassionately at the collected body of work I've done for SFWA, SF, the Internet, technology, and society as a whole (not just the specific stuff any one person doesn't like :-), I think they'll see that I'm an example of SFWAns who are forward looking. We do exist. Leadership is not necessarily about forcing a new idea on people that they don't like, but helping everyone move forward in a way that they can handle. I favor having a SFWA that helps all authors in their respective goals, and making sure everyone sees the success stories. That makes it easier for one's detractors to take shots at you, but I realize that and try to bounce back. Anyway, don't judge SFWA based on Howard's surprising feelings.)
I'll wear that one with pride, thanks. Although, to be accurate, I am in the Technobourgeoisie, and will certainly be the first up against the wall come the revolution.
I find it genuinely astonishing that a writer of science fiction viscerally loathes all things involved with computer-mediated interaction. Next: Viewing With Alarm the word processor, or possibly the typewriter.
The first thing that comes to my mind is Robert Heinlein and his Farnham fantasy.
And I want to say that SFWA is a guild, not a union. It's not even like the building trades unions, which at least have memberships for apprentices.
(If I can get a good internet connection up there.)
Okay, in my field of study "retrenchment" has a very different meaning.
And it is the exact opposite of what SFWA needs if it wants to be relevant in the next...oh, five seconds.