Howard V. Hendrix, SFWA's current V.P.
Howard sent the following and ended it, "Thanks for taking the time to post the rant." I respect a good rant, so I'm glad to post it. He didn't make me change my mind about posting work for free on the web, but he made me consider the issue in a new light.

--Will Shetterly

About Howard V. Hendrix:

About My Work:

I've held jobs ranging from hospital phlebotomist to fish hatchery manager to university professor and administrator.   My degrees range from a BS in Biology (Xavier University, 1980) to an MA (1982) and PhD in English Literature (1987), both from University of California, Riverside. 

My first four published novels appeared from Ace Books (Penguin Putnam): Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), and Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001). My fifth novel, The Labyrinth Key, appeared from Ballantine Del Rey in April 2004. His sixth novel, The Spears of God, was published by Del Rey in December 2006. 

My most widely available works of shorter science fiction can be found in my short story collection Möbius Highway (Scorpius Digital Books, 2001), the Full Spectrum original anthology series Vols. 1, 4, and 5 (Bantam Books), and in The Outer Limits Volume 1 (Prima). My publications also include some three dozen works of shorter experimental stories, among them the chapbooks Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3  (EOTU Press) and The Vertical Fruit of the Horizontal Tree  (Talisman Press). My more recent short fiction has appeared in the June 2002 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in the DAW Books anthology Microcosms (January 2004), and Aeon Two (February 2005), Aeon Five (November 2005), and Future Shocks (January 2006).  My story “Palimpsest” will appear in the September 2007 issue of Analog. 

I have also published numerous political essays, book reviews, and works of literary criticism, including a book-length study of apocalyptic elements in English literature from Langland to Milton, The Ecstasy of Catastrophe (1990). My most recent science fiction criticism appears in Projections (2004) and YLEM Journal (2006).

An avid gardener, I co-wrote a book on landscape irrigation, Reliable Rain (co-authored with Stuart Straw), which appeared in March 1998 from Taunton Press. 

For book-length print work, my agent is Chris Lotts at Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd in New York. For film, his agent is Vincent M. Gerardis of Created By, in Hollywood, CA.

About my life:

I live with my wife Laurel, just shy of the 5,000 foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Shaver Lake, CA. We do not need summer cooling. Over ninety five percent of our winter heating is from a woodstove fueled with wood obtained from our own property -- salvaged from second- and third-growth forest long ago timbered-over and natural-fire suppressed. I do all the felling of the trees for firewood, all the cutting in rounds, and the splitting.  Our primary vehicle is a 2003 Honda Civic hybrid, purchased in that model year.

We are firefighters with the Pine Ridge Volunteer Fire Department.  We enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada, as well as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

About my work in SFWA:

   I wrote the following when I ran for Vice President of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America a few years back:

   "SFWA is full of busy people who, nonetheless, make time to keep our organization going.  The strength of SFWA is clearly its volunteers and the service of those volunteers on SFWA's committees.
   "The purpose of our organization lies not only in educating ourselves and our fellow science fiction and fantasy writers about the blessings and the curses of this business, craft, and art -- important though that is -- but also in being zealous in our defense of the respect, dignity, and financial fair-play we are due as professionals.
   "Such an understanding -- that, at its best, SFWA functions as a trade association looking out for the common interests of our membership -- comes from my experience as SFWA Western Regional Director (2000-2003) and as chair of the Credits and Ethics committee during the late 1990s.  It also comes from twenty years as a professional writer whose publications include several dozen shorter works, a couple of short fiction collections, and five novels.  These works have appeared via large traditional print publishing houses, electronic and digital media, and small presses.
   "On a more personal level,  I am interested in the vice presidency of SFWA because the vice president works primarily with SFWA's committees.  Nearly fifteen years ago, it was a committee of SFWA -- the Grievance Committee -- which came to my aid when I was in a tight spot.  At that time, an unscrupulous agent who had "taken me on" as a client was holding my manuscripts hostage in hopes of extorting money (several thousand dollars) from me -- a trick, I later learned, which she had previously pulled  on other writers.  I contacted the Grievance Committee (chaired at that time by Sheila Finch) and presented to the committee the evidence of my situation.  As a result, SFWA's lawyer hit the aforementioned agent with a "cease and desist" and the situation was successfully resolved in my favor.
   "Despite a busy life and the sometimes crazy fractiousness of our organization, I feel a continuing sense of obligation to SFWA.  If the membership sees fit to elect me to SFWA's vice presidency, I will do my best to faithfully discharge that obligation."

Since writing that, I have published another novel and served two terms as vice president of SFWA. I still believe what I wrote at that time.  During my two terms as VP under President Robin Wayne Bailey (with whom I've been proud to serve), I have performed the traditional duties of the VP --  participating in all votes of the Board of Directors, serving as ex-officio member of many committees, and serving as chief "wrangler" for SFWA's numerous committees.  I also began working toward a reform of bankruptcy laws and publishers' contract templates regarding those laws, as well as working to establish a permanent "Legacy" database so that contact info for the estates, heirs, and agents of SFWA members who have passed on might be more readily available to agents, publishers, producers, anthologists, publishers, editors and scholars.  Both of these projects are ongoing.

Given my involvement with SFWA over the last ten years, many SFWAns have asked me why I chose not to run for the office of SFWA President.  Some have even accused me of precipitating a "constitutional crisis" by deciding not to run -- uncontested ballot, write-in candidates, all that.

I will not comment on the interesting election this year (2007), although I do think that anyone who seriously contemplates running for higher office in SFWA should have already served in the organization for a least a couple of years.  It shouldn't be "on the job training."

As to why I didn't run, there are several reasons.  No, none of them were "a desire to spend more time with his family" -- the cop-out du jour in these difficult times.  I will admit, however, that in my own case the last two years have been very trying: Laurel and I built a house in the mountains so I had to take on more teaching chores to help pay the mort-gage (French for "death pledge"), my mother-in-law went into terminal cancer, my mother was diagnosed with early stage dementia, and -- oh yes -- I had two editors (Steve Saffel and Jim Minz) shot out from under me at Del Rey.  I'm beginning to feel about my editors the way Custer felt about his horses at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (two steeds were shot out from under Old Yellow-Hair too).

I didn't think I'd serve SFWA well given all these matters still pending.  I though I'd call 2007-08 a "rebuilding" or "retrenchment" year.  I had no idea that one result of that simple decision would be an uncontested ballot.

In another way too, though, I feel that the organization and I are moving apart at the moment.  More and more of SFWA's business is internet mediated.  I've spent several thousands of hours doing SFWA business online during my Western Regional Director and Vice President years.  As a result I've developed an almost allergic aversion toward all things nettish, including what I'm doing right now. 

I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious.  For that reason I don't much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net.  A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you "go along to get along" for too long, there's a danger you'll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.

I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free.  A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work. 

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) -- given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization's development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch. 

Will I answer your emails? Sure, if you look up my contact info in the SFWA Directory.  But I won't blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, lounge or lurk -- and I'll be the happier for it.  Writing this now, I'm well aware of the irony that zealot Ted the Unabomber Kzin-ski got the biggest audience for his antitech manifesto /on the internet/, but I persist in insisting that people have a right to push back against technology they perceive to be destructive to their ways of life and their beliefs.

This is my pushback.  I'd rather be chopping wood for my woodstove, maintaining my own well, and working endlessly on our twelve acres of pines, oaks, and cedars than futzing with these electrons.  And that, if you'll excuse me, is exactly the hands-on work I'll be doing after my term as SFWA vice president ends

Have a nice life.

-- Dr. Howard V. Hendrix

4/24/7: Please read the follow-up post and comment here.