Eugene Fischer

Category: Books

Thomas Disch Taught Me a Bunch of New Words

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I recently finished reading Thomas M. Disch’s novel Camp Concentration, which had more words in it that I didn’t know than any book I’ve read in years. Here are the new additions to my vocabulary.

  • Orthoepy. n. The correct or accepted pronunciation of words.
  • Lutulent. adj. The state or condition of being muddy or turbid.
  • Resile. v. Abandon a position or course of action.
  • Orgulous. adj. Haughty.
  • Chrism. n. A mixture of oil and balsam, consecrated and used for anointing at baptism and in other rights of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.
  • Hierodule. n. A slave or prostitute in service to a temple.
  • Hypogeum. n. An underground chamber.
  • Chiliad. n. 1. A group that contains 1,000 elements. 2. A millennium.
  • Opsimath. n. A person who begins to learn or study only late in life.
  • Jactitation. n. The restless tossing of the body in illness.
  • Squitters. n. Diarrhea.
  • Commination. n. The act of threatening divine vengeance.
  • Electuary. n. A medical substance mixed with honey or another sweet substance.
  • Meretricious. adj. Apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.
  • Rodomantade. n. Boastful speech or behavior.
  • Concinnate. adj. Of speech or writing: put together with elegant style or propriety.
  • Philoprogenitive. adj. Having many offspring.
  • Emissile. adj. Capable of being protruded.
  • Epalpibrate. adj. Lacking eyebrows.
  • Viscid. adj. Glutinous, sticky.
  • Atomy. n. A tiny fairy or sprite.
  • Virescence. n. The state or condition of becoming green.
  • Chyme. n. The pulpy acidic fluid that passes from the stomach to small intestine, consisting of gastric juices and partially digested food.

 

The Bookbinder’s Guide to Destroying the Universe: three views of the magnitude of the Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” has long been an obsession of mine. The 1941 short story1 posits a library that contains every possible book-length2 combination of words. It’s probably my second-favorite short story; I think about it all the time and teach it whenever I can. I once even wrote a program to output the digits of 251,312,000, the number of distinct books the Library of Babel contains, which produced a 2Mb text file of mostly zeros. So when my friend Tony Tulathimutte (about whom I’ve written before) asked me to consult on a “Library of Babel”-inspired essay he is writing on the algorithmic generation of literature, I was happy to help. Tony asked:

Even if 251,312,000 is beyond astronomically large, I’m interested in getting as close as possible to a non-theoretical implementation of the Library. Can we work on a Fermi estimate of what it would take to assemble the library? Like, if we distributed the workload to every computer on Earth, or used the world’s fastest supercomputer (China’s Tianhe-2, 33.86 petaflops), or even assembled a Douglas-Adams-style Deep Thought Computational Matrix made of human brains (the human brain runs at an estimated 36.8 petaflops)? Or if Moore’s law holds, at what point would the processing power on Earth suffice to create the Library within the lifespan of the universe.

This is a completely reasonable question, but one that illustrates just how unnatural it is to think about numbers that are “beyond astronomically large.” The number of books in the Library of Babel is so big, no set of adjectives can meaningfully capture its hugeness. After all, things like petaflops or the computational capacity of the human brain are also too big to really conceptualize. So it makes sense that one might treat them all as members in equal standing of the Numbers Too Big To Think About club. But they aren’t. Here are three illustrations of the absurd magnitude of the Library of Babel.

1. Time

First we’ll look at the initial question, how long would it take to generate the Library of Babel? Instead of addressing it the way Tony suggests, though, let’s approach the problem from the opposite direction: what is the fastest it’s possible to imagine generating the Library of Babel?

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle implies that there is a smallest possible size something can be, and a shortest possible time in which something can happen. These minimum quantities are built in to the basic workings of the universe, and are called the Planck units. The Planck time is equal to about 5.391 x 10-44 seconds. It isn’t physically possible for an event to occur in less time than that. Let’s imagine that we have computers capable of generating one Library of Babel Book (LoBB) per unit of Planck time. How many of these computers? Let’s be ambitious: through some impossible alchemy, we will now turn every single atom in the observable universe into a computer capable of generating one LoBB per unit of Planck time.

There are on the order of 1080 atoms in the observable universe. So let’s say we have that many computers… what’s that? Oh, you’re asking, “but what about dark matter?” It’s true. Scientists think there might be five times as much dark matter in the universe as there are atoms. So let’s be generous and bump it up ten times. We’ll say with have 1081 computers, each of which generates one LoBB per unit of Planck time. So, if we have 1081 computers generating about 1043 LoBBs per second, that means we generate 10124 LoBBs every second, 10131 LoBBs per year.

There are 251,312,000 possible LoBBs, which is on the order of 101,834,097. At a rate of 10131 LoBBs per year, it will take 101,833,966 years to finish making the whole Library, or on the order of 10106. Take a quick look at Wikipedia’s timeline of the far future. You’ll notice that the time when we finish making the Library at the fastest imaginable rate would be one of the last items on the list, coming well after the entire universe is a cold, dead, iron cinder.

So the answer to Tony’s question is: never.

2. World Enough

But maybe you noticed that I cheated a little. I said I would consider the fastest it’s possible to imagine generating LoBBs, but calculated based on the fastest it would be physically possible to make them. We can imagine things faster than that, though. We can imagine just snapping our fingers and–poof!–a complete Library of Babel made in an instant. So, why not? Let’s consider that case. We now have the power to instantly assemble a Library of Babel.

Assemble it… out of what? I mean, what are we going to make the literal books out of? Not out of atoms; we already said that there are, generously, 1081 atoms worth of matter in the observable universe. Even if we could somehow encode a LoBB in every atom, we wouldn’t come close to making 10106 of them. Not even if we could make a LoBB out of every subatomic particle.

The universe just doesn’t have enough stuff in it to make the Library of Babel.

3. Vaster Than Empires

So let’s add more stuff. We’ve already given ourselves the power to instantly reconfigure every atom in the universe. Why not give ourself the power to make new matter out of nothing while we’re at it? What happens then?

Turns out, even if we could conjure enough new matter to make the Library of Babel, the universe itself would be too small to hold it.

There’s a weird and fascinating result from black hole physics called the holographic principle, which says that all the information needed to describe a volume of space, down to the minutest quantum detail, only ever takes as much space to encode as the surface area of the volume.3 That is, if you wanted to write down all the information necessary to perfectly describe every detail of what’s inside a room, you would always be able to fit all the information on just the walls. In this way, the entire universe can be thought of as a three dimensional projection of what is, on the level of information, a strictly two dimensional system. Sort of like a hologram, which is 2D but looks 3D, a metaphor from which the principle gets its name.

In any normal region of the universe, the amount of information in a given volume will actually be much less than what you could encode on its surface area. For reasons having to do with thermodynamics that are too complicated to go into here, when you max out the amount of information a volume of space can contain, what you have is a black hole.4 Now, remember those Planck units from the beginning? Length was one of them; there’s a smallest possible size that the laws of nature will let something be, and we can use that length to define a new unit, the Planck area. The most efficient possible encoding of information, per the holographic principle, is one bit per unit of Planck area, which is on the order of 10-70 square meters.

The observable universe has a radius of around 4.4 x 1026 meters. That gives it a surface area on the order of 1053 square meters, which means it can hold 10123 bits of information. That’s just the observable universe though; the whole universe is much, much bigger. We aren’t sure exactly how much bigger, it isn’t observable. But inflationary universe theory, which just got some strong confirming evidence, provides an estimate that the whole universe is 3 x 1023 times larger than the part of the universe we can see. Carry out the same calculations, and the estimated size of the whole universe means that it can contain 10170 bits of information. As for the Library, if you assume that it takes a string of at least six bits to encode one of a set of 25 characters, then the whole Library of Babel would require a number of bits on the order, once again, of 10106. Even if we demiurgic librarians do violate the law of conservation of energy to bring the Library into being, the entire universe would collapse into a black hole long before we finished our project.

So: the Library of Babel is so large that the universe isn’t going to be around long enough to make it. And even if it was, there isn’t enough matter and energy to do it. And even if there was, before that point all of reality as we know it would be destroyed. That is how extreme things can get when you start dealing with “beyond astronomically large” numbers.

  1. There is a version of the story online, but I much prefer the translation by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions. ↩

  2. As described by Borges: 25 symbols, 40 symbols per line, 80 lines per page, 410 pages. ↩

  3. I’ve previously posted a video to an excellent introduction to the holographic principle. You can find that here. ↩

  4. This is because, physically speaking, information is the same thing as entropy. ↩

Karen Joy Fowler wins PEN/Faulkner Award!

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Big congratulations to Karen Joy Fowler, author of my favorite novel from last year, for winning the PEN/Faulkner award! A well-deserved recognition for an outstanding book. Here’s the Washington Post’s article on the award, which contains plot spoilers. But eventually this spoiler is going to reach you anyway. If you want to preserve your reading experience and haven’t gotten a copy yet, go! Now! Read it! It’s out in paperback! What are you waiting for?

The First Twenty Books of 2014

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As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

  1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
  2. Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
  3. Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
  4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
  5. Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
  6. The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
  7. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
  8. Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
  9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
  10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
  11. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
  12. The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
  13. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
  14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
  15. Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
  16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
  17. Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
  18. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
  19. Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
  20. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.

My Favorite Books of 2013

It’s astonishing how few books I read as a graduate student. I did a tremendous amount of reading, but it was mostly unpublished fiction by classmates, students, and applicants to the MFA program. I’ve read about 30 books this year, 2/3 of them since I graduated in May. While not that many for me historically, that’s a three year high. Here are my favorites.

ArcadiaCover.jpgArcadia by Tom Stoppard. Every once in a long while you read a book that immediately becomes a part of your personal canon, something you know from the first encounter that you’ll be returning to and finding new depths in for the rest of your life. Borges was like that for me, and Catch-22, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and now Arcadia. I was already a fan of Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I read in high school. I’d been meaning to read Arcadia for years. I even bought a copy once, but it disappeared. (I think an ex stole it.) Over and over it was recommended by people as something I would like, and I finally got around this year to buying a new copy.

It’s incredible. It has all of my favorite things: clever formalism; patterns that repeat across different scales; nonlinear narrative; fractal mathematics; intellectual humor; and critique of gender roles in social, scientific, and literary regimes. It’s funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking. The best play I’ve ever read. The very first time I have an opportunity to see it produced, I will. In the meantime, the day I read it I got online and bought enough copies to throw an Arcadia reading party. I can’t give a higher recommendation than that.

WeAreAllCompletelyBesideCover.jpgWe Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. I was already a fan of Karen Joy Fowler’s work, from her short stories and her novel The Jane Austen Book Club. But her latest novel is in a different league. It’s utterly gorgeous, full of brilliant sentences that add up to an equally brilliant whole. While reading it I was frequently moved to read passages aloud to myself, just to feel the music in the prose. I’ve sold several people the book just by reciting the preface and letting the beauty of the language win them over. It’s convenient that that works, because there’s not really any way to talk about the plot without spoilers that will dramatically change the reading experience. But if that isn’t a concern to you, then you could check out this glowing review by Barbara Kingsolver in the New York Times. For my part, I’ll just say that this year I read Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel prize winners, bestsellers, and cult classics, but this was my favorite novel that I read in 2013.

books-delusions-of-genderDelusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. The previous was my favorite novel of the year, but this was my favorite work of nonfiction. (So it was a good year for books with bright yellow covers.) If this were just a thorough takedown of biological essentialism, whether historical or modern, it would probably be enough to earn a place on this list. But Cordelia Fine has done more than that. She’s not just taken on the heroic task of going through all the recent books claiming inherent neurological differences between men and women, and tracked down all of the references to assess their legitimacy, but she’s done it with humor. The book is written in delightfully dry tones of academic snark. So, for example, while critiquing the way that Barbara and Allan Pease use scientific studies in their execrably-titled book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, she observes that of the studies referenced in the Pease’s claim that their “emotion maps” are based on fMRI research, only one of them was a brain study conducted after the academic use of fMRI. And of that she writes, “It might also be worth mentioning that it was a postmortem study. Possibly Sandra Witelson really did present her samples of dead brain tissue with emotionally charged images–but if she did, it’s not mentioned in the published report.” As they say in the ivory tower, oh SNAP!

NausicaaDeluxEdition

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (deluxe edition box set). This was a graduation gift to myself, something I’d been meaning to read for years. I’m a great fan of Miyazaki’s movies, of which the film adaptation of this manga was the first for which he served as both writer and director. The movie version is glorious, and you should watch it if you haven’t, but the manga is a much larger and more intricate story. This is partly because he had only written/drawn the first two years of the manga when he made the movie, and wouldn’t finish it for another decade. The politics, world building, and characterizations are rich, and the artwork predictably incredible. (This oversized edition is worth it for the greater detail in the artwork alone.) The story does at times have a bit of a formless, sprawling feel to it. That could be because it was Miyazaki’s first (and last) long form manga work. But that hardly matters, as the expansiveness of the world is one of the distinct pleasures on offer here.

Man Who Fell To Earth CoverThe Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis. (My copy had a different cover that I can’t find good image of. This seems to be the edition in print right now.) For a while this year I was running a science fiction movie club, and picking movies for it was an excellent excuse to watch some classic films that I’d never managed to get around to. One of those was Nick Roeg’s adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie as an alien, which I’d been putting off until after I read the novel. Now that I’ve read/seen both, it’s the book I think I might be going back to. That’s not a knock against the movie, but Tevis’s novel was a startling work of bleak loveliness. If there is such a thing as a page turner consisting entirely of chilly, elegiac portraits of loneliness, this is it. (If you’ve seen the movie but not read the book, which seems likely to be the case for many, know that the book has a lot more tipsy rumination on the impossibility of ever really connecting with other people, and a lot less of David Bowie’s penis.)

CodeNameVerityCode Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. (This one isn’t the cover that my copy had either, but I wish it was, because this cover is way better. Mine was a couple of bicycles leaning up against a stone wall.) This is a novel that had been recommended by many people, and the recommendations were often things like, “This book is amazing but also it made me break down crying in public.” So, naturally, I waited until it was dark and cold and miserable outside to read it. The book is made up of a pair of linked epistolary narratives, with an unreliability-powered plot that’s so ostentatiously clever that, in my edition, the cover text touts its cleverness. That alone would make it worth reading. But this book is also that rare creature: a rollicking wartime adventure that is centered on a friendship between two women. It’s set primarily in Nazi-occupied France, full of espionage, aeronautics, and harrowing scenes of painful bravery. Even prepared as I was for an emotionally wrenching experience, the climax was shocking and the denouement deeply affecting. Read it, but not at a time when you’re feeling fragile.

AboutSF: Videos from the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU

I’ve just discovered, via Nick Mamatas, the YouTube account AboutSF, which are all videos uploaded by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Some of these, like the one embedded below, are excerpts from lectures given back when James Gunn was bringing science fiction authors to KU in the ’60s and ’70s. This is interesting for me personally, as my parents met at KU during this time and attended the Gunn-organized readings and lectures together. Here’s one of a bunch writers, including Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Fred Pohl, and Isaac Asimov discussing the value of science fiction. I particularly like Anderson’s opening comments.

Preserved for Posterity

Presumably all in reference to this bit of idiocy, but that’s incidental.

Screen Shot 2013-09-04 at 8.22.11 PM

Congratulations to all the Hugo winners

I just got back from San Antonio and LoneStarCon 3. It was a delight to have a major convention in my home town; when I was starting to feel conventioned-out on Saturday I was able to take a break and spend a day with my family. I also got to see the Hugo awards for the third time, and continue to find it thrilling. Congratulations to all the winners, and special congratulations to John Scalzi who won Best Novel for his book Redshirts. This was especially exciting for me, as I appear in the book as a minor character. (It’s worth noting that, so far, 100% of novels in which I die have gone on to win Hugo awards. Do with this information what you will.)

More on the Readercon Harassment Issue

Genevieve Valentine has posted a roundup of further responses to the Readercon Board’s decision not to follow their own harassment policy in punishing Rene Walling. Most notable is that a woman Mr. Walling previously harassed, Kate Kligman, has not only come forward, but revealed that she had privately alerted the Readercon Board to Walling’s history of harassment before the verdict was decided.

This is especially damning. The board’s decision to violate their own policy is unsupportable purely on principle, but to have done so while in possession of evidence that Mr. Walling is a serial harasser should make even the most sympathetic observer suspect cronyism as the primary motivation. It seems to me that, though a zero-tolerance policy may be too blunt an instrument for dealing with all instances of harassment, this case is not a boundary condition. This isn’t someone who went off his meds for a weekend and lost his shit. This is someone with a history of indefensible behavior.

Rose Fox has called for a vote from the convention committee on overruling the board’s decision. I am not familiar enough with the political structure that governs Readercon to fully understand what this means. Hopefully it is evidence that people in power are moving to do what is right: institute the lifetime ban that Rene Walling’s actions call for, and meaningfully apologize for the failure of the Readercon organizers to uphold the trust placed in them by their community.

On Readercon’s Failure to Enforce Their Harassment Policy

The sequence of events: Genevieve Valentine got harassed at Readercon and bravely came forward about it. The man who harassed her did so repeatedly despite very clear communication that his attentions were unwelcome. Genevieve did not initially name her harasser, choosing instead to address the issue with the Readercon board of directors. Apparently she had interacted with the board in 2008 after a similar incident of harassment (of someone else) by a man named Aaron Agassi, and found their response–banning Aaron for life–appropriate. In the aftermath of the 2008 event the board instituted a zero-tolerance harassment policy. Today Genevieve revealed that the board chose not to enforce their own policy, and are instead suspending the perpetrator, Rene Walling, for two years. The board has issued a statement explaining their decision. They say that Rene was found to be “sincerely regretful of his actions” and that “[i]f, as a community, we wish to educate others about harassment, we must also allow for the possibility of reform.” They also state, “[w]hen we wrote our zero-tolerance policy in 2008 (in response to a previous incident), we were operating under the assumption that violators were either intent on their specific behaviors, clueless, or both.”

In 2008, Aaron Agassi was banned from the con for life, and in 2012 Rene Walling was put on 2-year probation. Also notable, Aaron Agassi was not a well-regarded member of the community, whereas Rene Walling is a frequent blogger for Tor.com and has previously chaired a Worldcon.

I have several thoughts.

1) The establishment of a harassment policy is something to be taken seriously.

Why did the need to allow for the possibility of reform not enter the board’s minds when they were originally establishing the harassment policy? Likely because Aaron Agassi was an apparently super-creepy guy with no friends in the community, and the proximate goal of the harassment policy was to exclude him specifically. That is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. I am actually somewhat sympathetic the the board’s position that their harassment policy should allow for the possibility of reform, but the time to consider that was when they were instituting the policy in the first place. They could have written a tiered policy, with explicit levels of punishment for specific kinds of trespass, and attendees could have then decided whether the punishment schedule made them feel comfortable. But instead they instituted a zero-tolerance policy, and allowed congoers to believe they were governed by it.  So let’s call this Big Mistake #1: instituting a policy that they lacked the conviction to universally enforce.

2) Retroactively changing the policy is a bigger deal than any one incident of harassment.

By retroactively changing their policy, the Readercon board becomes complicit in pattern of well-connected men getting special treatment when they harass women. It doesn’t matter if, absent of other policies, a 2-year probation seems a proportionate response. If the policy is zero tolerance, the facts of the harassment are not in dispute, and tolerance is nevertheless extended, then the harasser has gotten away with it. He was exempted from normal system of punishment. The message that this sends is that the feelings of a harasser are, or at least can be, more important than the feelings of the harassed, and that systems which claim to offer redress in the event of harassment cannot be relied upon. It takes what was an isolated event and elevates it to the level of systemic problem: harassers will get special treatment if they are somehow important and express contrition. (And, while not being at all personally familiar with Rene Walling or his motives, I would note as many others already have that false contrition is a common attribute of a serial abuser.) This will serve to make women feel more at risk, more powerless. Genevieve herself says, “the results of reporting my harassment have been more troubling, in some ways, than the harassment itself.” So, Big Mistake #2: turning an isolated problem into a systemic problem by extending special treatment to a harasser.

3) What the board should have done.

So the board found itself in the position of having a case of clear harassment, but not wanting to issue a lifetime ban to the harasser, despite a zero-tolerance policy. The right course of action would have been to avoid Big Mistake #2 by following the policy, and then, after dealing with this specific circumstance of harassment, begin a process reforming their policy. This would have meant opening up a discussion about harassment and punishment with the Readercon community. It could even have resulted in the creation of an explicit appeals procedure that Rene Walling could have, at some point in the future, availed himself of. Doing this would have been transparent, responsive to the needs of the community, and resulted in a policy that the board could thereafter enforce with conviction.

4) What the board should do now.

I’ve never been to Readercon, so other people may have a more incisive view here. But my answer is: what they should have done in the first place. With the added step of apologizing for fucking up, and promising to take their own policies so seriously in the future that no one can ever suspect they are being applied selectively depending on how much of a Big Name Fan the person in question is.

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