All Art Is Political

This week, a new, upcoming organization for sff writers was announced. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators Guild. "A professional organization dedicated to the promotion of Sci-Fi/Fantasy and ALL of the wonderful creators of it."

Well, that sounds pretty great, I hear you say. Let's promote those wonderful creators.

Where it falls apart, is once you start digging a little deeper. First, there already IS a professional organization for sff creators: Science Fiction Writers of America, aka SFWA. Now there are some in sff who have an issue with the organization, especially since the expulsion of one Vox Day, for using an official SFWA twitter account to call author N.K. Jemisin a "half-savage". Jemisin is a black woman.

In the SFFCG's tweets, one can find their views fairly easily. While they claim to be all about the stories, they've called the statement "All art is political" a cancer on all of SFF.

How far is that tweet from the deeply disingenuous tweet to N.K Jemisin: "We are a new organization hoping to steer the sci-fi/fantasy community of creators away from the bickering and fighting over non- sci-fi/fantasy issues and back to just creating wonderful new stories."

These are people who seek a return to a past that never was, when sff was not political. The organization's founder stated that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (the first sff novel, on which we agree) is a non political book. This is one of those statements that is so silly it is difficult to even comprehend how someone would write it. Frankenstein is a novel about the overreach of science and the hubris of man. It is also about how society treats those that are different. It is a deeply political work.

But the thing is, that works that challenge the status quo, that are overtly political, are not the only political forms of art. A work of art that upholds the status quo, or hearkens back to imaginary halcyon days, is JUST AS POLITICAL. When the SFFCG says they want to support work that allows readers an escape, they are implicitly and explicitly - by rejecting work that deals with marginalized populations - saying they want work that allows people like them an escape. And no one else.

No one I know of in sff is opposed to comfort reading. Every author of my acquaintance knows the value of escape. The challenge is to provide an escape for everyone. And some people believe that providing an escape for anyone other than themselves is depriving them of their escape. These are the same people that decry the inclusion of Rose Tico in SW: The Last Jedi as "forcing diversity." I have seen the reactions of South East Asian friends upon seeing the film, the joy the got from seeing themselves, for the first time, truly represented in the fictional universe they love so well.

These are also the people who decry Star Wars being "newly political," as if it wasn't always about resistance against a fascist regime of space Nazis.

Every choice a creator makes is political. Not making a choice, upholding the status quo, is just as political. Because all art is political. Anyone who thinks that point of view is "a cancer on all of SFF" is either lying to themselves or to the rest of us.

Further reading:
Seanan McGuire's twitter thread.
Brooke Bolander's twitter thread.
Charlie Jane Anders' twitter thread.
K. Tempest Bradford's twitter thread.