Somebody, sooner or later, must speak up. So sad that it was us – whoever we are – and now, and that our chosen topic was, among other things, the distinction between a petty anxiety and the horror that arises when you become aware that you are witnessing persecution…apparently.

Topic change! In olden times, a letter that anybody could read was called a postcard. On one side it had a picture of some landscape and, on the other, 3 or 4 bland and formulaic statements. “Wish you were here”, “Having a lovely time”, “It has pissed down for 8 solid days”, etc. Now that we’re modern, it takes 3 pages of bland and formulaic statements to paint a picture of an entirely fictional landscape. We’re calling that progress.

Topic change! Only by completely refusing to allow some people a voice can we make things more inclusive of everyone. That sounded better in my head. The important thing is that, at the moment, everyone has a voice, but things would clearly be fairer, apparently, if the anonymous people who wrote our letter decided who was allowed to speak and who wasn’t. To quote Ernest Hemingway, “Fuck literature!” Now that we think about it, that quote doesn’t entirely support any of the 47 points we were trying to make, but this is a letter about the book industry, so we need a couple of quotes in, don’t we? As William Shakespeare said, “Yes.”

There is no cancel culture, but there really should be. Once again, that sounded better before we wrote it down. The point is, if we don’t cancel people then the people we don’t cancel may use their un-cancelled status to cancel others, and the people they’ll be cancelling are a tiny minority. By cancelling the people we want to cancel, which is quite a lot, then we’ll be protecting the very small number of people from cancelling, which means that, on the whole, more people will not be cancelled. Hang on, we might have forgotten to carry the 3.

Topic change! When you think about it, the real damage is done by those who stay silent in all of this. Those people are tacitly supporting the people we don’t like, possibly because they think they don’t know enough about the subject to comment. Hopefully this open letter will show them that needn’t be a bar.

Topic change! Stereotypes, eh? Maybe when women think about allowing trans men into women’s spaces their silly girl brains picture a huge man invading their spaces. What they’ve done – bless their feeble minds – is mistake being trans for wearing some kind of costume. There’s not space here to discuss how a transwoman might look a lot like a regular man wearing some kind of costume, or might look like a regular man not wearing a costume, who says they’re trans anyway, or to discuss the hundreds of objective and fool-proof ways to tell these groups apart. No, indeed, women are silly and we’ve got another 3 pages of open letter to write. Onwards!

Topic change! The things people are saying now sound very much like hateful incidents from the past, if you change some of the words they’re using, and ignore the context, and make up your own facts. Dear god, all the injustices in the world, and the one we’ve decided to write an open letter about is the one that only stands up if you prop it against an actual civil rights issue and then blur the language, until they sound like they’re sort of about the same thing.

Anyway, the point is, some things that happened in the past are now seen as bad, and we’ve decided to use the spectre of history’s judgement as a stick to beat you with, because if the open letter isn’t the format to have a free-form, footnote free, reckon about the future course of humanity, and why it should turn out the way we want, then nothing is.

Topic change! As Blake said, “All right, Avon. You were right and I was wrong. You said persuasion wouldn’t work and it didn’t. So now we use force.” Again, not really our point, but it’s a great line.

Topic change! As creative people, the idea of gender being more than pink or blue has always been with us. Writers have created stories about people who weren’t men or women, male or female…some of them were robots. Because literature always describes absolute reality, and dictates how society should be organised, we can infer books should only exist if they support whatever we believe in, and are written, published and sold by people who also believe in whatever we tell them to, or are are at least prepared to make statements to that effect.

Topic change! Also, some cultures have more than two genders. We didn’t bother learning about them, so we’re just assuming that they’re great. Go them!

Topic change! The time to repeat history is past. Let’s not do any harm, or in any way consider that what we’re proposing could do harm! Just do what we want! Send!