In late 2016, I attended a well-known science fiction and fantasy workshop with a number of other writers in Hollywood, California. It was fantastic to hang out with a bunch of writers for a week, but the workshop itself was… interesting… for a number of reasons.
But setting aside the workshop’s problematic practices and connections, it did help crystallize how I think about politics in fiction—admittedly, not in the way the workshop instructor intended.
No Politics in Fiction? Really?
I don’t have my notes from the workshop anymore, but I still remember quite clearly the instructor saying at the beginning of the week that you should never put politics in fiction. He was quite pleasant about it—striking the tone and pose of a kindly tutor at the front of the classroom—and even admitted that he thought of himself as a feminist.
Still, he insisted that there was no absolutely place for politics in fiction—or at least not in science fiction—and that making your writing political was a big mistake. You’d run the risk of making a political point instead of telling an actual story, and even if you didn’t, all you would do was turn some potential readers away.
The instructor surely wasn’t the first person I’d ever heard say things like this. (2016 was, after all, several years after the “unsuccessful right-wing anti-diversity” Sad Puppies nonsense.) But it was the first time I can remember hearing it from someone who claimed to be a feminist, and someone who sounded so reasonable otherwise. I still thought it was crap, but since the instructor didn’t otherwise set off alarm bells as a stooge for the far right, I shrugged and figured everyone had the right to their own opinion.
And then we moved on, and he said something along the lines of “If you’re writing YA, for example, you should never make your protagonist a 16-year-old female blacksmith. I see things like this all the time and it’s so unrealistic, because women are just naturally weaker than men.”
So, yeah. That first impression didn’t last long.
(By the way, there are many historical records of women working as blacksmiths, some dating as far back as the 1300s, and the argument that women are just naturally weaker than men is neither scientific nor accurate. But it is deeply misogynistic and transphobic!)
Invisible Politics
While I tried to recover from my cognitive dissonance (and keep my mouth shut), the workshop was moving on. The instructor had stopped talking about why politics in fiction was bad, and was getting ready to give us an example outline for a story following his method.
This, at least, seemed innocuous enough. Outlining a story doesn’t have much to do with politics. Right?
But oh… what a story!
The protagonist for this instructor’s on-the-spot story was a knight. But not a happy knight. No, this knight was in despair because he was “married to a harpy—a literal harpy wife!”
Things only got worse from there. The plot for the story featured the knight meeting a pretty young woman who he immediately fell in love with. We weren’t told if the young woman returned the knight’s feelings (I assume our instructor’s “feminism” did not extend to women having opinions about such things), but all the same his wife kidnapped her in a fit of rage and jealousy.
I was hoping against hope that this would lead up to an ironic reveal where the knight was revealed to be awful. But, alas! That was not the case.
The ending that the instructor came up with involved the knight holding his wife’s egg (i.e. his own unborn child?) hostage by threatening to destroy it and, then, when she tried to stop him, pushing her off the edge of his castle to a grisly and for-some-reason deserved death. The knight, the instructor finished with a flourish, was recognized as a hero and everybody got to live happily ever after.
So, um. Wow. “Don’t put politics in fiction,” huh? I guess becoming a hero after you murder your wife by plotting to force her to have an abortion doesn’t, somehow, count as political.
I did make it through the rest of the workshop—which had a few more obnoxious, offensive things in it but overall was fine. And by the end of that week, I finally understood something I’d already started to suspect: the people who said not to put politics in fiction were either lying through their teeth to forward their own political agendas, or they were just not very good at seeing their own biases—and their own politics.
I came away from the workshop more decided than ever that putting politics in fiction wasn’t just possible, but it was something I should embrace as much as I could.
Politics in Fiction (and in SFWA)
Even today, a good nine years later, thinking about that workshop still pisses me off. And perhaps as a result, you’ll find a lot of “politics” in fiction I write.
You’ll also find it outside of my fiction.
If you follow me on social media, or if you’re a full member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, you may have already seen that I’m circulating a petition to amend SFWA’s bylaws to define what “political activity” means.
(If you’re a SFWA member and haven’t seen it, you can view and sign it here through February 20th!)
Why this is needed is a good example of the danger of decrying “politics in fiction,” and why that phrase so rarely means what it says.
In 2021, SFWA members began asking SFWA to release a “statement and plan” in support of Palestinian writers. Despite having previously released statements in support of Black writers and AAPI writers, and despite repeated questions over the past four years from SFWA’s International Committee and other SFWA members, and despite the actual creation of at least two written statements in support of Palestinian writers (one created by the International Committee and one created by a board member), SFWA has to date ignored, delayed, or declined to properly respond to all requests to publish such a statement.
Please note that I am not trying to paint SFWA as some kind of evil organization, or its Board and Staff as moustache-twirling melodrama villains. I know from experience that SFWA’s Board, staff, and volunteers care deeply about using SFWA’s reach to help people in the SFF community. (In fact, diversity and inclusion are baked into its operations and procedures manual.) But that just makes this kind of thing even more frustrating.
In late 2024, SFWA instead published a statement in support of “writers in crisis.” This bland, generic statement was offered by the Board as its response to member requests to support Palestinian writers. However, despite the statement saying that “Our voices reverberate around the world and throughout time, and we must use them,” this statement did not make any mention of the word “Palestinian,” despite that being the explicit request it was intended to answer. Indeed, the Board has not ever used the word “Palestinian” in any kind of internal or external announcement, so far as I can find.
Since the organization has publicly said it “actively supports writers in crisis,” in January of this year I asked SFWA’s Board to consider a donation to two grants that support (1) Palestinian writers of speculative fiction and (2) the rebuilding of Palestinian libraries. The board declined, essentially on the grounds that my request did not follow the correct procedure (I was following the procedure a board member had earlier told me to follow). Several weeks on from that, I still have not been told what the correct procedure is.
SFWA’s current interim executive director also shut down a forum thread about supporting Palestinian writers after a few admittedly tense posts, stating that “the Board will continue to consider various comments and suggestions while contemplating the incredibly complex issues involved in political activities as a 501(c)(3) educational, public benefit non-profit”
It is my opinion that this refusal to act in support of a specific group of people—or even to say their name—and repeated suggestions by the Board or its staff that to do so is “political,” set a dangerous precedent for SFWA as an organization, and severely limits its ability to carry out its mission of “supporting, promoting, defending, and advocating for” creators of science fiction and fantasy works.
To be frank, supporting Palestinian writers is not political. Supporting Palestinian people is not political. Both are matters of humanity, and human rights. To argue otherwise is, itself, political. Worse, no matter if such arguments are made in good faith are not, they are dehumanizing and suggest that it is acceptable for Palestinians to be indiscriminately arrested, shot, bombed, and murdered by a national military—or by implication anyone at all.
All that is completely unacceptable to me, personally. For SFWA’s purposes, it’s also an egregious misreading of the phrase “political activity.” In fact, the IRS statutes that govern non-profit organizations explicitly define “political activity” as follows:
“directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) … in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.”
No matter what political party you support, I think we can all agree that participating in a political campaign on behalf of a candidate for elective public office is a far cry from a nonprofit organization releasing a statement in support of science fiction and fantasy authors who also happen to be Palestinian.
Although I’m not sure the petition will gather the 182 member signatures it needs to require a membership-wide vote, I’ve been somewhat heartened by the response so far. It looks like it will be pretty close!
And at the end of the day on February 20th, I’ll be submitting the petition and its signatures to the SFWA Board and SFWA President and asking them to stop hiding behind “politics” and start naming Palestinian writers as worthy of SFWA’s support—and the right of Palestinians to be recognized as human beings.
The day after that, my SFWA membership will expire. I’ve been a member since 2017, and at the moment I’m not planning to renew.
Ways to Help Palestinian Authors and Communities
Regardless of how the SFWA petition turns out, you can take direct action of your own today and help Palestinian authors of science fiction and fantasy and their communities.
Here are a few organizations you can consider donating to or supporting in other ways:
L.D. Lewis’s “Watermelon Grant” offers $2000 USD each year in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts.
The IBBY Children in Crisis fund supports the use of books as therapy and the rebuilding of libraries in areas impacted by war and natural disaster, including several libraries (re-)destroyed by Israeli military bombardment in the Gaza Strip.
Clarion West is an organization dedicated to supporting “emerging and underrepresented voices by providing writers with world-class instruction to empower their creation of wild and amazing worlds.” Primarily known for their 6-week novel workshop, Clarion West also offers The Malik Sharif-Fehmida Anwar Scholarship (in partnership with Usman T. Malik), which provides funding of up to USD $2,500 for a student of Palestinian origin.
(In the interest of transparency, I joined the Clarion West board earlier this month.)
Writing is Always Political—Embrace It!
This is already way too long. If you’ve made it to the end, thank you for sticking with me!
I’ll end by talking briefly about what “political” actually means—and why, exactly, you can’t escape politics in fiction.
Of course, this idea is far from new or original. As you can gather from my post on poetic shit-posting in 12th-century Japan, even 800+ years ago people were dragging their rivals for valuing “politics” over “skill.”
More recently, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1988 essay “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” looks extensively at the politics of pretending that writing featuring women is political—and how women can and do keep writing anyway.
I was talking in a Discord server the other day about politics in fiction, and a friend of mine (Sandjar Kozubaev) stated it succinctly and well:
Writing fiction is a political act and even more so when you’re writing about alternate worlds and futures. Speaking alternative futures into existence is inherently political.
(Sandjar noted that this is the basic concept of Futures Studies, a whole academic field that examines things like this!)
The TL;DR version is this: You can’t escape politics in fiction. If you think you have, you’re either using a very narrow definition of politics to mean “things I don’t agree with” or you’re putting your politics in there without recognizing it.
And since you can’t escape politics in fiction anyway… why not put it in there on purpose, instead of by mistake?
Writing Update
My single-author collection The Butterfly Disjunct is on the long list for the BSFA Award, with a lot of other absolutely great things by a bunch of amazing people.
That’s exciting!
You can also write the collection in for the “Best Collection” category as part of the annual Locus award poll, if you’re the sort of person who votes for that. (And, of course, if you’ve read the book and enjoyed it.)
I’m still working on the last couple of chapters of my latest Choice of Games title, Spire, Surge, and Sea.
As I was just telling my editor, I’ve always conceptualized this particular game as the player choosing to either support a tyrannical, fascist government or a radical, anarchist revolt against it, as well as examining the impacts of violent versus non-violent resistence and oppression versus inclusion.
If that sounds like your cup of liquid, you can wishlist the game on Steam or you can even try out the demo here on my website.
Lastly, Holly Walrath featured me in a guest blog post about how (and why) to outline flash fiction and short stories. You can check out “The Understory: A Versatile Techinque for Outlining Short Stories” over at The Weird Circular.
That’s all from me for now. If you’re reading this, I hope that you are staying well, any way you can!