Kelly Link, feminist SF, and Creative Commons

April 25th, 2007
by Laura Q

I was delighted to see that Kelly Link‘s collection Stranger Things Happen is available with a Creative Commons license. (STH website.) The collection includes “Travels with the Snow Queen”, which may be the first Tiptree Award-winning work that is available with generous licensing terms. (Yes? No?) … at any rate, if you haven’t read it, go — now — read.

Since we’ve been talking elsewhere on threads here about class issues and access to resources, I’d like to point out that Creative Commons & other open content licensing offer a great opportunity to grow audiences for new writers, a fact which I think Cory Doctorow has proven in spades.

Have other feminist SF writers made their work available with CC or other open licenses? I know Bujold’s stuff is with Baen — what of her work is available digitally from the Baen experiments? Are there other writers & works?

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Filed under Books & Literature, Online | Comments (5)

5 Responses to “Kelly Link, feminist SF, and Creative Commons”

  1. Madeline F on April 25, 2007 3:49 pm

    Bujold has apparently released her novella The Mountains of Mourning in the Baen Free Library.

    Here’s a list of all the authors who have put stuff up there: Authors Index

  2. Liz Henry on April 25, 2007 4:48 pm

    Also very relevant in the context of the giant and rather amusing Internet Hullabaloo about being Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretches and giving away work for free. Here’s a starting point, with the full rant from the former VP of the Science Fiction Writers’ Association. Oh, the Noble Calling of Being A Writer!

    If you missed this, take a look. I missed it for a whole week, only vaguely aware there was a joke somewhere about Techopeasants. Apparently, online discussion about SF, and especially SF writers who post their work for free online, are the Rot within the SFWA.

    Somewhere in the pages of comments on that original post there was a pretty funny counter-rant and parody that went something like “Elitist scumbag, overpaid cliquish monopolist hack….”

  3. Laura Q on April 25, 2007 5:42 pm

    Liz, i was in the same boat you were — vaguely aware of some chatter in my periphery about pixel-stained technopeasants — so I’m very glad to see you post this.

    My thoughts: First, it’s highly offensive as well as wrong to appropriate the term “scabs” in this context. Hendrix is of course entitled to critique the model economically, and even to use rhetorical hyperbole and unflattering comparisons. But scabs? To me that’s equivalently offensive to a gender or ethnic slur. Substantively it’s more akin to a political slur, in that it describes behavior and attitudes, but terms like fascist get thrown around and even completely misused, and “scab” remains specific and yes, highly offensive.

    Anyway — it’s also a completely fucked up comparison. Scabs take jobs during an actual labor dispute in which workers are organizing to improve their labor conditions. Scabs are therefore taking the side of management, against the common interest. They are taking specific, actual, existing jobs, away from workers who already hold them, but are joining in common cause to try to improve their lot for themselves as well as fellow and future workers.

    Compare this with writers who post things online via creative commons or other licensing. First, they are not taking any specific discrete job away from anyone. Not an audience, not a publishing contract, not a reader. Works of fiction are non-fungible: Reading Will Shetterly is not the same as reading Emma Bull.

    Second, Hendrix is saying that everyone who distributes her work for free on the Internet or by other means is deliberately sabotaging the efforts of other writers to improve the lot of all writers by engaging in selfish acts of personal self-interest against the interests of their class. It is mind-bogglingly arrogant that he suggests that his analysis (working with publishers to improve contracts) is the only way to improve the lot of writers and the industry generally, and that people like Cory Doctorow who has been a major promoter of free distribution are deliberate saboteurs of the interests of others.

    As Hendrix acknowledges, there is no consensus among writers about how best to reform the current situation vis-à-vis contracts, publishers, distributors, booksellers, audience, royalties, etc. We’re in a state of flux, and most of us in this industry want improvement: More writers, more good writers, better ways to access and distribute their work, more editors and venues doing high-quality work. There is no consensus about the best way to go about changing things and taking advantage of new technologies and getting more better content to more audiences and making a living for more people in the industry. And people are haring off in a lot of different directions, and having multiple different efforts is not as efficient as, say, Stalinistically developing a series of 5-year fucking plans to wield the mighty power of the union against the publishers. But for Hendrix to call people who don’t toe his line and don’t buy his grand theory of improving the labor market for writers scabs is just offensive beyond belief.

    wtf. wtf, I am so angry.

    … ah – i just went to the comments thread and the first one nailed it: “No, a scab is a strikebreaker. Calling someone a scab is fighting words, and rightly so because to scab is a vile thing.”

  4. I Read the Internets - 4/28/07 on April 29, 2007 3:05 am

    [...] really expensive, as can con attendance, and so on), lately.  Laura Q. has a short post about “Kelly Link, feminist SF, and Creative Commons” which continues that [...]

  5. Laura Q on April 25, 2008 3:46 pm

    Update: Kelly Link’s press has also released Maureen McHugh’s Mothers and Other Monsters on a CC license. If you haven’t read McHugh, this is a great time to start: Download is at the Small Beer Press website.

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