Here’s Chapter 40 of The Magic Battery. It’s a little Christmas story by itself.
The Christmas guests at Thomas’s house were the mages Lucas Schneider, Jacob Kessler, and their families. The dinner, everyone agreed, was excellent. The fire made the room pleasantly warm. Everyone was in good spirits.
Kessler stood on a chair and raised his cup. “To Thomas Lorenz, for bringing in a new age of magic!” All joined in enthusiastically.
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A group of Polish fans has posted a petition against Sergei Lukianenko as 2023 Worldcon guest. As I’m writing this, it has 894 signatures, including mine.
File 770 has reported on it, and the comments are interesting. It’s not just Lukianenko people are objecting to.
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Some things are sillier than any parody you could make of them. An example is Stanford University’s recent “Elimination of Harmful Language” document. It was greeted with so much laughter that Stanford has hidden it behind a login screen. Fortunately, the Internet Archive still lets you see the document, so we can still make fun of it. Try to imagine writing an article adhering to its demands. It would have no color (oops, can’t say that — racist!), and the effort would leave you gasping (belittles people with asthma!) and drive you insane (insults people with psychiatric issues!).
It starts with a self-own: “Content Warning: This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.” Further on, it self-owns the self-own by telling you that a “trigger warning” “can cause stress about what’s to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person.”
That last is actually the one piece of sensible advice in the whole clown act. Psychological experts have found that warning someone that scary stuff is coming only makes the reader more anxious. So naturally they don’t follow their own advice.
For the rest, I can’t do better than pick out some gems:
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I’d wondered if China’s thugs would ever threaten me for all the posts I’ve made about the China Worldcon. Well, you know what they say: Be careful what you wish for, or you may live in interesting times. Before the sun came up this morning, I had my life threatened on Twitter. Since originally posting this, I’ve received new information and updated this post.
Let’s start at the beginning. In today’s news I read that one Xiaolei Wu was arrested for threatening violence against a pro-Chinese freedom activist. I did a search on Twitter to see what I could find about Xiaolei Wu and found a post by a person using that name. As we know all too well, names on Twitter prove nothing, but this person claimed to “represent the future of China” and was begging to the Chinese ambassador for help. I later learned that the holder of this account is an impersonator, so I was threatened, but as a bad joke and not by the same person who was arrested. Here’s the reply I got:
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Starting today, December 15, and until New Year’s Day, Smashwords is running a sitewide end-of-year sale on participating books. This includes all three of my books on Smashwords, which are available at 50% off. While you’re there, look for other titles that might interest you. Here are the links for my books:
A branch of the Dedham, Massachusetts library decided not to put up a Christmas tree this year because it made some people “uncomfortable.” This has led to an acrimonious controversy which several news outlets have covered.
The situation goes to show how violently hostile people become over minor issues. More specific to this blog, it shows the kind of pressure libraries come under with increasing frequency.
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A law recently passed by the New York State Legislature poses a serious threat to online speech. FIRE is already challenging this outrageous law, which I doubt can survive a legal battle, but in the meantime, it poses a threat to anyone running a site that’s read in New York and allows user input.
The law applies to the ill-defined category of “social media networks.” That doesn’t just mean Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It could apply to anyone who runs a Mastodon instance or even runs a blog that allows comments. FIRE says:
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These are, as they say, interesting times in China. The anti-scientific “zero Covid” policy and the resulting extreme lockdowns have made people unable to get basic necessities. In at least one case, they’ve killed people, as residents in a burning building were literally imprisoned in their apartments. This has led to mass protests at great personal risk, in a country with 1984-level mass surveillance.
The committee of the Chengdu Worldcon has said nothing. Not a word. If I’ve missed something, please correct me in the comments.
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Just in time for your holiday shopping, The Magic Battery and Spells of War are now available from Amazon in paperback!
For some time I’ve known it’s dangerous to criticize the Chinese government on some American campuses. Emerson College investigated a student group that dared to criticize the Chinese rulers and then suspended it, and as far as I can tell it has never backed away from its contemptible decree. Mark Wrighton, president of George Washington University, declared he was “personally offended” by posters criticizing China and would “undertake an effort to determine who is responsible.” He backed off when he found himself facing more publicity than he bargained for.
Fandom gets a large proportion of its new people from college students and recent graduates. If they learn there that they should shut up about China while on campus, they may carry that habit over into their fannish activities. This, I’m sure, is one reason for the lack of widespread calls to boycott the Chengdu Worldcon. But how widespread is this effect? Are Emerson and GWU outliers? Lately I’ve looked into the ways China intimidates Western educational institutions and found that varying levels of intimidation are common.
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