The Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming estates have been in the news lately, after their publishers have worked with committees of “sensitivity readers” to rework their books in order to make them less offensive to woke sensibilities. The outcry was so great that Roald Dahl’s publishers agreed not to go through with their plan to sanitize his books, but to release the originals along with the censored versions (though I have heard conflicting stories indicating that the ebooks have been retroactively censored).
For many readers, this was their first time learning that “sensitivity readers” are a thing. While their outrage at the Orwellian rewriting of dead authors’ works is entirely justified, sadly, this is nothing new to the science fiction and fantasy field. Indeed, as Larry Correia and Steve Diamond pointed out in the latest episode of Writer Dojo, sensitivity readers have been a thing for at least a decade, and the most insidious examples of censorship are the ones we don’t see, when writers self-censor for fear of offending the outrage mobs.
For several decades now, science fiction and fantasy has skewed hard to the left, and the fact that there wasn’t a major outcry against these self-appointed Orwellian censors back in the 10s is a damning indictment of field as a whole. Why did it take until now, when the beloved works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming were threatened, for large numbers of people to speak out against this trend? Because all of the big names and major institutions in the SF&F field (or at least, the traditionally published side of it) tacitly approve of the censors and are quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) working to advance their politically correct agenda.
Back in the early 10s, when sensitivity readers were starting to become fashionable, I privately swore that I would never, under any circumstances, submit my work to any of these professional grievance mongers, nor internalize any of their rules to self-censor my work. If I was writing about another culture and needed to make sure I got things right, I would seek out feedback from a trusted friend who had personal experience with that culture (which is actually surprisingly easy here in Utah, thanks to how many of us have served missions in every corner of the Earth). I would not seek feedback from anyone whose paycheck depends on finding new and innovative ways to be offended.
The thing that’s sad, though, is how many writers have bent the knee to these cultural vandals, because they felt it was the only way to get their work out there. I happen to enjoy being a voice in the indie wilderness, but it’s not for everyone, and a lot of writers are self-censoring in order to keep their agents, or their publishing deals, or even just because they hope to have an agent or a publishing deal someday. It’s sad.
If I were feeling conspiratorial, I would point out that if my goal was to establish a neo-feudal, Orwellian police state, where religion was replaced with The Science, individuals were atomized away from their families, and the common folk were divided against each other by identitarian tribal distinctions in order to make them easier to govern, I would seek to capture the SF field before moving forward with my plans, so as to prevent a new 1984 or Brave New World from spoiling them. The pen is mightier than the sword, after all. If possible, I would subvert the SF field to actively advance my agenda, such as pushing the Marxist politics of envy, or the Malthusian economics of depopulation, or the post-modern rejection of any and all sexual mores and gender roles, so as to destroy the family as the fundamental unit of society. But none of that would really be necessary, so long as I made sure that nothing of any real truth or beauty came out of the field. All of the major awards would favor the ugliest lies that my propaganda machine put out into the world, and all of the professional organizations would pit authors and editors against each other according to their tribal identities, such as race or class or religion. Victimhood would be rewarded, and merit would be suppressed—and anyone in the field who dared to oppose this agenda would be harrassed relentlessly by my underlings, who would work to get them canceled from publishing deals and disinvited from major events.
In any case, I’m not going to be a part of that, even tangentially. Which is I I will never use sensitivity readers to review my work, nor apologize for refusing to bend the knee to the woke censors.
Very well said Joe.