Let me begin by repeating that Reckoning is actively seeking work by marginalized writers and artists, we would love to publish more work in translation, we pay translators the same rate we pay authors (10 cents a word for prose, $50 per page for poetry and art), and though we are not currently able to review or translate work written in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and a myriad of other languages, we can and do read in English, French, Swedish, and Spanish, and we get excited every single time we encounter in our submissions a new piece of translated work, or any work from part of the world or from a perspective we’ve never encountered before. We are very lucky to be able to say we’ve now got a native Spanish speaker on staff, who will hopefully open us up to many more of those experiences and enable us to publish even more diverse work.
Reckoning is a non-profit journal of creative writing on environmental justice. Lifting up and celebrating voices marginalized and shut out by the uninterrogated imperialist and extractive-capitalist mainstream is environmental justice. The concentration of wealth, which is the operating principle of colonialism, also concentrates agency and the power to be heard in the hands of wealthy and overwhelmingly white perpetrators of colonialism. The hegemony of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, the destruction of the earth’s forests, the depletion of the earth’s oceans, the deterioration of public health, and the spread of fascism are the exact and direct results of this. It’s our mission to resist and countermand those forces.
Apropos of the disaster that was the Hugo awards administration for 2023, it feels imperative to say out loud a few things about the science fiction and fantasy field as a whole, of which we’re proud to consider ourselves a tiny but vital part.
We perceive the dangerous potential, as daily worse things seem to come out about the behavior of a Hugo admin committee responsible for hurting so many great authors and the entire fandom of China—not to mention individual humans in their immediate vicinity—of writing them off as irrevocably evil outliers and therefore not representative of problems in our field. We don’t want this latest crisis to overshadow the previous, ongoing crisis or the one before that. That the Hugo committee has provided a scapegoat to whom consequences can be applied cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that, for one glaring example, the insidious shutting-out of Palestinian voices is still going on. There are so many compounded crises, anyone can be forgiven for not addressing every one all the time loud enough so nobody else forgets. Individually, we must choose one injustice at a time to address, with our voices, our donations, our votes, because otherwise we’ll all implode from the pressure. But we can’t let the latest injustice blot out the rest.
How do individual people get to act this terribly? They get encouraged. If they’re entitled white men, that encouragement need amount to nothing more than looking the other way. How do individual people get encouraged to be better? By positive peer pressure. By example.
The antidote to bureaucratic power-clutching and uninterrogated fascist creep, like the problem, is manifold. We need juried awards with juries of accountable, well-intentioned people empaneled by accountable, well-intentioned people. The Ignyte awards are one such. So are the Shirleys. Support them, care about them, pay attention to who wins. Our fellow Detroit-based indie press Atthis Arts bent over backwards this past year rescuing an anthology of Ukrainian SFF, Embroidered Worlds, from the slag heap. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Lift them up. We need magazines like Strange Horizons (who published a Palestinian special issue in 2021), Fiyah (who did one in 2022), Clarkesworld (who have long been in the vanguard of championing translated work and translators), Omenana, and khōréō (their year 4 fundraiser ends 2/29). We need magazines whose editors and staff are actively listening to, seeking out, boosting, celebrating, paying—and translating, paying, and celebrating translators of—Chinese, Taiwanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Congolese, Nigerian, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, and trans voices. Do we in that litany miss anybody currently getting shut out? Undoubtedly. This work is unending. We choose to keep at it.
The Hugo admins aren’t the only ones failing at this. The PEN Awards have recently been actively lifting up pro-genocide voices and suppressing Palestinian voices. A story we published, “All We Have Left Is Ourselves” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, won a PEN Award for emerging writers in 2021. How can the administrators of an award designed specifically to remedy the way the publishing establishment has systematically ignored marginalized voices side with imperialism? There’s an open letter calling the PEN organization to task for this. Reckoning is among those who have signed it.
Over my eight year tenure as publisher of Reckoning, I’ve heard complaints from a number of authors about a number of fiction markets which shall here remain nameless who insist on paying authors with PayPal or not at all. PayPal recently auto-suspended Reckoning’s account because we used their service to pay a Palestinian author for their work (and then unsuspended us only after we called in the BBB and CPA, a tactic we glowingly recommend). They also have routinely shut us out from paying Mexican, Russian, Nigerian and Bangladeshi authors. Do we then throw up our hands and not pay those authors? No, we find another service, we pay the fees, we jump through the hoops until they get paid.
Our contributors routinely tell us what an exceptionally relaxed, kind, professional, supportive experience it is selling us their work. I do not generally talk about this, though it is among the most rewarding things about publishing Reckoning. I tend to feel pleased but uncomfortable about it, because from my perspective, I did not do anything special. I was polite. I told them out loud how much I actually liked the work I was offering to pay them for. I paid promptly, and if obstacles got in the way of that payment, I surmounted those obstacles. I celebrated their work. I submitted it for awards. The end.
To be clear: Chinese dissident voices should not be discarded outside the gate to the field’s most popular award. Palestinian and dissident Israeli voices should not be suppressed because anyone is squeamish about genocide or the politics of wealth. English should not be the lingua franca of the future nor English speakers its arbiters, and all tools at our disposal should be employed to circumvent that. Translators should be credited and paid. Figureheads and bankrupt institutions should be torn down, not pandered to.
Thank you for your kind attention. Please send us your work.
Michael,
I could not agree more with you, here and in the original, raw version. How hard is it not be an a#@hole? In writing related endeavors and in life generally? I’ve lost a couple of “friends” when they couldn’t understand why I’m not onboard with Israel’s atrocities, many of which are conducted utilizing weapons given to them by the U.S.
By request, and to be even more clear: it is my conviction that the formation of the state of Israel by the Allied powers after World War 2 was an act of imperialism and conquest, and the 75+ years of settler colonial displacement & elimination of Palestinians since were different from Netanyahu’s current, openly genocidal policy only by degrees. Israel should give the land and the rule of that land back to the Palestinians it is engaged in murdering. The #LandBack movement is essential to the environmental justice reckoning this magazine was named for and founded to address, and I have hesitated to say so explicitly only because I’m a white colonizer and mine is not the voice that needs to be heard. The point is to provide a soapbox and the support to allow others to say it.
Gluttons for punishment may find my original, uncut and expletive-laden version here.
I am indebted to Reckoning staff without whose spurring I wouldn’t have written this at all, and in particular to Johannes Punkt and Priya Chand for edits and encouragement.