Short story birthday! "Candace Swallowed the Sea"

Back in January, I wrote an ocean-themed drabble for an ocean-themed drabble collection put out by Black Hare Press. It was a strange story, in that it basically all came out in one go and was weirdly surreal in a way that I don't normally write (I want my fantasy to MAKE SENSE and have an INTERNAL LOGIC and have a COMPLETELY BUILT WORLD!). I was a bit disappointed when the story was rejected, because I quite liked it, and also, when you've written a 100-word story on a specific theme and it isn't successful, it's not entirely clear what else you'll ever be able to do with it. (But I wasn't so disappointed when they accepted the next three stories I submitted -- more about that later this month!)

Then, about two weeks ago, I saw this drabble contest hosted by Maura Yzmore. She was looking for 100 word short stories, not necessarily related to the pandemic. Hey, guess what! I had a 100 word story at loose ends! So I sent it off.

Three days ago, I was immensely pleased to be notified that "Candace Swallowed the Sea" received an "honorable mention" (and $10, making this story the highest-rate-paid piece I've ever sold :) ) in the realism/surrealism category. You can read the story here online or download all the stories in a single collection (PDF, EPUB, MOBI.)

The most pernicious fallacy

UK Higher Ed loves metrics. REF. TEF. KEF. QS rankings. (I've written before about other types of rankings we might consider...)

Of course, there is no easy way to collate and evaluate the data necessary to make these different type of ranking systems robust. The QS rankings are made by surveying academics about their perceptions of other departments. I received a request to participate in this manner a few years ago, took a look at the survey, realised how entirely inadequate my knowledge was to allow me to give informed responses, and promptly decided to never contribute to these surveys ever again. Plenty has been said about how graduate earnings and employability are no indication of the teaching quality of the course the person graduated from, and neither is student satisfaction, and yet these are all factors that are taken into account in the TEF. I don't know enough about KEF to say anything about the methods it uses, but I'm sure they're just as problematic.

But in this post, I want to talk about REF and the proxies it uses.

The point of REF is to grade the research outputs of individual departments as a means of determining how to allocate money to departments, rewarding ones that are good and punishing ones that are bad. In an ideal world, the research produced would be read carefully and evaluated by panels of experts who have sufficient time and expertise to do this, and are commensurately recompensed for it. We all know that we're not in an ideal world, and that this doesn't happen: There are insufficient experts on the panels and they are given insufficient time to be able to read and evaluate all the work they're given in a careful and calm manner. This isn't something unique to REF and REF panels too -- it's the case any time research has to be evaluated, e.g., by promotions and progression committees, or on grant evaluation panels, or on hiring panels.

As a result, proxies have to be developed. Even though people are not supposed to take publication venue into account when determining the research quality of a piece, the fact remains that venue matters. After all, Philosophical Quarterly is a highly prestigious journal, accepting only a very small percentage of submissions it receives -- so if a paper has managed to jump that high bar, it must be a good paper, right?

But the fact is, the prestige of a journal is a supervening property, not something endemic to a journal. A journal receives its high prestige from the quality of the papers it publishes. That this is the case can be clearly demonstrated: If a currently high-prestige journal started publishing rubbish, then the consequence of this would be that the prestige level of the journal would decrease, rather than the quality of the papers increase (to match the quality/prestige of the journal).

And yet, because the prestige of the publication venue is all too often taken as a proxy for the quality of what is published in that venue, too often people become susceptible to what I have entitled in this post the most pernicious fallacy: The way to demonstrate the quality of your research is not by writing high-quality papers, but to publish them in prestigious journals. Because if your paper was in a prestigious journal, it must be a good paper, right? We have gone from journals deriving their prestige from the quality of the papers in them, to papers deriving their quality from the prestige of the journal that published them.

Why is this problematic? Because it treats publication as an end in itself rather than a means to an end, that end being the dissemination of research. When I am doing research myself, in preparation for writing an article, where do I go to find relevant papers? Not to the high-prestige journals, in general; no, I go to the journals that specialise in the area that I am working in, because these are the papers that are going to be relevant to what I want to do. Similarly, when I publish, I want to publish in venues that tend to publish other papers on the same sort of topics -- because this increases the chances that the people I would like to have read my paper will actually do so.

As a result of this, I have tended to publish papers in specialist journals in my field -- journals which, quite rightly, have a high prestige in their respective fields because of the quality of the specialist papers they publish, places like the Journal of Philosophical Logic for logic and Vivarium for medieval philosophy. But because these are specialist journals, rather than generalist journals, if these venues are taken as proxy for the quality of my papers that I've published in them, they get ranked lower than the generalist journals -- because if my paper were truly high-quality research, then of course a generalist journal would want to publish it. Now, that may be true: Maybe Philosophy and Mind and Philosophical Quarterly and the like are equally likely to publish philosophical logic or medieval philosophy as another subarea of philosophy (I have my doubts about this, but I'm happy to suppose that it's true for the purposes of example here). But is it equally likely that people interested in philosophical logic or medieval philosophy will go first to those journals to find the new, relevant research for their own projects? No.

And that's what I meant about publication becoming an end in itself rather than a means to an end. If the publication venue prestige determines the quality of the paper, for the purposes of rankings/evaluations such as REF, promotion, grant applications, job applications, etc., then getting a paper published in, e.g., Mind is an end in itself, even if the paper then dies a lonely, unread death because no one would ever think to look there to find a paper on that topic. If it is the journal that endows high quality upon the papers it publishes, rather than the papers published in a journal endowing high quality upon that journal, then whether anyone reads or uses the research becomes irrelevant: the actual research, and its actual quality, becomes irrelevant.

When we tell junior colleagues, ones applying for jobs, or applying for promotions, or trying to put together a good REF package, that they should be submitting their work to the high prestige journals, because those are the ones that will "count", then we are falling prey to this pernicious fallacy. We should never forget that the quality of a research paper lies in the paper itself, not in the venue that publishes it.

New publication announcement!

My short story, "What Lies Beneath the Waves", was published yesterday in With Painted Words, an online magazine with an unusual modus operandi: "every month a new image is chosen as a prompt and, for that month, all submissions must have used it as their inspiration – no matter how slight, vague or metaphorical it is there must be some form of link between the image and the work." The prompt for January 2020 was a couple of brightly covered starfish beneath rippling waves. During January, I took part in Wendy Pratt's daily poetry prompt course, on the theme of Beginnings and Endings. Despite being a poetry course, short flash fic was also encouraged, and the prompt one day was to write a story about a childhood game gone wrong. This story is not the sort I usually write, but I enjoyed the double challenge – to write a story inspired by the image and to write to a specific topic/brief.

The best part about the starfish image is that it also inspired my daughter – I explained to her what I was doing, and she too wanted to write a story inspired by that picture. It turned into a joint effort, and we have Big Plans afoot for it. Watch this space!

I'm definitely going to be writing more for WPW.

How do we (teach students to) ask questions?

Yesterday I gave a talk with this title at Nottingham Philosophy's departmental colloquium. The post below isn't a transcription of the talk but it's the notes I wrote up on the train down which I mostly followed when speaking. I'm reproducing the notes here unchanged, not because I didn't get loads of useful feedback from the Q&A, but because I don't have the time to amend/augment it now, and in any case I'm planning to take this and try to turn it into an actual journal paper.

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I'd like to thank Matthew and the rest of you for the invitation to come give a talk, because it gives me an opportunity to explore some things that I spend a lot of time thinking about but which I feel like we (as a profession) spend very little time talking about – either with each other or with our students. I know from Matthew and Ian that Nottingham is a very open and pluralistic department, so I wanted to do something a little bit different. This is going to be more of an interactive exercise where I get you guys to think reflectively about a bunch of stuff and then share your thoughts with each other and with me. It's primarily selfish in nature: I want to get better at this, so I want to get as much different input as I can.

What is philosophy?

1. Is it content?

   Is it about who our predecessors are, and what they thought? Is it names, dates, influences, concepts, theories, questions, applications, problems, paradoxes? [If it is, what distinguishes philosophy from history of philosophy?] Is it about investigating fundamental reality?

2. (2) Is it method?

   Or is it method? Can any topic be philosophical so long as we apply certain kinds (the right kinds?) of methods to it?

   What are the methods? Formal logic; informal logic; concept analysis; phenomenology; thought experiments; etc.

One needn't place themselves firmly in one camp or the other – it's possible to take any position on the spectrum between these two extremes, and probably most philosophers find themselves somewhere in the middle. But if hard pressed to come up with a means of excluding philosophy from non-philosophy, each of you will end up favoring one side or another.

Why is it important to know where you stand on this issue? It's because it relates to another topic, namely:

What are we teaching when we teach undergraduates philosophy?

3. Is it philosophy?
4. Is it how to be a philosopher?

These are not quite the same question as the previous question, but if you say the answer is (3) then whether you take (1) or (2) will make a difference.

Think back to your own undergraduate career. What did you learn? What courses were you required to take? In the US, I had to do history of ancient and history of modern; I had to take at least one ethics course; I had to take at least one logic course. For the rest, I had choice, but the classes I took tended to focus on particular areas/subfields/figures in philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein; philosophy of language; metaphysics; epistemology; philosophy of math. As I got higher up (and started taking grad classes) I got focused topics like compositionality and vagueness and logicism. But there was a very clear sense that we were learning who the important figures, themes, concepts, developments in philosophy were. In only one case did I get the feeling that my professor was teaching me what he was teaching me because he thought it was right (Terry Penner doing Plato was amazing.)

If there was an expectation that we would learn how to be philosophers, it was that this would fall out of reading and seeing how the great philosophers did philosophy. (This is, if you think about it, an interesting pedagogical assumption. Would we expect people to learn how to become engineers by reading/seeing how other engineers do engineering? Would we expect people to learn how to write fiction by reading/seeing how other authors write fiction? It's a pedagogical technique that seems more appropriate in some cases than in others, and not appropriate across the board: So we must ask the question, "Is it appropriate for philosophy?")

Does anyone else's experiences differ from mine?

Anyway, the takeaway I took from this, as a student, is that this is what I was supposed to teach my own (undergraduate) students – that there were certain figures, concepts, disputes, etc. that any student having gotten a philosophy degree should come away with some degree of knowledge/familiarity with. (Let me just say as an aside here that this is where questions of canon come in…questions I'm not going to talk about so much, but not because I don't think they're important.) So if I was teaching philosophy of language, I should teach people about Frege/Sense/Reference; Russell/Donnellan/Kaplan/definite descriptions; Kripke; possibly Geach. Maybe at a higher level I could teach semantics, and compositionality, and theories of truth.

That's what I should teach…but what I really wanted to teach was all the ways in which philosophy of language gets fiction wrong, and how to deal with lies, and what do we mean by "meaning" and "nonsense" and "meaningless", and the problems fanfiction causes. But if I did that, then I'd have to give up on giving them the broad foundation in the historical debates and developments – there simply isn't enough time.

But what if what we were really supposed to be doing was teaching students how to do philosophy or how to be philosophers?

Then all the things I wanted to be teaching them and talking to them about, I could. But if that's what our goal is, then I think for the most part, we don't do a very good job at it.

In my capacity as director of undergrad dissertations at Durham, the biggest thing concern I've seen over the years is that students don't really know how to come up with dissertation topics. They look at the grand topics they've covered in their classes – the problem of evil, why is there something rather than nothing, what are numbers, etc. – and worry (quite rightly) that (a) they can't come up with a grand topic like this; (b) if they do, they won't be able to come up with an original contribution; (c) if they do, they can't adequately discuss it in 12k. Or, they look at the sorts of essay topics they're given in their classes or exams, and try to come up with something that sounds like that, and invariably end up with something clunky, awkward, and not very much fun.

My first experience with teaching (UK) students how to come up with their own questions was a few years ago when I taught a 2nd year course on Language, Logic, and Reality. I talked with the other person running the module and we agreed on a plan. The course had one formative paper and two summative papers. The formative paper, we would give them one question – everyone had to write on it. (It tied back to the very first lecture when I wrote three quotes up on the board – one in medieval Welsh, one in Sindarin, and one in Linear B. We asked them whether the quote in Linear B was meaningful, and why/why not.) The second paper we had around 7 pre-set questions students could choose from. But their final paper, they had to come up with their own topic. We told them this at the very beginning of the year, and provided a lot of "and this would be an EXCELLENT topic for your final paper" during lectures and discussions. We also arranged for my students to talk to the other lecturer to get their questions vetted, and vice versa, so that no one ended up picking something unreasonable for 3000 words. These final papers were across the board a much higher quality than the other ones.

But I can't recall how many people I had in my office telling me things like "I didn't know that I could talk about X in philosophy" or "Is this philosophical enough?" (Those two words are the bane of my existence). The worry whether something is "philosophical enough" connects to a concern that philosophy is demarcated by its subject matter, rather than its method, and that if one wants to talk about something in a philosophical context one must relate it back and anchor it in that subject matter. Whereas if one things that philosophy is a matter of method, then anything can be philosophical enough. It was working with students that convinced them that method is the way forward, and that method is what we should be teaching them, and what we should be teaching them explicitly.

(Side note: As a graduate student in the US, I remember being utterly baffled how my compatriots wrote journal articles. How did one come up with an idea that was suited to an article? I didn't have much problem writing seminar papers, but journal articles seemed a very different thing, and not once did I get any explicit guidance as to what the difference is or how I should approach one vs. the other.)

So how do we teach students to ask questions? Well, here's how I teach them:

When students are in my office wondering what to write their dissertations on, I have a surefire method of finding them a topic that excites and interests them. First, I ask them what interests them outside of philosophy. What do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch, what do they talk about with friends, what are their hobbies? [Only once did I have a student tell me he had no hobbies.] Then, I ask them what interests them in philosophy – is it ethics, is it metaphysics, is it epistemology, is it language/logic? That is…are they interested in what is right? What is? What we know? How we say true things about it/draw inferences about it? Finally, I ask them: What's in the intersection. There's your thesis topic.

But that just gets a topic. How does one know what to say about it? These are the questions I have them go through:

• What do you want to know?
• What would count as an answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between things that answer the question and things that don't?
• What would count as a good answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between competing answers? What are your foundational principles, the things that you cannot give up? What is the purpose of this answer (are you looking for something functional, moral, epistemological, etc.)? State these at the beginning of what you are writing, as part of your motivation.
• Then, once you've answered the question…who cares? Why does it matter? What has changed as a result of having this answer? What must change as a result of having this answer? Does having this answer affect our behavior? Does it affect what philosophical position we must adopt to remain consistent? Does it change the philosophical landscape by either removing or adding possible positions? What difference does it make?

These are, at the heart of it, the questions I think philosophers should be asking, whatever other questions they ask. Do not ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or "What is a fact?" unless you have some idea of what could possibly count as an answer, and some idea of what could possibly count as a good answer. And when it's boiled down to this, these are fairly straightforward things to teach students to ask.

Answering them, on the other hand… is another matter altogether.

Stats and graphs and publishing fiction

I've now been writing and submitting short (and long!) stories moderately seriously for just over 5 years -- after a decade or more hiatus from writing fiction, I decided one day, August 26, 2014, to start writing again, and I did. Since then, I've written hundreds of thousands of words (literally -- since I started tracking my words via WordKeeperAlpha in September 2017, I have written more than 200,000 words of fiction!), and I've had a satisfying amount of my fiction published. I was thinking the other day that publications don't ever really tell the whole story -- of the time between when a piece was first submitted and when it was finally published, or how many rejections there were between first submission and first publication. So I thought I'd do a post about this, doing some graphs and stats on the last five years. (Well, rather, the last two and a half, which is when I started using the Submissions Grinder; this won't affect the stats very much, as prior to that I had only one story that I had ever submitted, and it was accepted on the first go.)

Between 2017-05-04 and 2019-09-16, I've submitted 23 stories. 11 (=48%) of them have been accepted. (Some of those which have not (yet) been accepted were one-off things written for a specific venue and when they weren't successful there there wasn't any great pressure to try resubmitting them, so if I didn't count those "dead" stories that acceptance percentage would be even higher! I hadn't realised how high it was, this is quite rewarding.) The first two graphs focus just on the accepted stories, and the third graph will focus on ones not yet accepted. (If you click on a graph you'll get a larger, easier to read version.)

The first graph plots how many days there were between when a story was first submitted, and when it was finally accepted:

The second graph plots how many rejections each accepted story got before it was finally accepted:

And then final graph plots how many rejections stories that have not yet been accepted yet have accrued already:

One thing that comes out of these numbers is that persistence pays off. This makes me feel a lot better about the stories that I keep submitting and submitting and submitting. They will eventually get there. Eventually.

Edited to add another graph: Plotting the number of rejections vs. the length of time between initial submission and first acceptance:

Story birthday! "On the Other Side of the Dark Entry Gate"

Yesterday my drabble "On the Other Side of the Dark Entry Gate" was published in Black Hare Press's anthology Beyond.

(Book selfies are hard, when they're of ebooks!)

The original idea for this story dates back to spring 2017, when one of the Marvel films was being filmed at Durham Cathedral. My daughter's school is right behind the cathedral, and during filming there was limited access. To inform us of this, we got an email from school, which contained this delightful line:

The Dark Entry gate is locked; access will be via The Bailey.

That was when I knew I needed to write the story of the Dark Entry Gate -- especially when in proximity to a cathedral, doesn't that sound like a euphemism for the entrance to the pit of hell?

The story itself had a number of false starts over the last two years, but when I saw the theme for this anthology, the perfect drabble came out in one go.

Here's a picture of the Dark Entry gate when it is open:

How to write academic papers for fun and profit

Back in spring, I chatted briefly with a group of master's students about what I was looking for in their final papers, and how they could go about structuring them (this was in the context of encouraging them to think beyond the length of paper they'd been used to writing -- instead of 3k, 5-6k). It took about 15 minutes and some scribbling on the board, but afterwards one of them thanked me and said no one had ever taught them this before.

Today I took 15 min. to tell some 2nd year master's students what, exactly, should go into a philosophy/logic research paper.

Later, one of them told me that no one had ever told them that before.

We really are failing our students sometimes. :(

— Doctor Logic (@SaraLUckelman) April 11, 2019

Following up on that tweet, I wrote up what I could remember of the advice I'd given.

Then, last week, someone in an FB group for fiction writing that I'm in was struggling with writing a paper for one of her classes, unsure how to get started. This group has 17+k members, and I often end up putting on my "professional academic" hat and giving people advice on picking classes, applying to uni, talking to their profs, etc., and this post was no different. The topic was an argumentative paper on quality management in insurance companies with special regard for business customers -- a topic I know nothing about, but you know what? I know what sort of paper I'd want to read on this subject...and the structure it has turned out to be rather similar to what I'd given the philosophy students for their logic papers!

So I thought I'd compile this advice into a blog post. Note that this isn't the only way to write such papers, but it's a way, and it's a good one, and it's one that not only do I encourage my students and other students to use, but I use myself quite often, too.

Advice from twitter:

• Your intro should include what your problem/puzzle/issue is; what motivated your choice; and what tools you'll use to solve it.
• You should say what other people have done that's relevant, and why it's inadequate (if it isn't inadequate, then you don't have a puzzle/problem to solve).
• You should define all your technical apparatus. This can be done in two ways:
  1. Either you introduce the technical apparatus and the motivating examples/material concurrently, in an interleaved fashion.
  2. Or you present all the technical apparatus, and then apply it to your motivating examples/material.
  It's REALLY HARD to know which route is best. I often end up starting with one method, finding it wholly inadequate, switching to the other, hating it, and then switching back.
• After you've applied your technical appartus, say something about the consequences. What have you gained from doing this? What have you learned? What are the problems? What still needs to be done?
• And all of that will segue into your conclusion/recap/future work section. I think that's about it.

Advice from FB:

The first thing you need is what question you're trying to answer, and what your answer is: Everything else gets built around that. I often recommend to my students to work backwards: What do you want your reader to come away with at the end? Set up your entire paper to drive that point home:

• Motivate the question -- which is this a question worth answering? Why this question rather than another question?
• Contextualise the question -- what has already been said to answer this question? Why are these previous answers inadequate? How will your answer differ?
• Motivate the answer -- what will count as a good answer? How will you discriminate good answers from bad answers? (This will, of course, be connected to the previous, in that you want answers that do things that previous answers haven't done).
• Answer the question.
• Explain how your answer answers the question and why it is a good answer.
• Remind your reader what the question and answer were, and conclude.

Aim for 1000 words for the first two, maybe 1500 for the third, 2000 for the fourth, and another ~2.5k for the fifth and sixth -- that's 7000 words and should be about 20 pages.

There you go! Have fun. Oh, wait, you want to know how to make money from all of this? Ahahahahahahah....

Story birthday! "The Simurgh's Daughter"

About two weeks ago, my short story "The Simurgh's Daughter" was published in the anthology Pioneers and Pathfinders (Amazon link); my print copy arrived today!

This story was written over Christmas break 2017-2018. I'd seen a call for stories for an anthology on Asian bird themed SFF, and was interested in exploring this theme in an atypical way. G had recently come home with a children's version of the Shahnameh from the library, and while reading it, especially stories of the simurgh, I wanted to write a story that fit within that mythos while not being a retelling of it, and I wanted to write a story for her.

She was my first beta reader and my biggest champion for the story throughout. I read it to her, and she drew pictures of parts of the story -- those pictures were taped to my kitchen cupboard for a good year, reminding me that no matter what happens, she loves my stories and believes in them.

"A fragrant pliant golden green haoma tree which blooms in summer"

"Vourukasha the world sea"

"The simurgh is a wondrous bird with copper feathers and the tail of a peacock and the face of a beautiful woman"

"She landed upon Harā Berezaitī the peak of the tallest mountain when a cry caught her ears"

"You were born upon the mountain Harā Berezaitī around which the stars and the moon resolve"

"The city of Amui upon the shores of a great sea"

I have a pretty good track record of writing stories for specific themed anthologies and failing to place them in those anthologies, but placing the stories elsewhere. I'd shopped this one around for quite awhile before I decided to ask Jessica, who edited Pioneers and Pathfinders if she'd like to read it, even if the story wasn't an exact fit for the antho brief. She loved it as much as G did. :)

I loved reading up on Persian mythology and history while writing the story, reading about Ahura Mazda, about haoma trees, about the world-sea, looking at geography to choose where exactly I would set Harā Berezaitī and which city (modern-day Amol) I would set Simbar's adventures in. I also loved research Persian food, making myself hungry along the way! (One book I stumbled across was Jan Gonda, Rice and Barley Offerings in the Veda). And finally, to the best of my knowledge, Simbar and Thriti are both plausible historical Persian feminine names; Saena is a name used for the simurgh in the Yashts, a collection of Avestan hymns.

I'm super glad to see this story in print, and look forward to reading it to G for many years to come.

Doctor Logic Goes to WorldCon!

Edit August 1: The final schedule is now up, and I can confirm that the below is all correct.

I am super excited to be going to my first WorldCon, in Dublin next month. It'll be an interesting adventure -- it's my not only my first WorldCon, but it's also my first SFF con of any type, and while there I'll be participating in events that feature many different facets of my life. I've got lodgings arranged with philosophy and NaNoWriMo friends; I'm giving a paper on onomastics in the academic track; I'm speaking in two panels on AI; and I'll be participating in the demos and display stalls for the Society for Creative Anachronism; and I've got a drink-beer-with-an-author session. All my academic, hobby, and authorial pursuits all coming together into one!

So, what, exactly am I do, and where can you find me? Here's the scoop!

Thursday, August 15

11:30-12:50: Worlds (Academic Session)

Names: Form & Function in Worldbuilding & Conlangs

Significant interest has been generated in recent years in the robust development of conlangs (constructed languages) for fantasy and sci-fi purposes, with detailed handbooks now available for the amateur conlanger, providing instructions on how to develop grammar, phonology, etc. One area of linguistic development that many conlangers often overlook is personal and place name patterns and practices.

The influence of medieval European naming practices can be seen throughout contemporary fantasy naming practices. This influence can be traced back to the Father of Fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien, as many of his names – such as Gandalf, Thorin, Frodo, Theodred, and Peregrine – are in fact genuine medieval names; and Tolkien himself was significantly influenced by the medieval-style romances of William Morris. However, unlike Tolkien and Morris, many modern authors developing ‘generic medieval European’ style fantasy worlds do not have a background in medieval history or linguistics, with the result that even dedicated conlangers approach names in an unsystematic or ungrounded way.

In this talk we argue for the importance of including personal names and place names in the development of fantasy worlds and languages, and highlight the distinctive aspects of the formation and function of personal and place names that conlangers and authors should be aware of when developing a world or a language. We also show how resources available to the amateur historian and linguist, such as the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, can be used to develop consistent, grounded, systematic name pools and patterns of construction.

Date, Time, Location

15 Aug 2019, Thursday 11:30 - 12:20, Odeon 6 (Academic) (Point Square Dublin)

Speakers

1. Dr. Sara L. Uckelman – ‘Names: Form & Function in Worldbuilding & Conlangs’
2. Andrew Richardson – ‘Civilisation and Science Fiction’
3. Dr Kevin Koidl – ‘Trust and the Future of Social Media’

Friday, August 16

16:30-17:20: Is Hari Seldon’s project becoming achievable? (Panel)

People have long tried to predict future outcomes of nations or personal behaviour. Prediction is now enhanced by big data and machine learning. Panellists consider which events we already can predict with high probability. With stochasticity, which events will we never ‘get’? What mechanisms would prevent misuse (e.g. for advertising or influencing voting)? What would trigger a ‘Seldon Crisis’?

Date, Time, Location

16 Aug 2019, Friday 16:30 - 17:20, Alhambra (Point Square Dublin)

Panelists

1. Shmulik Shelach
2. Dr. Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University)
3. Tomasz Kozlowski (Atelier of Improvisation) (Moderator)
4. Marina Berlin

Saturday, August 17

15:30-16:20: Crafting your fandom (Panel)

From building a spaceship wardrobe to knitting the Doctor’s scarf, baking the Death Star, or putting their travel cards into wands, fans have ever more inventive ways to express their love, enthusiasm, and fandom through arts and crafts. Our panellists will share their love of fandom crafting from what they do to how they do, and discuss why we all do it.

Date, Time, Location

17 Aug 2019, Saturday 15:30 - 16:20, Alhambra (Point Square Dublin)

Panelists

1. Dr. Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University) (Moderator)
2. Todd Allis
3. Arwen Grune
4. Michelle Coleman (University of Nottingham)
5. Alicia Zaloga

Sunday, August 18

17:00-17:50: Society for Creative Anachronism (demo)

Date, Time, Location

18 Aug 2019, Sunday 17:00 - 17:50, 4th floor foyer (CCD)

21:00-21:50: Literary Beer with Dr Sara L. Uckelman

Come and keep me company and have a beer (or not) and talk about writing (or not) or academia (or not)!

Date, Time Location

18 Aug 2019, Sunday 21:00 - 21:50, Liffey-A (Fan Bar) (CCD)

Monday, August 19

10:30-11:30: AIs and the female image (Panel)

Whether in smart homes or wearing mechanical bodies, until recently many ‘female’ AIs emphasised beauty and sexuality. Now some portrayals emphasise strength and intelligence. Can we do both? How does the representation of ‘male’ AIs differ? Must we anthropomorphise AIs and assign them genders? Can we have non-binary AIs?

Date, Time, Location

19 Aug 2019, Monday 10:30 - 11:30, Odeon 1 (Point Square Dublin)

Panelists

1. Madeline Ashby
2. Charles Stross
3. Pat Cadigan
4. Dr V Anne Smith (University of St Andrews)
5. Dr. Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University)

It may come as a surprise to some people that I am actually an introvert and sometimes can suffer from incapacity shyness and anxiety. I've spent a large part of my life thinking "Surely everyone has someone they would like to talk to more than talk to me". But if people come up and talk to me, I am positively delighted and often can pretend very well to be an extrovert. So look out for these shoes and introduce yourself to me if you see me! (And if there is someone else at WorldCon with these shoes...I want to meet you.)

New publication announcement!

On Friday, my paper "Contradictions, Impossibility, and Triviality: A Response to Jc Beall" was published in Journal of Analytic Theology, as part of a symposium on Jc Beall's paper, also published in the same issue, "Christ – A Contradiction: A Defense of Contradictory Christology". It was a pleasure to be invited by the editors of the journal to participate in this symposium, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading Beall's paper and responding to it. I look forward to reading all the other responses with the attention and care they are due.

Short story birthday: "An Orb of Ice-Blue Held Aloft in a Perfect Hand"

Yesterday my short story "An Orb of Ice-Blue Held Aloft in a Perfect Hand" was published in Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast. (Go listen to it! It's only 10 minutes long!)

The story itself has quite a story behind it. Late February/early March last year, I was involved in the longest-ever strike in UK higher-education history. From long cold days on the picket lines in the snow, to the harshness of being able to do my job, it was a tough time (something I blogged about daily here, starting with Day 1). I was struggling with the disruption of my schedule, of my projects, of my identity. Then one of my friends posted the above photo on Facebook, and I commented "I wanna write that story."

So I did.

About a week later when the local branch of the Durham UCU held a "Solidarity Salon", I read my strike story out loud -- the first time I've ever read any of my fiction aloud to an audience other than my daughter. Writing that story provided me with an outlet and a solace amidst a very stressful time, and I am so pleased that I was able to capture such an amazingly beautiful photo (of my amazingly beautiful friend!) in a story. That someone else liked my story enough to publish it is just the cherry on the top!

Photo credit: Mermaid Audris by Phil Mc Fadden. Follow @MermaidAudris on twitter.

New publication announcement: "Computation in Medieval Western Europe".

I've got a new publication to announce! (It actually came out a week or two ago, but I only got my author's copy on Tuesday, so no author selfie before then.) It's a book chapter in Sven Ove Hansson, ed., Technology and Mathematics: Philosophical and Historical Investigations, on "Computation in Medieval Western Europe":

Abstract:

Practices that fall under the broad umbrella of ‘computation’ in the western European Middle Ages tend to be goal-oriented and directed at specific purposes, such as the computation of the date of Easter, the calculation of velocities, and the combinatorics of syllogisms and other logical arguments. In spite of this practical bent, disparate computational practices were increasingly built upon theoretical foundations. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical principles underlying three areas of computation: computistics and the algorithms employed in computistics, as well as algorithms more generally; arithmetic and mathematical calculation, including the calculation of physical facts and theorems; and (possible) physical implementations of computing mechanisms.

It was an interesting paper chapter to write because it stretched the boundaries of my comfort zones -- I had to read up a lot on calendrical computation! (Which is super interesting.) But it's a fascinating exercise, to pick a modern concept, such as computation, and then see what, if anything, counts as its historical precursor.

Approaching philosophy as a speculative fiction author

Two days ago I had the brilliant opportunity of giving a skype guest lecture in Michael Rea's undergraduate class on Science Fiction and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Michael invited me to speak to his students not in my capacity as a philosopher but in my capacity as a Real, Live Author (a capacity which I still find a bit boggling that I have!), to speak to his students about the ways in which philosophy feeds into my writing and how my writing feeds into my philosophy. He asked that I speak for 15-20 minutes, and then there'd be a Q&A, both them to me and me to them. It was an excellent hour and a quarter full of living discussion from which I came away with many thoughts about things I'd never considered before, and I thought I'd write up the brief notes I had for my kick-off presentation, as well as put together some lists that I promised the class during the course of class.

In advance of the class, I had them read Kate Elliott's blog post, The Omniscient Breasts, on the problematic internalisation of the "male gaze":

A problem arises when people write and/or read without knowing or realizing they are writing and reading exclusively from the perspective of a male gaze. When this perspective has been internalized as the most authentic or real perspective, it can subsume and devour all other perspectives because it is treated as the truest or only one.

Why does this matter? Because:

Stories told through a female gaze are just as valid, just as true, just as authentic and universal. And they are just as necessary, not just for women but for men, too.

ALL OF THE STORIES ARE NECESSARY

A fortuitious series of events also lead me to read this interview with Sheri S. Tepper in Strange Horizons a few days before giving the talk, and many of the topics discussed in it informed what I wanted to say.

Notes for my presentation

Topic: Why is my reading/writing spec fic relevant/important to my being a philosopher?

• Brief intro: Who am I?
• Writer since age 4. 10 year gap while I wrote a PhD/established an academic career.
• Picked up writing again in 2014; started submitting in 2015. Since then, I've had 9 short stories or pieces of flash fic published or forthcoming. I'm currently in my 3rd year participating in NaNoWriMo
• Practical aspects: The first way in which integrating the practice of reading and writing fiction into my philosophical research is beneficial is a straightforward practical one: It gives me concrete philosophical research questions to try to answer.
• What is "creation"? What is being created? "If creation is important to something or someone or is going to become important, then all subcreations of it are also important. Everything is important. There is nothing so unimportant you can ignore it or destroy it with complete impunity." (Tepper interview, op. cit.)
• What are fictional characters?
• Truth in fiction.
• Emotions and fiction.

But this is a rather low-level reason to integrate philosophy and reading/writing fiction: Any of these research questions I could perfectly well engage in without engaging in the production or consumption of fiction; it's just that certain aspects are highlighted or more interesting to me given that I do.

I want to contrast those pragmatic/practical aspects with two other types of aspects which I think are intrinsically tied up in the production and consumption of fiction, and cannot be dealt with separately.

• Epistemic aspects:
• Thought experiments: What if?
• The opportunity to explore ideas (through writing) without having arguments for them.
• But stories are arguments, and arguments are stories. (see here, here, and here).
• "Things done in imagination have meaning in the world. Faery is imagination, right? Things done in imagination are transferable to reality. Promises made there can become real." (Tepper interview, op. cit.)
• We cannot get from here to there without having an idea of what there looks like. We cannot start working towards the future we want to make real until we have a way of conceptualising what the future could be like. Fiction helps us imagine that.
• Moral aspects:
• No one is ever persuaded by argument alone. We need stories to persuade people.
• Every choice matters: In fiction we can chose whether to perpetuate problematic social structures. "The male gaze occurs when the audience, or viewer, is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male." (Laura Mulvey, quoted in Elliott's post, op. cit.). Kate Elliott and the "homosexual agenda": "to him, a sexual gaze was by default a male gaze".
• "All of the stories are necessary": Necessary how/why?

The Q&A section of the class covered a tremendously wide spectrum of topics, from the very practical questions of how can we shift mainstream media (movies and books) when everything comes down to money; how do we deal with mainstream media where the narratives of the stories (e.g., strong female leadership in the new Star Wars movies) are in conflict with the actual production of the stories (how many women in executive/production roles in the making of the movies?); how do we talk to our friends, families, colleagues about these internalised defaults; how much should we, as writers of fiction, care about how our words might be used against us or misunderstood?

A few specific points came out that I though were really perceptive. One person asked if there were anything like a trans gaze (as opposed to a male or female gaze), and if I could recommend any stories that center that. I'm not sure if it makes sense to speak of a trans gaze (as opposed to, e.g., a nonbinary or genderfluid one), but I could certainly give them recommendations for stories that center trans characters and trans authors. I have elsewhere enthusiastically reviewed a collection of short stories by trans author Ana Mardoll, and I recommend them enthusiastically here. I also recommend the detailed and unending work that that Bogi Takács does, writing, editing, and promoting spec fic by trans authors. They are the editor volumes 2 and 3 of the Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction anthologies (volume 2; volume 3; checkout the rest of Lethe Press's trans and genderqueer fiction), and they also review speculative fiction widely and have a very helpful index of author demographics: Bogi Reads the World. (Follow them on Twitter for more recommendations.)

Another person, who has read enough of my reviews of short SFF fiction for SFFReviews.com to know of my resistance to 2nd person POV, wondered if there was a connection between that and the problematic centering of the male gaze. I thought that was really perceptive, because I'd never put the two together but I think there's something there: I don't really like 2nd person POV because it feels too often like I am being told what to do and what to think and what to feel, and I resist this very strongly. But in a sense, centering the male gaze when the reader is themself not male is similarly problematic -- I am forced into viewing as an object something that I do not want to view as an object. This is certainly something I'd like to pursue further.

Finally, people asked what, concretely, they can do to fight against the problematic structures that are sadly all too entrenched in contemporary SFF media. My best recommendation there was to read the transgressive stuff and to recommend it widely. SFFReviews (linked above) provides one means of identifying stories to read; but I also promised the class a list of mainstream SFF journals that are publishing stories that push back against problems and are freely available online. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it will give people more than enough stories to start with:

• Apex
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies
• Daily Science Fiction
• Diabolical Plots
• A family of podcasts: Escape Pod (science fiction)/Podcastle (fantasy)/Pseudopod (horror)
• Strange Horizons
• Uncanny

All in all, an excellent experience, and no one seemed to mind too much that -- because I was skyping in from my bedroom -- I got photobombed by two different cat butts and a 7yo.

New publication announcement!

My paper "Names Shakespeare Didn't Invent: Imogen, Olivia, and Viola Revisited" is now available online from Names.

This paper has been in the pipeline for...at least two years, possibly three, long enough that I can't really remember, but I'm really pleased that it's finally published online! Here's the abstract:

Just as Shakespeare’s plays left their indelible stamp on the English language, so too did his names influence the naming pool in England at the beginning of the 17th century and beyond, and certain popular modern names are often described as inventions of Shakespeare. In this article, we revisit three names which are often listed as coinages of Shakespeare’s and show that this received wisdom, though oft-repeated, is in fact incorrect. The three names are Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline; and Olivia and Viola, the heroines of Twelfth Night. All three of these names pre-date Shakespeare’s use. Further, we show in two of the three cases that it is plausible that Shakespeare was familiar with this earlier usage. We conclude by briefly discussing why these names are commonly mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare’s imagination, and the weaker, but not mistaken, claims which may underlie these attributions.

If you do not have access to the journal and are interested in a copy of the paper, please drop me a line.

Publication announcement: New short story available!

A week ago Friday, my short story "Being Human" was published in Flame Tree Publishing's Robots and Artificial Intelligence collection. This anthology of short stories combines classic stories by L. Frank Baum, Jerome K. Jerome, and Ambrose Bierce with twenty new stories, including my own! This was my first pro-rate story sale, and I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful venue!

I wanted to write a story that could be read at two levels. On the one hand, it's straightforwardly a classic "robot upgrades from inorganic body to organic body" story, and I hope that read that way it is a rewarding way to read it. Originally I'd intended to have quite a bit more happen after Laura leaves the clinic and meets Asiya and her mother, but when I reached the point of having to write those scenes, they felt forced and awkward and unnecessary. In the end, the story was quite short, but, hopefully, still complete.

But on a deeper level, the story has very little to do with robots at all. A few months prior to when I wrote the story (which was in October 2017), a friend on FB had a link to this What is your gender? quiz, with hilarious results. I took the quiz myself, and was decidedly pleased that my gender came out as "Fine. Seriously, it’s completely fine. Nothing wrong here at all. This is a totally acceptable and normal gender with which to find yourself." But a friend of mine's result was "Robot" which somehow struck a chord with me. "Robot" may not describe my gender, but it does describe how hard it sometimes feels to be a human and to interact with humans. It is so exhausting trying to keep track of where my body is placed, and what I do with my hands and feet, and to pay attention to what people are saying, and what I should say, and how I can time my trips so that I arrive not too soon and not too late, and everything. All of that, I put into Laura. Every single thing she tells herself as she walks down the street she's never walked down before (but which is in fact modeled after Old Elvet, in Durham, England, and the building that she enters is strongly reminiscent of the old shire hall that is across the street from my office) is something that I tell myself as I try to navigate the world. So it is my hope that someone will read the story, and see themself in Laura, in the same way that I put myself into her.

And all the rest of you people, who don't do these calculations, who don't have the running commentary in your heads, have you ever thought that maybe you're the weird ones

---

• Publisher Q&A with the authors, part 1
• Publisher Q&A with the authors, part 2 (to come)

Publication announcement: New short story available!

Today my flash fic story "The Bargain" was published in Impact: Queer Sci Fi's Fifth Annual Flash Fiction Anthology, edited by J. Scott Coatsworth!

I'd had the idea for this story for awhile -- the kernel was the phrase/feeling of "people looking right through you", that feeling where it's not that people ignore you, but that you simply don't impinge upon their lives at all. What if it's because you're already dead? -- but never had quite the right context to develop it in. When I saw the flash fic contest, and the theme "impact", I figured I'd give it a go. I generally find flash fic very difficult, and my first drafts of this story definitely showed this. There were, strangely enough, too many words.

Finally, a day or two before the deadline, I radically rewrote it, with a very different narrative voice, and it worked much better -- well enough that it got accepted. I'm looking forward very much to reading the rest of the stories in the anthology, to see how others handled the same topic in the same constraints. (And G is looking forward to me reading them aloud to her.)

Publication announcement: New short story available!

Last night I got the exciting news that the Wavelengths anthology edited by Jessica Augustsson and containing my long short story (almost a novelette!) "The Platform Between Heaven and Earth" has been published! Here are purchase links: paperback, US; kindle, US; paperback, UK; kindle, UK.

I thought I'd devote a post to talking about what went in to writing this story. I wrote it during Camp NaNoWriMo April 2017, with an original goal of 15k, reduced to 11k about 3 weeks in, and the story ended up being ~10975 words. The inspiration came from an off-hand comment a friend made, when we were visiting the first weekend of the month, about how "language was made for us to miscommunicate with each other". Well, what is that if not inspiration for a tower of Babel story? It made me think, what must it have been like, to have been present at the shift from everyone being able to speak to each other, to suddenly having a communicative rift. What would it be like to no longer be able to speak with those who spoke with just the night before?

Then began the research. The single most important thing for me was to get the names of the characters right, so my research started with looking up info on feminine names in the Old Babylon period. The first thing I found was Marten Stol, "Old Babylonian Personal Names", Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici sul Vicino Oriente antico 8 (1991), which had an amazingly detailed collection of information, including a number of examples of women's names. One of the footnotes in that article led me, inadvertently to W. F. Leemans, Foreign trade in the Old Babylonian period as revealed by texts from southern Mesopotamia, which proved to be one of the most fascinating non-fiction books I've read in a long time -- and one of the few that I've read cover to cover without having been contracted to write a review of it! It was full of vocabulary and anecdotes and letters and information about temple practices; pretty much all of the little details in the story come from that book, such as the use of silver, carnelians, and "fish-eyes" (not known what these are; perhaps pearls?) as temple tithes; burasu, a type of incense made from juniper; and most satisfying of all was that from the information in Stol's article -- specifically: "Similarly, in a cloistered community of priestesses, Amat-Beltani considered the priestess Beltani as her 'matriarch'." (p. 203) -- I had hypothesized the name Amat-Ninkarrek, for someone dedicated to the goddess Ninkarrek, and then I found an example of that name in Leemans' book. I was wicked smug about that. All of the other names found in the story are actual documented names, and Selebum does indeed mean 'fox'.

The gods and goddesses mentioned are all ones especially venerated at the towns/cities they were connected with, and for this I found Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses a very helpful starting point for my research.

Significant research was done regarding the history of the Babel myth itself, the surrounding geography, and the relative chronologies and timelines. For this, Wikipedia was invaluable, particularly with locating the various cities and estimating distances between them, and providing older forms of their names, and giving me basic information about the construction and decoration of ziggurats. As far as I was able to determine, current scholarship identifies the zuggurat Etemenanki, dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon, was either the inspiration for the tower of Babel story, or the tower itself. The title of the story comes from the translation of the name, "the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth", also translated house of the platform between heaven and earth.

One of the things I learned while researching the history of the myth is that the idea that the confusion of languages was God's punishment for our hubris was quite a late interpretation, and that in a pre-Christian context or rather a pre-Greek context, 'hubris' was not really a concept that made sense to speak of in this context. (For more info on the former, see Sabrina Inowlocki, "Josephus' Rewriting of the Babel Narrative (Gen. 11:1-9)", Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2006), pp. 169-191). This meant I had to find another reason for why these events would occur that couldn't be predicated on a vengeful, punishing God. I'm still rather pleased with how I managed to do this in the end.

The game that Belti and her friends play in the evenings is a variation of the Royal Game of Ur.

This was an immensely satisfying story to write, and I learned so much from the research -- this post covers only a few of the sources I read, or the links that I've saved in my notes.

What I'm going to do on my summer vacation

It's June. My last grades were handed in on Friday. I had a brilliant weekend off followed by a one-day workshop in Antwerp. I'm now back home, dealing with a bit of admin, and after that...basically there is nothing stopping me from plunging in to my summer writing plans.

But one thing I've learned is that it always takes a day or two to transition; I ca'nt just go full-out marking for a month and then jump straight into writing; projects need some time to meld and rest and simmer, while I figure out which one is the right one to do next. Part of that process involves figuring out just what the projects I want to complete are, so here's me, making a list [note, this is just of academic projects I want to do over summer]:

• "Silencing Voices: Women, Self-censorship, and Logic in the Middle Ages": I presented a draft of this in Minenapolis a at the end of April, and a full version needs to be done by the end of January 2019. To get this from draft to final stage, I'm going to need to read a whole bunch more primary sources than I have done.
• "Possible Impossibilities"/"Possible Impossibilities in Medieval Disputations": This paper has been sitting at ~75% done since I presented it in Konstanz in, um, 2012. I don't know why I haven't been able to finish it, but there have been so many people I've promised it to when it's done, that I'd really like to get that wrapped up and off my plate.
• A chapter on an early 20th C female logician for a book on women in philosophy by women in philosophy for women who aren't yet in philosophy that an ex-student of mine is editing. I need to figure out whom I want to write about!
• I'd like to spend more time figuring out What problem Ladd was trying to solve.
• What, exactly does Grosseteste say about logic and the study of logic in De artibus?
• Revise #TheNovel. [edited to add]
• Paper for symposium in Singapore. [edited to add]
• 5-7 pages responding to a paper on contradictory Christology. [edited to add]

I also hope to lay down some of the groundwork for the two projects (one on fandom and philosophy, the other on spatial and temporal logics for building chronologies and maps for stories) that will be my focus during next academic year when I have two terms of research leave. But in the meantime, those five projects should keep me busy over the next four months, especially in tandem with fiction writing and also hopefully referee reports coming back on papers currently in submission. I also want to do some very basic feasibility research related to my grand plan for world domination.

May writing wrap-up

So...May was an odd month! I barely cracked 20k, with an average of just over 700 words a day, and for the first time since September I failed my goal of 400 words a day for 5 out of every 7 days; one long weekend involving a conference in Ireland and a medieval re-enactment event meant I just didn't get anything written. That's the first three-day stretch I haven't written in 6 months, which is something to be proud of!

From the rest of the bar graph, it's pretty clear what I was doing: May is marking month! There were reports on MA theses, answer keys for two final exams, letters of recommendation, and more that I can't even remember -- it all tends to blur together and once it's over I don't really want to think about it any more!

Ordinarily, I think I would've been disappointed at how little "real work" (aka nonfiction) I wrote that month, but when I put this month in context with others, I see that it's okay for me to have a "down" month, especially since it was legitimately filled with exam-related stuff instead, and starting this month I've got four months that should have almost no admin whatsoever. (Almost. So far this month, pretty much all I've done is admin...) Also, at least some of what went into homework answer keys will end up eventually in my textbook, so that's some consolation -- and that's also why I so assiduously count all my words. Just because it's "merely" admin doesn't mean that it doesn't positively contribute to my research profile.

What I am pleased with is how much fiction I managed to write -- it's a piddly amount in comparison to other months, but there were a couple of things I wanted to work on, and I managed to do so. I'm looking forward to summer being a time when I can finish up a few things I've half started.

Speculations, or, a day in the life of inside my head

(Dear friends, I need your help reminding me that I don't actually want to start a publishing house. I don't want to deal with finances. I don't want to deal with taxes. I don't want to deal with marketing. I don't want to deal with advertising. I don't want to deal with website hosting. Really. So tell me why/that the below is a bad idea, to help me remember this.)

Normally when I write on this blog, I try to frame things in a relatively linear narrative, even if I don't have an argument I'm trying to make. But this isn't really how the inside of my head looks. This post, you're going to get a only-very-lightly-editing transcript of things I've been thinking about the last few days.

• Hunh, it's been like two months since I submitted that Plato paper to the emotions journal. I wonder when I'll hear back from them. Eh, probably not until the end of summer.
• Gosh. If that had been one of my fiction submissions, I'd be checking the Grinder daily and calculating what it means when it's been 1, 4, 7, 20 days without rejection, or when someone else's story submitted after mine has already been rejected and mine hasn't.
• I really wish there was such a thing as the Grinder for academic journals.
• It's really strange how the norms differ between SFF mags and academic journals. With few exceptions, the response times for the former are so much quicker.
• That's because there's no peer review.
• But there are slush piles and slush readers.
• But that isn't the same. Remember? You point to this as something you like about fiction, that it's judged on a subjective basis, that a rejection doesn't mean "your story sucks" but "it's not to our taste/doesn't fit our next issue/didn't grab us/wasn't right for us". And it's important we have peer review.
• Wait, why is it? What would happen if we published papers because we thought they were interesting/had something useful to say/were enjoyable to read?
• We'd be inundated with CRAP.
• But I'm sure SFF journals are inundated with crap too.
• Yes, but somehow they manage to extract non-crap and publish good stories. With a short turnaround time. AND they pay.
• Oooh, that's right. There's another reason why things differ: They pay.
• The thing about paying markets, is that they probably get even more crap than non-paying ones, because of the potential reward of submitting.
• But somehow or other, the possibility of payment also attracts the high quality submissions, and SFF journals manage to weed out the crap and publish the "good stuff" (in the sense that what they publish is what people want to read and come back to read more of).
• "Because they pay money for what they publish, they’re likely to publish better quality stuff" seems to get the causal order entirely wrong.
• Yes, but it 'hurts' more to pay to publish something bad, so there's an onus to only publish good things.
• Still. There does seem to be some connection between venues that pay and venues that publish high quality work.
• Imagine what it would be like if academic journals paid people to publish their work.
• Pro rate fiction markets pay $.06/word. For your typical 12,000 word journal article, that’s $720.
• Gosh. That’s a lot. I wonder how SFF venues manage to fund that.
• [pause to enumerate all the options I've seen/can think of:
  1. Subscription fees.
  2. Paid advertisements.
  3. Patreons.
  Ad (1): But what about the SFF journals that publish "open-access"? Ad (2): Hah, what kind of advertisements can you imagine an academic journal attracting?! Ad (3): Hmm, there's a thought. Would people seriously commit to supporting an open-access, paying-to-author philosophy journal?]
• Suppose they would. Well, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't until it was well-established.
• Well, I am in a financial position where I could probably fund $.01/word out of my own pocket, for a select number of articles/issue, maybe at 2 issues/year. At least to get things going.
• Gosh, if I were to found such an open-access, paying-to-author philosophy journal, what would I want to publish?
• Stuff I find interesting.
• That's ad hoc. You can't market that.
• Hmmm, what draws together everything I like to read and write? If it were fiction, that would be easy: It's broadly 'speculative'.
• What would count as 'speculative' philosophy?
• Well...philosophy that asks or answers a 'What if?' 'What if meaning were compositional?' ' 'What if we looked at medieval logical treatises to find out what kind of temporal operators they use?' 'What if we could axiomatise common knowledge?' 'What if we try to take seriously the practice of producing and consuming fandom and analyse it from a philosophical point of view?'
• Hmm. You might be on to something.
• I totally am. 'Cause you know what we could do? We could call it Speculations , and make everyone who submitted a paper also include the 'What if?' question they are trying to ask/answer as part of their abstract?
• That would be one way of tying everything together to make it look like you had a coherent project.
• And you know what would be even better? We wouldn't have to restrict ourselves to publishing nonfiction! We could indulge that other daydream we keep returning to, of making a venue for the publication of 'philosophical' fiction. We could publish BOTH.
• And make the authors of the fiction pieces also tell us the 'What if' their story addresses.
• See?! Isn't this a brilliant idea?! We can run both nonfic and fic through a 'slush pile' which will probably result in a lot of desk rejections with brief comments ('didn’t grab me', 'too much stereotyping', 'don't feel qualified to judge the results'), but since we're paying, we wouldn't publish anything without vetting it properly, e.g., double check the results ourselves, or find a willing referee to look over the paper, but only in a short turn around time, focusing on the question 'would you stake money on the results of this paper?' or 'would you stake someone else's money on the results of this paper?' Certainly if we're paying out of pocket, we'd want to have some reason to think the papers were good. Of course that might make the journal rather skewed towards my own interests...but this isn't really a problem with spec fic venues, so why should that be a problem with nonfic? And if we we could always eventually bring in slush readers who could at least read things from outside our area of specialisation and say 'this could be decent, look into it further' or 'definitely chuck this'. And if we published fiction in addition to nonfiction, we'd be eligible for a listing on the Grinder.
• Well, that seals it.

So, peeps, tell me (why) this is a bad idea!