Yesterday was Father’s Day and it was a good one for me and the whole family, I think. It started early. The Little Man had his last t-ball session at 9am, and his grandparents came to watch him play. After that, we headed over to the splash park and the kids ran ragged, getting themselves soaked in the process.

We decided to have an early dinner. I grilled, cooking a couple of rib-eye steaks, some salmon, baked beans, and corn on the cob. We had watermelon for desert, and after a walk, we also had special Carvel Ice Cream cake (with the crunchy stuff in the middle).

The Little Man did not nap yesterday. When we got home from our walk, he had fallen asleep on the couch next to his grandfather. I picked him up and put him to bed–and he ended up sleeping straight through the night.

I got some very nice Father’s Day cards from Kelly and the kids. And a new wallet, which is exactly what I had asked for since my old one was falling apart.

So busy was the day yesterday that I had almost no time to read. But I still managed to sneak in about 500 words of writing before going to bed last night, and my streak now stands at 110 consecutive days.

Today a racist bully kicked up a storm on Twitter and other forums. This is not new for this particular individual¹ but today’s attack against SF/F writer N. K. Jemisin and a recent Guest of Honor speech that she gave was particularly brutal. Read Jemisin’s speech. It is moving.

I try to stay out the politics of the genre. Indeed, I recently wrote a post on how I prefer it that way. What it comes down to is that I just want to write stories. But today’s rant pushed me over the line. I decided that to stay silent was, at least for me, tantamount to accepting this behavior. And so I spoke out against it in various social media. I also sent a letter to the board members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America calling for this bully’s expulsion from the organization under the appropriate article and section of the SFWA’s bylaws.

Even doing that didn’t cool my jets completely. When I was a kid, science fiction opened my eyes to other worlds. It opened my eyes to science and astronomy. But it also opened my eyes to different cultures. Sometimes those cultures were cast as alien, but the message came through loud and clear. And what I found was a high degree of tolerance and acceptance in science fiction stories.

There is no denying that science fiction has had a rocky past when it comes to racism and sexism. John W. Campbell, one of the biggest editors in the genre, and the man who led science fiction through its “Golden Age” of the 1940s was a pretty racist guy when it came down to it. Some of Robert Heinlein’s stories (I’m thinking in particular of the Sixth Column) read today as pretty racist. One might argue that the story is a product of its time, but that doesn’t make it less racist. Women have had a hard time being treated as equals within the genre. They were (and sometimes still are) belittled. Too often they are defined by physical qualities instead of their talents as writers. It is a shame. There is no reason for this type of behavior.

I love science fiction too much to see it pulled apart by the kind of bullying I saw this morning, or by the kind of racist and sexist undercurrents that plague the genre. I remember reading Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, and seeing how casually same-sex relationships were treated in that story–and I remember thinking, yes, that is the way it should be. I remember reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and realizing that gender was not necessarily a fixed thing tied to anatomy–and thinking, yes, that makes sense. I remember reading stories like “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a Alice Sheldon) or novels like The Female Man by Joanna Russ and marveling not only at the writing but the possibilities.

It seemed to me that science fiction–through its stories–was the place where humanity struggled for some kind of enlightenment of acceptance. Only when that acceptance was achieved, once it didn’t matter what your gender was, or the color of your skin, or your sexual preference, once you were accepted for who you were and the skills and dreams you brought to the table, only then would we really be able to get to those stars we wrote of so often. It made sense to me as a twelve-year-old kid, and it still makes sense now.

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When I stepped outside this morning, I was struck at once with a smell that hung in the air. The sky was clear and bright, with a few low morning clouds drifting in the gathering light. The air felt like summer, not heavy and humid, but not the morning cool of spring either.

But it was the smell that struck me. All at once, I was a kid again, awaiting the bus that would take me to the YMCA summer day camp I attended when I lived in Warwick, Rhode Island. It wasn’t a passing reflection, it was a powerful three-dimensional vision, as if the smell in the air had somehow transported me whole back in time.

In later years, when I was no longer in summer camp, that smell in the air called to mind visits to my Grandparent’s house. Or hanging out in the mornings while my parents were at work, watching reruns of The Love Boat and Flipper until it was late enough in the morning when my friends would be awake and we could go out and play.

But that was later. This morning the air smelled just like those early summer mornings in New England. And for the briefest second, I was back there, and I remembered what it was like to be a kid, free from all of the accumulation of grown-up responsibilities.

When it was over, all of the usual stress that weighs on me was gone.

No wonder they say that smell is a powerful sense.