Voices Welcome (Editorial, NYRSF 305)

In her recent comedy special We Are Miracles, Sarah Silverman says, “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake, not because they can’t, but because it would’ve never occurred to them they couldn’t.”

I love this joke, even though I recognize the flaw right at the heart of it. Girls need to be told they “can be anything” because all the social, economic, and political structures of the world are arrayed to tell them the precise opposite.

One of the biggest and best things going on in science fiction as a community is that underrepresented groups—women, people with skin colors other than pasty white, those along the whole range of sexual orientations beyond ostensibly monogamous heterosexuality, people from countries other than the northwestern fringe of the Old World and its direct colonies—are finally starting to find some of the representation they deserve. More and different voices can only make science fiction richer as an art form and stronger as a community, and their growing strength is to be celebrated.

Such improvements don’t simply happen by themselves. As with any social movement, there have been hundreds, thousands of people working together to build spaces, open doors, create more inclusive environments. The habits of decades do not dissolve spontaneously.

So, to loop back to the joke at the start of this brief editorial: No magazine should have to say, “You are welcome to send articles to us, to send essays to us, to send books to us for review, regardless the color of your skin, the object of your worship, whom you love and who loves you. You are human and we want to hear from you.” But in this world, at this time, yes, it is worthwhile, necessary, for us to say exactly that, out loud.

You can be anything you want be. We want to hear from you as you are.

(It was the Martin Luther King Junior holiday as I started to write this; I finished it a few days later. But that’s a holiday where we absolutely need to keep the spirit alive throughout the year, or it means less than nothing.)

—Kevin J. Maroney

and the editors