The Fireside Fiction Report: A Reader/Critic’s Perspective

It has been months since Fireside Fiction published their outstanding #BlackSpecFic Special Report — a report so detailed, and damning, of the state of short story magazines and their relationship with Black Speculative Fiction writers that it rises to the level of an indictment on the entire system of genre publishing in the United States. You should read it. If you’re a reader or writer of Black Spec Fic, of any speculative fiction, this report is about you and for you. For some of us, it is painfully unsurprising. A few of the facts there: [divider type=”space_thin”]

[divider type=”space_thin”] This report puts numbers to our lived experiences as writers and readers. I’m not so naive as to think it will change the minds of those dead-set against acknowledging those of us already writing in the field. I do think these are the sort of figures that push those who pride themselves on their “diversity” to really evaluate their practices. These are numbers that dare our liberal friends to refute them, and when they can’t, to grapple with what they mean — that speculative fiction has an anti-black bias that is systemic and almost universal. I’ve sat with this report, reading it again, feeling challenged by it, and perhaps encouraged by the facts of it, the way so many of us feel when we finally can point at an overt act of racism and say: “See, I’m not making this up!” In response, one of my favorite online thinkers and Black Spec Fic writers, P. Djeli Clark, posted his own th…