Tangent Online 2024 Recommended Reading List

Science Fiction Writers Association:

Social Justice

or

Writers Organization

A Modest Proposal

Last year I used this space as preface to our Recommended Reading List to comment on several issues pertaining to SF at large, and SFWA in particular. This year I would like to continue my thoughts on why I believe SFWA is traveling down a dark road, further expanding what it believes is its ever-increasing role of liberal social activism in addition to that of its founding mission as a literary organization devoted to bettering its writers in the areas of fair contracts, how to acquire an agent and what to look for in an agent, subsidiary rights, writing advice in general, and fair and timely payment for works both long and short. The organization’s basic remit was to inform, support, promote, defend, and advocate for its members. Along the way, relatively early in SFWA’s history, it offered a pair of benefits to its writer members—a legal fund and a medical fund—both of which would be offered to writers with a proven need, with the proviso that any monies loaned must in time be repaid. These benefits to writers were, and are, nice perquisites for finally meeting the entry requirements of a certain number of professional sales and becoming a member of this new writers organization, one devoted to science fiction and fantasy, the literature they loved to read and now write. The hard work of selling a story or novel to a professional market (usually after many rejection slips) would finally pay off when one could proudly say they belonged to SFWA. Hard work had paid off.
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