This one is public, so feel free to share if you like. Transcript below:

Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.

Today, I talk about confronting aliens.

Okay, more like… today I talk about Baen’s Bar, because it’s inevitable that I talk about Baen’s Bar. For those of you who aren’t involved with the legacy science fiction publishing industry, Baen is only remaining publisher that seems committed to popcorn entertainment, the kind of stories that remind you of blockbuster summer movies: explosions, adventure, excitement. I enjoy a lot of Baen’s catalog—notably I went through a lot of it just after childbirth because dealing with incessantly female stuff made me crave some balance in my life, and balance to me felt like participation in interplanetary wars. (what can I say, it worked for me.)

Anyway, Baen has had a forum for so many years its forum software looks like it crawled off a BBS, and if you remember the wild west days of the internet where Usenet was a neverending flamewar, then you’ll understand what I mean when I say there are subforums on Baen’s Bar that take you back to times where speech was so free it reached through the screen and punched you in the eyes.

It is naturally inevitable that in the 2020s, the rhetoric there is defined by people in power in the industry as hatespeech.

I’m not really moved by this definition when the people who are calling it out never did anything about the hatespeech that’s been aimed at me, for decades, even when I spoke out about it. Even when it happened on their forums and their servers, which they never shut down to save this particular ‘woman of color’ from violence. It’s clear to me that this is a case where hatespeech is okay when used against your enemies, but not when it’s used against you, and I have no time for that kind of hypocrisy. I guess I can talk about it more if y’all want me to, but it’s not really the focus of this ramble… which is this thing that jumped out at me subsequent to the explosion of talk about Baen’s Bar.

…and that’s the number of people who proudly state that if you do not agree with them ideologically, they are willing to cut off ties with you.

This is bad enough in the normal populace. But it staggers me that it’s a thing in the science fiction arena. Because what is science fiction for, if not to confront the alien? How many of us fell in love with the genre because it was exciting to seek out new worlds and new civilizations? To meet the Other and discover all the congruencies and the frictions of competing worldviews? What is first contact, except an opportunity to expand one’s own horizons by grappling with ideas and beliefs we don’t share? And then, in exhilarating moments, to find the commonalities, framed in a new context that makes them shine like the glass in a cathedral window?

To hear science fiction authors and fans proclaim proudly that they don’t want to associate with people who aren’t like them… I don’t even know what to say to that. I thought we were the explorers, the negotiators, the listeners, the pioneers. What I want from my fiction is the excitement and danger of the alien shore. And there’s no wonder without that danger, and the danger is that you will be uncomfortable, you will be challenged, and you will have to reassess your values in a context where they might not apply.

How you confront the alien says a lot about you. How you frame the process of engaging with the alien does, too.

Ironically, the people who claim the writers and fans of Baen’s work are shoot-‘em-up types who enjoy books that cast the Other as enemy… are the ones who are advocating, in real life, for the Othering of people, actual human beings, with alien ideas. They are responding to caricatures, like someone deciding that Martians are little green men without sending a rover to Mars to find out. And they’ve decided those caricatures are too dangerous to exist, and it gives them great pleasure to start the interplanetary wars to extirpate them.

I can’t do that. And I wouldn’t be proud of it if I could. I prefer to know and count as dear people of many different beliefs, walks of life, and life experiences… than to decide in advance what I think of those people, and cut them off forever. I have grown more as a person, and honed my ideas in contests with other ideas, through my willingness to let other speak, and not discount them. I would hope that those of us who dream of the stars, and first contact, would as well.

Anyway, that’s all I got. Thanks for listening to this questing heart. Jaguar out.