Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore was a landmark, both for America’s science fiction community and for its home, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Founded in 1974, it was the nation’s oldest independent science fiction specialty bookstore. Later joined by a sister store, Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore, in 1980, the two stores stood side-by-side on Chicago Avenue, hosting book signings and readings in a culturally vibrant district of Minneapolis, a city long known for its “Minnesota Nice” vibe.
As of this date, July 2020, Uncle Hugo’s is no more. It wasn’t the economic precariousness of the book-selling industry that did the store in. Nihilists did. Depending on the legal vagaries of owner Don Blyly’s insurance policy, with its civil insurrection carve-outs, Uncle Hugo’s may never be rebuilt.
Rioters burned Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores to the ground in the early morning of May 30, 2020, along with numerous other businesses on both sides of Chicago Avenue, supposedly in response to the police-involved death of George Floyd. On May 25, 2020, Floyd was arrested by four members of the Minneapolis Police Department for having allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill in a convenience store. When Floyd resisted being placed in a police car, a struggle between him and the officers resulted in one officer pinning Floyd to the sidewalk, face down, restraining Floyd by pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, a method of restraint approved by the MPD. The restraint, filmed by onlookers’ cell phone cameras, lasted approximately eight minutes. The restraining officer, Derek Chauvin, did not relinquish the hold despite cries from Floyd that he could not breathe and was in distress; Floyd had also complained thus prior to attempts to place him in the police car, before he was in restraint. Floyd became non-responsive and was transported by ambulance to a local emergency room, where he was pronounced dead. The autopsy report later showed that Floyd’s neck and esophagus had not suffered damage and that Floyd had ingested potentially fatal levels of fentanyl and methamphetamine, that he suffered from heart disease and hypertension, and that he tested positive for COVID-19.
Floyd was black; Chauvin is white; one of the other three officers is white and two are of Asian background. Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo fired the four officers the following day. Massive protests against police brutality and racially discriminatory policing began in Minneapolis on May 26. These were initially peaceful, but late in the evening, violent members of the crowd began vandalizing police buildings and vehicles and physically clashing with police. Over the following three nights, several Minneapolis commercial corridors suffered severe damage from rioters, looters, vandals, and arsonists, the prelude to weeks of protests and riots in cities across America and the Western world.
The mob came for Uncle Hugo’s during the early morning hours of Saturday, May 30. Owner Don Blyly received a call from his security company at 3:30 AM. Motion detectors had alerted the company Blyly’s store had been broken into. He immediately threw on a set of clothes and headed for his business. When he was two blocks away, he received a second call. This one informed him that smoke detectors had been activated in the store. When he arrived, his two bookstores were ablaze. Arsonists had broken every window in the stores and had spilled accelerants through each window prior to setting the fires, ensuring the destruction would be total. Blyly ran to his back entrance, hoping to access his fire extinguisher, but choking black smoke billowed through the door as soon as he opened it. He then attempted to limit the damage to his neighbor’s business, a dental clinic. That building also proved too far gone to be saved.
I doubt very much that the arsonists had a particular animus against science fiction, the mystery genre, or even books in general. Rather, I think they burned down Uncle Hugo’s due to their love for destruction, an adrenaline-fueled high that came from their exercise of nihilistic power, and a savage joy in tearing down what they had not built up. Upon carrying out their arsons, the perpetrators, all young white men, did not evince anger, bereavement, or resentment. They acted as though this were a festive occasion. Blyly did not witness rioters screaming or crying or expressing rage. He saw arsonists and vandals dancing on Chicago Avenue, the uproarious flames on both sides of the street illuminating their exultant faces.
As of late, science fiction has accrued its own arsonists, vandals inside the field, both professionals and fans, who brandish a far more particularized sense of grievance than that displayed by the destroyers of Uncle Hugo’s. So-called “progressive” elements within the science fiction community have successfully canceled a handful of “problematic” icons from science fiction’s past. Their victims included the most influential editor in the history of the field, John W. Campbell, arguably the father of modern science fiction, a contrarian who inspired his stable of writers to new feats of extrapolation through speculative discussion sessions and editorials that did not steer clear of controversy, whether social, technological, or political. In 1973, Dell Magazines, publisher of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, began awarding the annual John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, meant to honor the worthiest author whose first science fiction had been published within the past two calendar years. In 2019, winner Jeanette Ng denounced John W. Campbell in her acceptance speech, calling him a “fascist”; Dell, the award’s sponsor, immediately cowered and changed the name of their award to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (thus defenestrating the most significant employee in the company’s history).
This followed on the heels of the 2016 banishment of H. P. Lovecraft’s visage from the World Fantasy Awards. Since its inception in 1975, the annual World Fantasy Awards trophies, presented by the World Fantasy Convention, had been stylized busts of H. P. Lovecraft, a founding master of dark fantasy and horror fiction. However, in 2016, the award committee bowed to pressure and changed the trophies to a tree in front of a full moon, due to concerns regarding evidence of racism and anti-Semitism found in Lovecraft’s correspondence.
The science fiction community’s iconoclasm has not been limited to dead white males. The late Alice Sheldon, who had written under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. and had long been a feminist icon in the science fiction world, has been subjected to a similar posthumous cancellation. Sheldon and her husband Huntington had agreed to carry out a mutual suicide pact in the event that either of them should suffer a catastrophic decline in health. Huntington became blind late in his older age, and Sheldon, following a highly-praised late-life career in science fiction, found herself suffering from depression and heart disease. In 1987, she shot him, then killed herself. In 1991, the organizers of the feminist science fiction convention WisCon began awarding annual James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Awards to honor works that advance the consideration of gender issues. In 2019, however, the awards committee, responding to complaints that Sheldon had shown herself problematically “ableist” by choosing to kill her disabled husband, decided to strip Alice Sheldon’s pen name from their awards, renaming them the Otherwise Awards.
At least Campbell, Lovecraft, and Sheldon find themselves in good company. During June 2020, in a spate of monument destruction that began with the topplings and removals of memorials to Confederate generals and politicians but quickly extended to statues of virtually everyone held in high regard by traditionally patriotic Americans, vandals damaged or destroyed statues of Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. Even the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial, honoring the Union Army’s first all-volunteer black fighting force, did not escape the defacers’ destructive attention. This either illustrates the vandals’ breathtakingly arrogant ignorance of history, or their desire to emulate the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero in an American context, a violent erasure of everything that predates the onset of their revolutionary zeal.
The Jacobin wing of the science fiction community have not limited their cancellations and online shaming-and-shunning campaigns to deceased luminaries. They have also targeted a number of the field’s elder statesmen, writers who have provided the conceptual and speculative scaffolding for all science fiction being currently written. Robert Silverberg is perhaps the most honored living science fiction author, a dominant force in the field since he burst onto the scene as a wildly talented teenager in the mid-1950s. In 2018, following the third consecutive Hugo Awards ceremony at which woman-of-color N. K. Jemisin was awarded the Hugo for Best Novel (she had published a trilogy), Silverberg commented in a private online chat room that he considered her acceptance speech to have been particularly graceless. Despite Jemisin having won an unprecedented three consecutive Best Novel Hugos, a triple honor that greatly boosted her earning power and prestige, the honoree had opted to deliver an angry, condemnatory speech focused mainly on the alleged racism and sexism rife within the science fiction and fantasy field. She mainly aimed her vitriol on a minor writer not in attendance, Vox Day, a provocateur who had called Jemisin some nasty names on his blog. Robert Silverberg has dedicated his entire life to science fiction; the annual Hugo Awards ceremony is one of the highlights of his calendar. So he was understandably perturbed when Jemisin chose to turn such an occasion into a Maoist reeducation session. Silverberg made his comments in a private forum; an unscrupulous member of that forum then leaked those comments — which focused entirely on Jemisin’s gracelessness, not her sex or her race — to a public forum. Internet purity enforcers thenceforth tarred Silverberg, who has exemplified the best aspects of liberalism throughout his long career, as a racist and a sexist, branding him with the contemporary Scarlet Letters “R” and “S”.
Silverberg’s public humiliation followed a similar episode involving two nearly as prominent authors from the generation that followed his. In 2013, award-winning writers Barry N. Malzberg and Mike Resnick were fired from their quarterly gig of writing the “Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues” column for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA) Bulletin. Their “crime”? They wrote a series of articles celebrating the little-remembered women editors and assistant editors who had staffed the offices of several science fiction, fantasy, and horror pulp magazines of the field’s Golden Age, including famed magazines such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. The articles praised these women in the most effusive and adoring terms and resurrected their names and reputations for a new generation. But Malzberg and Resnick stumbled into a “wokeness” trip wire when they used the term “lady editors” (certainly period appropriate for a remembrance of the 1930s and 1940s) and recounted an amusing anecdote from the 1950s during which the wives of some male fans fretted over their husbands’ poolside socializing with one of the woman editors because of how striking she looked in a bikini. The resulting explosion — Resnick and Malzberg were variously excoriated online as “misogynistic, irrelevant dinosaurs,” “old men yelling at clouds,” “hideous, backwards, and strangely atavistic,” “blithering nincompoops,” “antiquated,” “gross,” “shitty,” “prehistoric,” and perhaps most colorfully, “giant space dicks” — provoked a six-month hiatus in the publication of the Bulletin, a panicked hunt for any signs of atavistic attitudes within SFFWA, and the end of what had been the magazine’s most informative and entertaining feature. As collateral damage, Jean Rabe, the woman editor (ironically) of the Bulletin, was forced to resign, due to her having signed off on the Resnick/Malzberg articles and for having approved a cover that featured an illustration of a scantily-clothed female barbarian warrior, an homage to iconic fantasy pulp magazine and paperback cover art.
The science fiction community is not alone in possessing these neo-Puritanical tendencies. The community overlaps with and emerges from larger communities where cancel culture and obeisance to the tropes of wokeness are especially prevalent — academia (particularly the liberal arts and studies departments), media, government, and the non-profit sector. Unlike the early decades of the commercial science fiction genre, when many writers possessed backgrounds in the hard sciences or engineering, today’s writers and editors tend to be graduates of MFA programs or academic programs in the soft sciences or liberal arts. Many have day jobs as college instructors.
Cancel culture has grown so severe and pervasive in academia, journalism, media, professional sports, and the arts that Harper’s Magazine pushed back against the phenomenon by publishing “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” on July 7, 2020. It read, in part:
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. ... (I)t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. ... We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
The letter was signed by 153 prominent writers, journalists, and academicians, most of whom identify as political liberals, including J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, Francis Fukuyama, and Wynton Marsalis. Pundits from opposite sides of the political spectrum joined virtual hands on the list: David Frum and David Brooks on the right, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, and Matthew Yglesias on the left. Ironically, Yglesias, senior editor at Vox, was subjected to a Twitter shaming campaign by junior staffers at his own magazine due to his signing the letter, and several of the letter’s signatories have since renounced their support, after learning that some of their co-signatories possess “unsavory” views. Cancel culture is the snake that swallows its own tail.
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Science fiction cannot survive as an intellectual and artistic pursuit (as opposed to a flavor of adventure and suspense media) in an atmosphere of fear and pervasive self-censorship. Speculation and extrapolation — asking what if? and why? or how? — are the life’s blood of science fiction. Its writers can’t mentally wrap themselves in yellow CAUTION tape; if they do, they creatively cripple themselves and the field they profess to love. They need to be free to follow their what ifs? wherever those speculative rabbit-holes may lead... even if they lead to unpleasant, disturbing, or frightening places.
Traditionally, science fiction has prided itself on making room for contrarians, for heretics, for the unfashionable and unpopular, for dreamers at the fringe. This freedom of entry and freedom of thought has resulted in a rich, century-long conversation between generations of practitioners of extrapolation, a conversation that lies at the heart of science fiction. This ongoing dialogue has fueled the field’s growth and inspired its greatest works. An environment of self-censorship kills the conversation. It results in work that is derivative, stale, and decadent, lazy fictions that reek of commonplace pieties and socially-enforced ideology.
More than fifty years ago, in 1967, at a time of cultural upheaval and social unrest not too dissimilar to that of our current season, writer and anthologist Harlan Ellison captured the attention of the science fiction community, as well as much of the larger literary world, by publishing the largest original anthology of science fiction printed to that time, Dangerous Visions. Ellison sought submissions that couldn't be printed in the science fiction magazines or anthologies of the day. He asked for taboo-shattering stories. And he got them! The anthology’s 32 stories included tales that explored the ramifications of incest, homosexuality, bisexuality, cross-species sex, women's liberation, sadism, graphic violence, blasphemies against popular religions, the moral limitations of capitalism, and the pervasiveness of bigotry. Five years later, in 1972, he followed up with an even larger sequel, the two-volume anthology Again, Dangerous Visions.
During the five decades since the anthologies' publication, what was originally taboo-breaking has become the common mental furniture of the science fiction field and the rest of the arts. Virtually none of the stories Ellison published in 1967 or 1972 would be regarded as shocking, subversive, or transgressive by today’s readers. But this does not mean that taboo as a social and cultural force is anachronistic or obsolescent. New taboos have arisen to take the place of exhausted ones.
Examples aren’t hard to find. Disagreement with any of the following beliefs is considered taboo according to the reigning zeitgeist — the pervasiveness of structural racism embedded throughout American society; gender is an entirely social construct, yet gender identity is an innate, immutable quality; speech is violence, but “good” physical violence should be considered protected expression; race is a socially invented category, yet one’s racial category demands higher loyalty than that granted to any other membership and properly determines one’s political and culture views; white people are innately and ineluctably racist and all efforts on their part to deny this are evidence of white fragility and attempts to buttress white superiority; there are no significant differences between men and women, yet women are uniquely vulnerable to sexual predation from men and so, in any situation of ambiguity of consent, women’s testimony must be favored over men’s; human-generated carbon emissions are the primary driver of climate change and will result in an uninhabitable planet by the end of this century.
These are all beliefs, or hypotheses, or assertions of moral guidance, no different in universal applicability from Hindus’ belief in the sacredness of cows or Jews’ injunctions that dairy foods not be consumed at the same meal as meat. Yet large, influential sectors of American society consider violation of any of these beliefs or hypotheses or moral injunctions as taboo. Just as within past and present societies ruled by religious or ideological authoritarians, in the America of 2020, violation of taboo results in performative shunning and attempted ostracism with the goal of inflicting reputational and career damage. Consequences for violation of taboo have not yet risen to the level of mass imprisonment; ominously, however, the increasing salience and prosecutorial use of hate crime litigation and efforts by some on the left to criminalize disagreement with climate change dogma point in that direction. More and more often, political disagreement is heightened to the level of heresy. Persons who earn their livelihoods at the sufferance of employers sensitive to cancellation campaigns will naturally self-censor, purely out of a sense of self-preservation.
Yet in this period of accelerating technological change and resultant social change, we need a healthy, vigorous, daring, and courageous science fiction, more than ever. We are entering an era when many of science fiction’s classic scenarios are becoming realized — pervasive, technologically invasive population surveillance and social control (in China); human and animal genetic modification; asteroid mining; radically decentralized weapons production in the home; cyborg technology; and, perhaps most portentously, the creation of artificial intelligences. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock may have been deferred for three decades while Western societies took their collective right foot off the technological accelerator pedal, allowing themselves to be mesmerized with the Internet and social media, but future shock is fast approaching, if for now hidden the way a tsunami wave is hidden beneath the sea’s surface until the wave nears land.
All of these soon-to-arrive phenomena were extrapolated and explored during science fiction’s most productive decades, the 1940s through the 1970s. But those classic tales were written during times far different from our own, in the context of societal viewpoints and assumptions that have mutated greatly in the decades since. They need to be revisited in the light of our current circumstances. The most socially and culturally useful science fiction of the next generation will be near-future science fiction, imaginative extrapolation that will bear resemblance to the sub-genre now referred to as techno-thrillers. Relevant science fiction will often take the form of reexaminations and reconsiderations of past fictive extrapolations that are now shading into fact.
Writers should never feel pressured to conform their work to a particular template; as works of art, science fiction stories and novels are in no way compelled to aspire toward a status of social, cultural, or political utility (that way lies propaganda). However, those writers who wish to take upon themselves a responsibility to help their fellow citizens understand and cope with the rising wave of technologically-driven societal disrupters will need to get back to science fictional basics. They will need to direct their creative efforts away from commercially-driven sub-genres such as fantasy in its various forms (secondary world fantasy; urban fantasy; dark fantasy), alternate history, romance genre mash-ups, media property tie-ins, and supposedly sophisticated slipstream fiction that wears its fantastical or technologically extrapolative elements the way a giant pretzel does its particles of salt: on the surface, easily dislodged.
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This collection and its forthcoming sequel, Again, Hazardous Imaginings, an international anthology of politically incorrect science fiction, are intended to push back against the closing of science fiction’s collective mind. Both feature stories that would not be published by editors of commercial science fiction magazines or anthologies in the current climate. By publishing these stories, I am screaming “NO!” at the strictures of the reigning zeitgeist — but not merely to kick up controversy and sell some books. I’m trying to inject some sorely needed antibodies into our cultural bloodstream. In order for science fiction to serve as an early-warning radar for both tomorrow’s perils and for dangerous technological and social trends already metastasizing, its practitioners cannot wear blinders, whether forced upon them by outside influencers or self-imposed.
Science fiction cannot be a safe space.
Much of what you will read in these two volumes will not feel comfortable or comforting. Some of these pieces may make you angry. Some may make you question certain verities that you had never thought to question before. Some may even incite you to throw the book (or your reading device) across the room.
If so, these volumes are working as intended. The best of science fiction was never meant to be escapist literature. The only way to escape the future is to die. Those of us who live to inhabit the future will be forced to cope in one way or another with all the changes the future brings. Rather than waiting passively to be blindly buffeted by whatever gusts the future will bring, we better serve ourselves, our families, and our communities by using the tools available to us to forecast from what directions those winds will engulf us.
Science fiction is among the most powerful of those tools. But all tools exposed to the elements require preventative maintenance, lest they grow rusty or degraded, their blades dulled.
Think of this volume as an example of science fiction’s preventative maintenance, just as Dangerous Visions was during the tumultuous year of 1967. Hazardous Imaginings and Again, Hazardous Imaginings represent my efforts to clear taboo’s encroaching entanglement of dry kindling from the ramparts of science fiction, so that no arsonists will succeed in burning down the fabulous edifice the way Uncle Hugo’s was burnt to its foundations... all its thousands of books, monuments to science fiction’s past and exemplars of its present, turned to ashes the same way as the condemned tomes in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
— Andrew Fox
July 2020: Virginia
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