On Fractals and Self-Replication: An Acceptance Speech I Didn't Give

[justira]

Very many congrats once again to nerds of a feather, flock together for their very well-deserved 2021 Best Fanzine Hugo win! In the spirit of starting the new year as I mean to go on (read: posting at all about both media and culture), I would like to share the acceptance speech I wrote the night before the ceremony. None of us had really felt up to writing a speech all year, but that night, as covid spread through the con, as I sat, trapped in my hotel room, thinking about how we all got here, I got... mad. And I still want to share that anger and what I wrote out of it. Here's to acknowledging the bad and proceeding with hope and as much a sense of wonder as we can capture.

I want to start by thanking you all for your nominations and votes, and by thanking our colleagues and fellow finalists in this category. And then I want to talk about fractals.

Did you know that fractals, by and large, are not self-similar? We imagine perfectly regular shapes, a small pattern that repeats, building on itself, building copies. Self-replication, many would say, is the essence of life.

They would be wrong. Self-replication, we are all too aware in this harrowing time, is deadly.

The truth is fractals are shapes with non-integer dimensions: not one dimensional, or two, or three, but something in between, straining against the boundaries of definition. They are shapes that, when you look closer, only get more complex. They are a measure of how we do NOT fit in neat boxes, how we can in our roughness and imperfection come together to create strange and beautiful forms spanning to the edges of our understanding and beyond.

Lady Business is a group endeavour. We are a small community inside the fanzine community inside the speculative fiction community inside the global community. We're honored to have been nominated alongside so many other incredible fanzines produced by dedicated and brilliant writing communities, different from us and different from each other.

But we are not just fractals. We are fractured.

In this time where both separation and coming together are tinged with fear and loss, it has only become clearer how many within our communities &emdash; our neighbours, our families, our so-called authority figures and leaders &emdash; use our differences to cause us harm. To cause us death. To drown our very planet in their selfishness.

The year Lady Business did the work we were nominated for was a year millions died, fascism reached out of the shadows, and transphobia gained an international platform. A year where those with disabilities and chronic illnesses, the immunocompromised, the most vulnerable among us, were deemed disposable. A year the Black Lives Matter movement fought injustice, racism, and murder with every breath. Every breath behind a mask.

The speculative fiction community is one of envisioning possibility. Right now, many of us feel deprived of visions, of exits, of anything but stumbling in the dark.

But you've seen fractals, haven't you?

You have seen the intricate threads and whorls that reach out to each other across the blank voids, creating shapes we don't have names for yet.

These losses are part of us now. The voids left behind by those already lost to malice or to murder, to apathy or to ignorance. The void that is the pitiful, vile desolation of empathy left behind by those who have turned their backs on anyone unlike themselves.

THIS is the monstrosity of self-replication.

But we are beautiful together. And we are with you, in the dark.