These Gravely Digs of Mine

So some of you -- several thousand, if my hit counter is to be believed -- took a look at last Tuesday's post (http://yagathai.livejournal.com/958867.html) on the future of fandom. If so, you probably saw Eric Van, in the comments of that posts and two of the ones I linked to, make a complete ass of himself. Over the course of a few days he berated, belittled, and insulted his critics and the critics of his ill-conceived, now-cancelled plan to de-evolve Readercon like (SPOILER ALERT) Dennis Hopper at the end of the Super Mario Brothers movie. When relentless insults and GRE dick-waving (and seriously, who does that?) didn't convince people to stop saying true things, Eric decided on obfuscatory tactics, dropping names and invoking straw men like a frantic squid thrashes tentacles and sprays ink when it spots a predator.

Now normally this sort of behaviour wouldn't warrant a post like this. Certainly being a dick on the internet is nothing unusual (see "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"), and if I'm going to be honest I ought to be the last person to throw stones for that particular sin, living as I do in a house of extra-shattery glass. Besides, Van does a perfectly adequate job of embarrassing himself -- hubris is by definition its own punishment.

It's what Eric Van did that you didn't see that moved me to this action.

Shortly after Cat Valente published the post that ignited last week's kerfluffle, by making the unconscionably impolitic suggestion that a few of her friends skip Readercon next year and come hang out at her place instead, Eric Van sent her an email. In that email, he threatened to release details of Cat's previous Readercon programming-related correspondence with him unless she did as he demanded. In his own words, excerpted from the email in question: "I don't want to be a dick, but if you don't call the whole thing off and admit you were talking out of your hat, I won't hesitate to embarrass you".

Does that sound like blackmail to you? It sounds like blackmail to me.

The correspondence that Eric Van threatened to release is fairly innocuous. In it, Cat simply volunteers to be on more panels at this year's Readercon than the two to which she was originally assigned. At worst this might paint Cat as self-promoting and ambitious, and attempting to malign an author by accusing her of trying to raise her public profile of that is a bit like attempting to impugn a pornstar by calling her promiscuous. Speaking critically, on its face it sounds like a fairly incompetent, poorly constructed bit of extortion -- but only on its face.

The real threat in Eric Van's letter isn't the explicit one, but rather the implicit one. When a mobster walks into a local ice cream parlor, says something like "Sure is a dry summer we're having. Why, I bet the timbers in this old place are as dry as a bone. Sure would be a shame if all this ice cream melted. Say, do you have fire insurance?" and lights a match, it's obvious that he isn't really talking about the weather. He's threatening to burn the place down if you don't pay protection.

Similarly, it doesn't take Jedi mind powers to see that when the head of programming at Readercon sends you a threatening letter demanding that you comply with his orders and reminding you that he decides who does and does not get access to panels and readings... Well, you do the science. It sure as hell sounds like coercion to me. I don't know if it meets the legal definition of blackmail, but as far as I'm concerned it meets the dictionary definition closely enough.

I have been in touch with the Readercon committee and they have informed me that Eric Van is no longer in charge of programming, and his participation in next year's con has been reduced to an "advisory" role. There is no reason to believe that anyone but Eric Van is responsible for the email. This post is in no way meant to impugn Readercon as a whole or the hardworking volunteers that operate it (with the one obvious exception), and who have, let's be fair, had a pretty rough couple of weeks. You can visit www.readercon.org for updated information on the format of next year's event, which bears little resemblance to the description on the now-disavowed flyer which started this whole mess.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes, and I'm writing this post in the hope that by exposing the petty, vicious and unethical actions of a member of our fan community, we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

ETA: Cat did not ask me to write this post, and I am not her satrap (though I am her friend). In fact, so outraged was I when I learned about the email that I asked her if she would mind if I wrote about it.