This is a recap of a post I did on Wyrmflight last November (2022). The SF convention I’d been involved with for a long time, SpoCon, had just ended its run. These comments were about what I thought was the best panel of the weekend. The topic still resonates, so I’m offering it again here.
Today I’m sharing an excerpt from the panel discussion, “That’s Too Political.” I was joined by my old friend Manny Frishberg, with newer friends S. Evan Townsend and Michael Hodges.
“That’s too Political” is an accusation that gets thrown around a lot recently. It’s meant to stop uncomfortable conversations. The panelists agreed that all fiction is political. Science fiction and fantasy have been at the forefront of this more than many other genres. Anyway, this is what I remember about my closing thoughts.
“One book can change the world. Books are that powerful. When people say, “That’s too political,” it is a form of censorship. They want to stop the conversations that challenge their world view. Through a coordinated campaign of school and library censorship around the country, they want to stop kids from having empathy for a gay, or a Black, or someone thinking of suicide, or someone with a mental illness.
“We as writers must not permit this. We writers cannot be silenced.”
I still believe this. Writers are people who live in this world. We see what’s going on around us. With our keenly honed literary skills, we want to write about what we see.
And we should keep on writing it, even in the face of self-proclaimed “community groups” who actually are not related to the communities they claim to represent. These are political hit squads, carefully curated by one political party to carry out their agenda of censorship against racial and gender equality.
Over the past year, we’ve seen their attacks on libraries, whether in individual classrooms, whole schools, and now public libraries. They weep over alleged “pornography” and rant about “liberty” and “freedom” while relentlessly suppressing both.
Writers, keep writing your stories. Don’t let the censors win.
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