Let's stick together

The challenges of being an ethical artist in 2025

“I might have found my tribe.” EasterCon keynote, 2008

Read the news and it’s easy to think that publishing fiction is a waste of time; an indulgence in a world beset by so much horror. Is being a writer a luxury we can’t afford? WELL.

A week ago I drove my 12 year old to Birmingham to attend TFNation, Europe’s largest convention based entirely on The Transformers. When I say ‘I drove my 12 year old’, what I really mean is: I convinced him to come with me (it didn’t take much).

To pretend that this wasn’t as big a deal for me as it was for him would be disingenuous. I was born in 1980, putting me at the absolute perfect age to be sucked into Hasbro’s TV show / toy / comic extravaganza for young boys. Robots that transformed into vehicles! I was three years old when they first appeared in toy shops. I was five when Transformers: The Movie hit cinemas in 1986. I was 10 when the comic finally wrapped up in 1991.

Simon Furman and Transformers UK

Along with creating a permanent interest in cool robots, my childhood obsession was formative in other ways. Simon Furman’s work on the 1980s comic in particular introduced my brain to long form serialisation, and the idea of a story told over many years. Bear in mind a lot of books I was reading at the time would have been fairly simple one-and-done adventures, or standalone series like The Hardy Boys. I very clearly remember being fascinated by Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl, specifically because it was a sequel and that entire concept fascinated my tiny brain.

The Transformers comic was something else. Furman (and the other writers, but mostly Furman) wove a complex story involving time travel, multiple dimensions and an insanely huge cast of characters across many years, building to an immense finale. The comic had violence, complex ethical conundrums, time paradoxes to make a child’s head explode, and explored the concept of death in a very real way. As has been noted many times, if the comic had been about humans rather than robots, it would have been banned by the Daily Mail.

I drifted away from Transformers in my teens, only to return in the early 2000s when I stumbled upon a bootleg CD filled with scans of the 1980s comic. I picked up occasional collected issues from Titan Books, but most of the old comic was out of print. Earlier this year I pledged to Skybound’s huge Kickstarter compendium¹, which will be the first time I’ve had a legal, legitimate collection of the whole thing. I am very excited.

I can draw a line from Transformers in the 1980s to my own storytelling in 2025. As anyone who is reading Tales from the Triverse can attest, I have a penchant for long, episodic stories that combine into something greater than the individual parts. That structure comes mainly from Furman’s work, which seeped into my brain as a pre-teen and never went away.²

Finding your tribe

So, off we went to TFNation. The weekend reminded me of something the keynote speaker said at EasterCon back in 2008. To quote:

“My first Eastercon was…in 1984 -- a huge and wonderful affair. I was 23, wide-eyed and delighted by the convention. Bumptious, gawky, ransacking the dealer's room… occasionally mistaken for Clive Barker (why?) and starting to suspect that I might have found my tribe. And now, 24 years later, I'm some strange old-timery creature…[and] there seem to be an awful lot of people here the age I was at my first Eastercon or younger, an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a lot of people who are having their first convention, and who may even now be suspecting that they might have found their tribe.”

I sat in that audience and thought yes, that’s how it feels. Back in 2008 I wasn’t yet writing consistently, and it would be a good few years before I completed my first serial, A Day of Faces. Being in the audience at EasterCon, all I could think (rather hubristically) was that I really wanted to be up on the panel itself. That was the spark that got me writing properly, and led to where I am today. I wanted to be an author.

In the years since 2008 I found my tribe, wrote some books, and I’ve even been on some panels at festivals. In the newsletter scene I’ve found a supportive and insightful writing community. In Substack, I’ve found a set of tools that have helped me publish something every week and build a readership of over 9,000 people around the world.

There’s always a catch, though. Who was the keynote speaker at EasterCon 2008, who delivered that inspirational speech?

Neil Gaiman.

Bad actors and bad tech

When Gaiman’s reputation imploded at the start of the year, I thought back to EasterCon, not to mention all of his books and TV shows and movies, and tried to reconcile the two realities. It’s the same struggle for Harry Potter fans. The age-old question of whether we can separate the author from the work, when the author turns out to be deeply problematic.

It often feels like all our heroes turn to villains, if we wait long enough.

That’s the risk of ‘finding your tribe’, of associating with a group. Humans are complex and messy and can surprise in ways good and bad; gather enough of them in one place and it’s impossible to check each individual for total moral alignment with your own views. Take any dozen people and at least a couple will be arseholes.

Which brings me to the other thing³ that’s been on my mind of late (again). The growing calls for writers to leave Substack. I nearly left in late-2023 with the original ‘Nazi controversy’ from The Atlantic, but ultimately decided to stay.⁴ The discourse returned in the last month following a bizarre incident⁵ when Substack sent a push notification to some users promoting a Nazi account⁶, prompting A Million Robots, one of my favourite recent newsletters — there’s the clever thematic connection! — to jump over to using Beehiiv,

It’s the same problem that we all face when using tech. The internet and digital tools have brought incredible creative opportunities and new ways to reach audiences and interact with each other. But so often there’s a gaping lack of leadership and governance, turning every interaction with tech into an ethical minefield. Over and over again, an exciting new tool appears, and is then undermined by its own maker, or by the cultish behaviour of its primary evangelists. Whether it’s Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Tesla, there are compromises at every turn. We can’t drive a car or use a phone without being compromised.

There’s no way to keep our hands clean. Sometimes it seems that the only ethical way forward is to disconnect entirely: get rid of the phone, turn off the computer and go live in a cave in the woods.

Fine, but I quite like writing, and having people read my writing, and meeting writers and readers. I want to be part of the world, despite all its flaws.

Searching for purity

There’s a very silly episode of 1990s TV scifi show Babylon 5 in which an alien killing machine goes on a rampage, destroying anything it deems to not be ‘pure’. The twist being that ideological purity is a race to the bottom, with the alien society who created the machine now extinct: after taking out the obvious enemies, it turned on its creators, none of whom could ever pass the test of ‘purity’.

Unsubtle though it may be, that episode sometimes feels like a prescient vision of what it’s like to have even vaguely left-leaning politics and be online in the 2020s. If we keep abandoning spaces which contain problematic people, in a never-ending exodus to some sort of moral perfectionist nirvana, all we’re actually doing is continually ceding ground to the worst in society. Reasonable and diverse voices are diminished, dispersed and scattered, while those we object to are solidified and made stronger. It’s a form of self-sabotage.

Maybe this is all just endgame capitalism. There’s no way to exist in the world without also being complicit in its destruction. I don’t like to accept that kind of fatalism, though.

A subtle resistance

There’s a pervasive, existential angst to being an artist in 2025. All I really want to do is write some good stories and get them out into the world; but to do so often requires interacting with ethically compromised systems and platforms. Perhaps this has always been the case, with artists having to find a way to tread the path between authenticity and ‘selling out’, and the modern tech era is simply the latest incarnation.

To go back to what Neil Gaiman said about the joys and importance of finding your tribe: the sentiment isn’t undone by his own behaviour. We can’t allow the unsavoury elements of society to dictate everything about how we think and live. The presence of unpleasant people must not drive us from every venue, every platform until we’ve silenced ourselves and there are no voices left to object.

Let’s return to the beginning. Back to TFNation in Birmingham. The atmosphere at conventions I’ve been to is usually delightful, and TFNation was especially so: welcoming, friendly, inclusive, relaxed. A whole bunch of people of all ages and genders, a broad LGBTQ+ cohort, excellent provision for anyone with limited mobility and other access needs: kids and adults and parents and artists and writers, amateurs and professionals, all gathered together to celebrate a common interest.

It felt like a model of how things used to be, and could be again. The organisers made it look easy (as always, for something to look effortless requires an immense amount of effort). TFNation wasn’t a success because of careful gatekeeping, but quite the opposite: it threw the doors open and made sure everyone was welcome. In doing so, it was a fundamental rejection of the worst tendencies of imported internet discourse. It was nostalgic and old fashioned while also being progressive and forward-thinking. It was a demonstration of what humans are like when you get them off social media, off the internet, and put them all in a big room together.

There was no gatekeeping. No ‘us’ and ‘them’. There was none of the absurd polarisation that has infected all crevices of politics and culture in the 21st century. In 2025, the casual diversity and inclusivity and simple joy on display at TFNation became an act of defiance, a subtle resistance.

Which brings me back to the question at the very start. Why be a writer of fiction in a world that has so many real problems? I think TFNation reminded me. It renewed my belief in the power of fiction to unify, and illuminate, and point the way. In times of crisis, fiction becomes more important, not less.

And all of that from a cobbled-together 1980s toyline targeted entirely at young boys.

Plus they had lots of Aerialbots and a really, really massive Metroplex that was almost as tall as my son.

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Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading. There was no great productivity tip or writing insight in today’s post, no quick growth hack. No snappy take-away. It’s just my unfiltered brain, so well done for getting to the end! Writing this newsletter is a big part of how I process the world, the good and the bad. Perhaps collectively sharing some of these anxieties is good for us?

Some other reading, then:

Lincoln Michel

is always worth a read, and this recent piece is an affirming thing:

Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop

Something I stumbled upon at work: This speech from 2016 about the problem of applying software and systems design to all aspects of life is startlingly prescient. It’s a shame nobody listened to it, and it’s even more pertinent nearly a decade later.

“People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.”

In far better and more exciting news,

Winston Malone

has explained how he ended up founding a bookstore:

From Serials to Substack to Storefront

Mike Sowden

of Everything is Amazing has just released a new course on non-fiction storytelling. To celebrate, he interviewed himself, because of course he did:

*TODAY*: A New Thing, According to Me

I finished playing 1000xResist yesterday. I’ll probably write about it over on

Infinite Backlog

.

Right, that’s it for today. Thanks for reading!

1. $4.6million on an original goal of $40k isn’t bad.

2. Many of my books include the line “[person] enters the fray.” Which is a direct reference to the ‘Time Wars’ story of the OG UK Transformers comic.

3. Today’s newsletter is a series of unlikely segues, for which I can only apologise.

4. I went into more detail on why I stayed in this recent Note:

5. The article is, inevitably, paywalled, but you get the gist.

6. Also for the record, if a writer does decide to use a different set of tools, that’s totally their call. I thought a lot of the performative departures in 2023/early-2024 were extremely cynical, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Alec’s work on A Million Robots. Which I highly recommend if you’re into stompy robots.