Heart Drain

against Cancel Culture

"Her mom divorced him. Her sister won't talk to him. He lives alone in a little apartment with all his guns."

It was a long, peaceful July evening in Sofia, and I was finally out of the hospital. I had nothing to do but regrow my internal membranes and repeat gossip about the family of an old friend. I'll call her Irene.

"It's sad," I said, "because this man spent his whole adult life building his family. Marry, buy a house, raise three daughters, and it all just falls apart."

I lay on my back on the couch in our lawn, watching the bats work against the darkly glowing sky. My daughters were inside, probably watching videos on their phones.

"Irene? Wasn't she the home-schooled girl?" asked my mom. She had flown out to help me recover. "Her family was always a little weird. Very religious."

I didn't share her disapproval. My recent contact with death had left me aware of my need for religion. It was as if a clinging sheet of plastic had been pulled off my face, and I could no longer ignore the things that mattered.

"Yes," I said. "Weird. Someone said something a bit too extreme, and the normal people went to find another church. That would leave a group that was less normal on average. Now someone else would say something more extreme and the community would get even smaller.”

Pavlina knocked her wine glass against the arm-rest of her chair. "Brain Drain. When everyone who's smart and ambitious leaves, you get," she said, "what's left."

We three sat there, considering the fact that we were in Bulgaria. My mom had been horrified by the black mold growing on the bathroom walls of my room at the hospital. She didn't even know yet that my second surgery had only been necessary because of a doctor's mistake after the first one.

I was past caring about that. Leaning on my rack of fluid-filled bags, learning how to walk again, I had asked myself "why did this happen?" "Because one molecule bumped," into another was like trying to eat sand. "Because your enemies attacked you," was like drinking lye. I’d spent a month reading Terry Pratchett and watching the kestrels that nested in the hospital's neglected attic. I was glad to be in Bulgaria. Also, if I'd gotten a colostomy in the US, the medical bill would have bankrupted us.

"Heart Drain," I said. "It wasn't the smart ones who left Irene's father's church, it was the good ones. The people who stayed were like a tide pool in the sun. They got saltier and saltier."

If my mother and wife rolled their eyes at me, I didn't see it. The sky was darker now and the bats were hard to make out.

"Well, I'm glad she's out of it at least," said my mom. "How is Irene's baby? Say hi to her for me."

Except Irene wasn't out of it, at least from my perspective.

Irene and I kept in touch for years, writing long emails and critiquing each other's stories. I must have sent her hundreds of thousands of amateurish words, but by the time I got to my first published book, something had started to go wrong.

"He likes her because she doesn't remind him of his EX-WIFE?" Irene wrote in the all-caps of outrage. "She reacts to the oppression of the patriarchy by feeding into their classification of her as a child?" She told me I was infantilizing a black character because he was short and had a round face.

I didn't know what to do. Irene was reading my work like she was a censor, but I couldn't tell her that. I didn't want to be mean, and also I was starting to understand that to push back against a certain type of comment might be a career-limiting move. In the end, I couldn't bear to send her my manuscripts. We would talk about other things.

My readers will know that selective silence wasn't enough. Irene's increasingly extreme ideology infected everything we talked about. Food, gardening, our children. Her final email told me how much Irene limited her son's screen time and why that was so important. I read it, stumbled downstairs, yelled at my daughters who were of course staring at their phones, and realized that I had a problem. I had to leave this conversation.

For about five years, I only handled the internet with tongs. My app-blocker was strict. My emails were terse. My posts avoided readers, because readers might comment. I kept my head down and told myself that I still had my agent, my publisher, my colleagues. I would work and that would be enough.

My readers will know that it wasn't. My agent became more demanding and my publisher colder. Every science fiction convention was worse than the last. My fellow writers were angrier, pettier, more likely to end your career for you.

I once asked a stranger at a con what the badges on his lanyard stood for. "Well of course I declared my gender," he said, pointedly. "Why wouldn't you?"

I nodded silently. And I left. I stopped going to conventions. In the words of one of my colleagues, why would I pay to spend time with people who hate me? I hear that subsequent cons have become absolutely unbearable. It's not worth reading much traditionally published genre fiction, either. Heart Drain has hit scifi hard.

None of this is news to anybody, but now we get to my question for you, my readers. What do we do now?

What attracted me to the Literary Right was its kindness and generosity. Come to us and say what you're thinking. We'll disagree with you, and then we'll get back to writing. Now, based on the essays of

JE Tabor

and

John Carter

, I wonder if I was naive. If I say the wrong thing to you, will you try to get me fired? Harass my colleagues? Get my books pulled? If I suspect you might, and if others suspect it, you won’t be able to have honest conversations any more. If you become powerful enough to threaten the rest of us, we’ll go along with it, nodding silently, until we leave.

Imagine us in another ten years. Will we be surrounded by fractious, squabbling, honest fellow writers, or will we be alone in our small apartments, surrounded by our weapons?