Category Archives: Uncategorized

*This gentleman is the person who got me my rights to my backlist (all but Baen and two of the mysteries) back.  I’ll warn you he told me upfront he wasn’t “right” because he didn’t practice in NYC … but I had a feeling, and I liked his mind, which happens to be twisty, and I insisted.  He still says it wasn’t him, it was the good bond paper.  But I was there, I saw it.  It was him.*

Greetings all, thanks to Sarah’s generosity, I have the opportunity to write a short post here on her blog about … well, I guess I better figure out what the post is about before the end of it.
I’m Robin Roberts and I’ve been practicing law for about 17 years now, first in California and then here in Colorado. My wife and I have a law practice in Denver. Intellectual property law was my original interest in getting into the legal field from my software development career.
Sarah has written often in this space about how the publishing business has been in so much turbulent change in recent years. We noted just a couple of weeks ago Kristine Rusch and Dean Smith’s short-lived Ella Distributing venture – for getting Indie published works into bookstores – which looked like a great idea just months ago but was subsumed by changes in the existing distribution systems. The reality is that the legal field has been undergoing similar chaotic changes in recent decades. I’d like to write about the kind of legal services that I think writers need and how to get those services at a reasonable price. First I want to talk about the areas of law that affect writers – especially indie published writers – and then I want to talk about the need for legal services to navigate those areas.
I have done a bunch of local seminars at various venues where I speak on Copyright Basics for Writers. About an hour and half where I cram in the basics of copyright law – the scope of copyright, the term of copyright (I want to do a short post on why you see authors lodging the copyright of their works in corporations e.g. Tom Clancy, Kevin J. Anderson), work for hire, fair use doctrine and infringement. But for this post, I just want to talk about licensing, which is what a traditionally published author does with his/her work and an indie author basically doesn’t.
Once a work exists in a tangible form, i.e., you’ve pounded out your work on that keyboard and have it saved to that hard drive or USB stick – manuscripts are just so 19th Century – you of course have a choice in how to proceed to publication. If you try indie publishing, the main hurdle in form of legal gobbledygook for you is the terms and conditions of the publishing channels you use – Smashwords, Kindle Direct Publishing and Nook Press. Recent changes in Nook Press got some coverage as Holly Lisle and others dissected the terms of Nook Press’ agreement. That resulted in some changes to those terms, but the reality is that most of the core issues there come from the clauses in those agreements on pricing. That’s really where the important issues arise in those channels – how you are allowed to price your work among the competing channels, the resulting royalties and the amount of control on pricing you surrender. Holly Lisle, on her blog, recently reacted negatively to some changes Nook Press tried to adopt but in reality the indie author still retains far more control of their work in those channels than the traditionally published author on pricing and royalties.
The traditional publishing route presents a far more complex legal hurdle – that of the publishing contract. But first, I want to make a short digression about agents.
Recently, I had a conversation with an aspiring author who was being courted by some name agencies, and I tried to explain to that author why the agency model has been breaking down in traditional publishing but in truth Dean Wesley Smith does a better job of explaining that here. The bottom line is that the agency model is not doing a good job of representing the author’s interests while fighting hard to protect the agencies’ interests. And one of those areas of conflict shows up with the publishing contract. Since your agent is representing many authors to each publishing house, their own interest is dominated by their relationship to that publishing house – not to an individual author. So that conflict of interest can result in an agent not looking out for the author’s interests in the terms of a contract. As another aside, many states’ ethical rules for lawyers won’t permit lawyers to have a percentage stake in a contract that they are representing a client regarding. Think about your opinion of lawyers’ ethics and consider what it means that often attorney’s ethical rules are too strict to allow them to do what “agents” do …
So that is where I recommend that a writer with a publishing contract in hand get that contract reviewed by a good attorney with an intellectual property law background. (Perhaps later Sarah will let me write my rant about the difference between “intellectual property law” and “entertainment law” – but for now, be wary of “entertainment law” practitioners). You want an attorney with some experience in Copyright law issues over and above an understanding of contract law principles because Copyright law includes some provisions that supersede common contract law principles. You want an attorney who is going to make sure you understand the contract you are considering – even if you don’t want to be “bothered” – so that you can make a rational business decision.
There are several important areas for an author to scrutinize on a traditional publishing contract. First, the issue of what exactly you are licensing to the publisher. This sounds obvious but it is a very complex question in modern publishing contracts. The industry has a lot of terms, which it pretends are all “standard” terms, but are not always so, to describe the various ways that the copyright of a work is sliced up. Copyright law provides several “exclusive rights” in a work and the first is the eponymous “Exclusive right to make copies”. And the publishing business divides that up into a score of variations upon “hardcover”, “trade paperback”, and “mass market paperback” and divides up the geography by country. So one can license the mass market paperback rights to a work for the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand countries while the author retains the rights to all the rest. Many variations upon this exist and nothing is truly “standard”.
Also important, when reviewing a contract’s licensing clauses, is understanding what kind of derivative works rights you are transferring. In Copyright law, “derivative work” refers to things that are straight forward transformations of your work like translation to another language. But “derivative works” also refer to transformations to another media like audiobooks, video games, stage plays and screen plays. These rights are sometimes left to the author and sometimes they are transferred to the publisher who then owes the author some share of what the publisher receives. All is negotiable regardless of what an agent or a publisher tells you. Most of the time if an editor says that the contract terms are not negotiable it is more likely that they don’t understand their own contract in the first place.
The second issue of a traditional publishing contract review is how royalties are calculated. Intertwined with this issue is that of how the advance is credited to the author for those royalties. The issue of how publishers account for royalties and advances for multiple books – often in contradiction to their own contract terms – is fodder of a blog post of its own. The music business taught publishers a lot of dirty practices and poring through a publisher’s statement for an author’s titles can be an exercise equivalent to working for the NSA decrypting Russian transmissions. And in fact, there is an undercurrent in the business that publishers have been dishonest in reporting sales for some time. But the author should still clearly understand how royalties are being calculated, what terms like “reserves” mean and the exceptions for when an author will be paid little or no royalty on discounted or clearance books.
Third, an author really needs to understand how and when that author will get the rights returned to him, e.g., how to terminate the contract. Because sadly, too few people think about what happens when the publisher loses interest in a work, and yet the author thinks that there is still market value for it. Termination clauses in publishing contracts are very obtuse, and it is where the objective eye of the attorney is most useful. Because authors have a common practice of reading a contract for what happens when all goes well, and good attorneys read a contract for what happens when things go bad. You should understand how and when you are going to get the rights to the work back when you want to put your work out before your fans, and you want to exploit any market for sequels you think that the publisher is ignoring.
When I’m done reviewing a contract for a client, I either talk to the client about the contract and my concerns or I write a report to them in memo form, whichever they want. What I don’t do is simply say “You can’t sign this” or “You can sign this”. That’s not advice, that’s making their decision for them. A publishing contract is a business decision and the author has to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the contract in detail and make a rational business decision of their own.
The costs of a attorney to review a contract for you can seem daunting. Certainly, sometimes people focus on the hourly rates of attorneys without considering context. An agent is going to take his or her percentage of every dollar that the author’s work ever generates but an attorney is going to bill you for the time actually spent and no more. Because of their overhead, attorneys in such metropolitan areas as New York charge very high rates but there is a lot of competition for legal services in this country these days. Hourly rates in Denver for instance for good attorneys outside the white shoe firms range from $175 to $225 an hour. A review of a publishing contract plus the time spent by the attorney to explain it to you should not exceed more than an hour and a half to two hours billed time. Some attorneys will happily quote a flat fee for services if you are concerned with an indeterminate cost.
The reality is that the legal business is in a similar state of chaotic change regarding how legal services are priced, you have a lot of choices. I currently believe that the large, high overhead, “Biglaw” law firms are a thing of the past and are seeing their pricing models crumble. The future is for smaller, lower overhead and more nimble firms and individual practitioners. I’m pretty sure that you can find such attorneys in your community is you look around.
There are membership based legal services like “Pre Paid Legal” which offer various bundles of services for a monthly fee including supposedly “free” contract reviews. I’ve had some experience with such services and while I’ve seen a few people get good value from them, in general they are not good deals. You have no control over which attorney actually reviews a contract for you, no control over their actual experience and competence or understanding of the industry-specific issues presented and so very uneven quality of legal services. Such plans also purport to offer “discounted” rates for legal services beyond those in the scope of the “free” services, but in reality the attorneys that are on the referral panels for such plans would often discount their services to the same degree for any client that they valued.
Robin D. Roberts

http://www.robertsandroberts.net

email: robin@robertsandroberts.net

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  For previous chapters, look here.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. Also, can I light the bat signal for someone to send me the compilation up till now?  I know, I know, but I have it on a flash drive and can’t find the right one. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case this week, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

All The Fish In The Sea

Wolfe Merrit, Overseer to the Earl Of Savage’s properties and manufactories:

There are several things you should never, ever, do when wild magic is running rampant in your world, corrupting all magic workings you could perform.  Particularly there are things you should not do  in a room from which two young ladies disappeared by magical means and almost certainly hadn’t gone where they meant to go.

The first one of them, of course, would be trying to reach through the hair to the creature to whom it belonged and pull her back.

Yes, surely, of course, I know I absolutely should not do that.  I passed primary instruction.

What I did not pass was – apparently — the basic test for human common sense.  My mother had said so, when I showed home with a wife who was an elf-lady I’d found naked in the forest.  I’d protested then, and she’d not said it again.  Probably because she liked Jimmy too much to hurt him.

But some would argue my besetting sin was having less brain than the chickens who at least knew how to get out of the wet and go perch.

Faced with that pile of hair, the curly, dark one, the golden one, my hand on it, I thought of Lady Helen.

I’d never spoken to her, but only seen her to look at.  She reminded me of my wife, and that’s the truth, even if I rather think the Earl’s family would bring an action at law against me if I ever so much as hinted it outside my own head.

It’s not that she looked like the fey.  Most of them are pale and wan, very tall, very thin.  My wife was, and even Jimmy has a bit of that look, like he is not real enough for the world.  ‘course the king of elves, who came to the princess’s wedding to Darkwater – only some people say as they’d married before, but that’s just gossip – had dark curls, as much as you could see of it, under that head dress of golden leaves, but I figured that came from being half brother to the Darkwaters who are all dark and sharp looking like Greek merchants.

But for all she was neither pale nor excessively tall nor so thin that she looked unnatural, the Lady Helen had something…  Something like she wasn’t quite tamed.  Like you’ll come along a forest, on a summer evening, and see a deer, and they’re quite tame around our place because the Savages don’t hunt, nor do they like us to.  You’ll see the deer there, browsing on leaves, and it doesn’t quite run, but the moment you come around the edge of the leaves, and it catches sight of you, it will get that look in its eyes, like in its mind it’s already galloping away.

Lady Helen gave me the same impression, the same look like at any moment she would turn and kick off her shoes and run, and run into another world, another dimension, the disordered world of the fey where she could be free and finally be herself.  Her brother had a touch of it but not as strong, or perhaps I didn’t react as much to it, because he was a man and not a comely female.

Elves will have their glamour.

I can’t put it higher than that, but what I can tell you is that every time I’d seen the lady arrayed in the proper muslins and lace of a debutant, I’d wanted to take her under my arm, toss her across my saddle and run off with her into a land of adventure.

Only of course I didn’t have a saddle, or a horse of my own, and what could I offer an earl’s sister, I who had nothing and came from farmers, and who probably was still legally married to my vanished wife.  Insofar as marriage to elves was legal, which was a matter that the courts had been debating for years, in cases more prominent than mine.

So I’d done nothing, and I’d said nothing.  I looked around the room with all its books.  She couldn’t escape her station no more than I could escape mine, and she didn’t fit it no better.  And she’d tried to get away via a fantastic plan.  And…  Something had gone horribly wrong.

Yes, as soon as the idea that I could free her, I could bring her back to this world by the sympathetic magic in her hair, came to me, I thought that it was a bad idea.  The transport spell had gone wrong, after all.  All magic was going wrong.  Spinning machines were flying off their sockets and sending parts flying all over the shop, destroying other machines and almost beheading two lint boys which had only escaped because I managed to send a protection spell to them in time.

But my protection spell had worked.  Perhaps there was something in my contact with fey magic had given me protection.

Before I could quite call myself to sense, I had laid my hand square on the pile of hair, and I started the words of the call-back spell, “Quaero, feri—”

The maid screamed.  There was a flash of light, a smell of scorch, a sense, as though the floorboards heaved and moved.

I fell from a great height, but couldn’t see where I was, until I landed.  I’d prepared for it, and landed on my feet, my legs held loose, to take the impact.  But I wasn’t ready for cold water up to my ankles, and I almost fell.  I’d just retrieved my balance, when someone fell on me and someone beside me.  In the dim greenish light, I couldn’t see who for a moment, then I realized it was the Lady Helen in front of me, outlandishly attired in breeches and coat, her short hair on end, a splash of greenish something across her face.

She fell on me, and we both fell back into the water, or whatever it was.  It smelled like water that had been used and passed through a living thing.  Several times.  She was so warm, and, despite the reek surrounding us, she smelled so good that I hesitated a moment before pulling her up to her feet and standing myself.

I’d never seen such a beautiful woman, not even my wife in the forest, in all her elven splendor.

But I had no time for daydreaming, as something came from somewhere ahead of us.  It’s hard to describe.  There was this sound like a big creature splashing in deep water, and then there was … It looked like a shark made entirely out of iron, and it lunged at us.

I said “Hell,” and grabbed Lady Helen and her companion who I assumed was the maid, around the waist, and I pulled them both backward with me, reasoning that if the place forward was deeper water, this would be shallow.

I was right, as we landed in a soft, sort of squishy place, and the creature who hand lunged at us landed where we had been, and glared at us with glowing, vicious yellow eyes, before somehow sliding itself back into the water.

The maid was crying, softly by our side, and the Lady Helen was heaving with deep breaths atop of me, and I thought she was going to cry, and I said, “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  I tried to use the bringing spell to bring you back to your room.”

She took one large, long sigh, and she pounded her fists on my chest.  It didn’t hurt.  It was much like when my little sister used  to try to punch me when she was little.  But it was startling.  As were her words.  “You stupid man,” she said.  “You stupid man.  I tried to transport us home and your stupid spell had bring us here to this stinky place where you were.  Why did you think I wanted to come here?”

“I didn’t.  I was in your room.  I tried to bring you there.”

She disentangled herself from my arms.  She glared at me.  “You did not.  You can’t have.  If you did why am I here?”

“The magic has gone rotten,” I said, pulling myself to my feet and standing.  “the magic is doing odd things.  That’s why your transport spell went wrong.  It’s happening all over the world.”

I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t.  Her lips did funny things but when she said, “Oh!” it was in a tone of great anger.  “I cannot believe my cursed luck.  Just when I had everything ready to esca—” She stopped as though it occurred to her she was about to give away her grand plan, as though anyone with more sense than a kitten wouldn’t already have figured it out.  She really needed a minder.  She should be kept inside and warm.  The image of my mother’s kitchen fire flashed in my mind, and of Lady Helen all cozy in the big rocking chair, wrapped in mamma’s best quilt.  The idea was so incongruous I almost laughed.  Instead I said, “It’s worse than that.  If it goes on, it will unravel the magic of the whole world, and we all die.”

She glared at me.  Then she said, “Even Jonathan?  My brother?”

I nodded.  It seemed obvious that if everyone died the Lord Savage would too.  But people in shock think in strange ways.

Her mouth compressed tight.  “Well, we mustn’t let it happen then.  He has never had any happiness you know, and it wouldn’t be right.”

I was sure there were a lot of other people who’d never had any happiness, and that she herself must not have much, and that if the Lord Savage hadn’t had happiness, he must have had something that passed for it, if rumors of his drinking and routing were true.  But I started to suspect this unhappy girl-woman thought she was going to protect her big brother.

And meanwhile, I was looking around, trying to size up our predicament, and I wasn’t liking it at all.  It was far, far worse than I thought or else I was seeing things.

“Who are you anyway?” she asked.  “And where are you.”

“I’m Wolfe Merritt, m’lady, the supervisor of manufactories and general factotum to your family.  I’ve seen you once or twice, but I don’t think as we ever had occasion to get acquainted.  And as to where we are.  I think we’re inside something.”

“We’re obviously inside something.  The open air doesn’t smell this foul.  Well, except near the privies.  But what?”  Her little maid had picked herself up and was looking at me with huge eyes behind the lady’s shoulder.  I hated to say what I was going to say both to the lady false courage and to the maid’s obvious fear.  But they had to know.

“No,” I said.  I pulled the lady over, and pointed upward, to where the low roof looked like a pink membrane, rising and falling like something… breathing.  “I think we are inside something living.  A creature.”

Yesterday I got caught up in a Facebook argument about public libraries and care for the homeless.

Well, I sort of got caught up – sort of, as usual I missed most of it, because a) I was hanging out here with you reprobates b) the time normally devoted to writing was devoted to sleeping.  The entire family had a very odd upper respiratory thing and the symptoms ranged from the mildest – my husband – which just induced a lot of sleep to the heaviest – mine – which on top of feeling like I was carrying a three ton weight around, gave me the absolute worst headache I’ve ever had.  As a champion headache let me assure you this one was a doozy.  So I sort of got zombified for most of the day (today I seem to be “up” to my husband’s level yesterday of feeling like I’d like to sleep rather a lot.  Husband is bright eyed and bushytailed and at work, so I’m hoping that will be me tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.) and missed most of the argument, which was fine, since William T. Quick was making the points I would otherwise have made.  He’s at the more libertarian end of the spectrum (by which I mean more Libertarian) from me and you know libertarians, no two of us ever agree on anything, but on this basic thing we were like two bodies with but one soul.

This discussion got me thinking, and btw, you are warned this might be the world’s longest blog post because I’m zombified and therefore can’t write short to save my life.

It started with a fan linking a bunch of us to a site about libraries.  What he said was sort of true of me, though not really.

I have a very odd relationship with libraries.  First, to begin with, unlike most of you, I didn’t fall in love with a public library in childhood.  I didn’t, because there were none.  Portugal has a system of public libraries, and in fact, if you look on line, there is a picture of a very ornate library in Portugal.  When that was making the rounds of the net, all my friends linked me with “wow, you must know that place inside out.”  Well… um… the place was in fact in either Lisbon or Coimbra, which most of the time I was growing up were a tediously long train journey away.  So even had they been libraries as Americans view them, I probably wouldn’t have visited them that often.  And I’ll confess I was, briefly, for a few months, familiar with the Porto branch of the same library system.

The reason I was familiar with it, will explain to you why I wasn’t more familiar and the difference between Portuguese libraries and American ones.  I spent a few months, every free moment after school, in that library tracing the fluctuations of currency through the sixteenth century in Portugal.

See, the libraries in Portugal are repositories of original material – some of it very old.  If you want to do anything that requires primary sources you go to the public library.  The entire system is the equivalent of the section of libraries here devoted to local history and documents.

As in those, you can’t check books out, and quite frankly, you wouldn’t want to.  The few fiction books in there are those considered of historical and/or literary value.

There are of course other libraries, most of those being rather small and confined and private.  Most parish houses have a lending library at least for young people.  A lot of youth clubs have libraries.  Schools from middle school up have libraries.

Unfortunately, it is all tainted by the rather nose-in-the-air attitude that culture is something that’s too good for the common folk and also that the common folk must be protected from “trashy novels.”

With the best good will in the world – and remember I’m the kid who read Thomas Mann at eight simply because I was bored out of my gourd and those were the only books I could get my hands on (in the attic) which hadn’t been read yet.  Same reason I read Camus at 11 – I found myself hard pressed to discover anything in most of those libraries that I wanted to read.  Most of it was moral tracts and improving works, and it was therefore as dusty as it deserved to be.

I think I once found a book about a Portuguese Queen in my Highschool library which was only half bad.  I “think” because I might have dreamed it.

By the time I’d started tutoring I’d come to the conclusion not the only difference but a considerable one between me and most of the people I tutored was that they’d grown up without fun books.

This was particularly bad when the kids I got were geniuses (most of them were.  Not all) born to families of poor-but-honest-and-definitely-pious peasants.

Portugal is an odd country.  It is said that every Portuguese has a book of poems stowed away somewhere that will never see the light of day.  This is probably true – at least to some extent.  I would be very shocked if the guy up the street who forced his family to live in medieval squalor and farmed by medieval methods had one, but you never know.  Those romantic poets can get weird.

At any rate, most Portuguese will at the very least pay lip service to books.  It was a shock to me when I came to the states and people saw me reading and asked me what I was studying for.  In Portugal a lot of people read in the train, though for working class young men, in my day, that was usually comic books.

However, a certain class of people… let’s called the wanna-be middle class, views it as their duty to keep their kids – particularly their daughters – from being corrupted with “trashy” stuff.  Portugal being a country with two feet, two ankles and heck, at least up to the chest in the past, “trashy” is anything written in the last hundred years, which hasn’t been given the imprimatur of either “intellectuals” or “the church.”

My family was always weird, in that mom disapproved of books about imaginary stuff (I think younger son takes after her, though he likes the meatier SF and some mysteries.  He prefers books about how things work/worked, and real history and stuff) but dad was addicted to who-dunnits and adventure books (Captain Morgan and Sir Walter Scott were his.)

Dad had spent all his pocket money since he was eleven or so (and this is a man who walked over an hour to school because buses were too expensive) in the used bookshops (known in Portuguese by the rather romantic and I suspect Arab-origin name of Alfarabios.  Normal bookshops were librarias (places containing books.)  I have no idea what Alfarabios means, etymologically, but like bazaar or kiosk it has a romantic taste in the tongue, a suggestion of something exotic and strange.)  Those weren’t very common when I was growing up in Portugal, because culture taints buying used with the same sort of low-class feel as selling your stuff in pawnshops.  But dad was broke, and he had to read.

His library was augmented by inheritances from his grandmother and great grandmother both of which I’m given to understand though nothing of feeding the family on vegetable soup for a week so they could buy the new chapters of the novels they were following.  (These were sold in chapters, with a hole on top, hanging from a loop of string attached to a pole.  The bookseller came through village hawking his wares, and sold novels to people a chapter at a time – they probably couldn’t have afforded a whole book at once.  They sold fun stuff – I think our Sir Walter Scott was originally bought that way – and villagers bought it, and once they had a book, they’d save and send it to be bound up.  This system had ended LONG before my time, but the expression “string literature” for cheap, accessible, exciting adventures stayed in the language.  My dad often teased me with it when I was little and devouring Enid Blyton by the yard.)  Then as my brother and I started reading, we started poling our birthday and Christmas money to buy paperbacks: science fiction and mystery, mostly.  And since my dad still devoted most of his money to books – it was his secret vice.  Other men blew money away on drink.  He spent it on books – we learned to coordinate and strategize purchases.  This meant, yes, that my brother and I often bought dad the books we wanted to read for his birthday and read them very carefully and wearing gloves before we wrapped it for him.  It meant also that when going to the book fair, which takes place in large cities for a couple of weeks in summer, outdoors, in tents, and where books are usually offered starting at half price (and old stock that was in the back MUCH cheaper) we had to compare lists.  “Okay, I’m looking for this, this and this are they on your list?”  We also would do the first walk then call home and ask the others if they (if they’d gone before) had already bought x y or z.  This was hard learned.  The year I turned fourteen and had some money I’d made (it might have been the year I ran a neighborhood newspaper) and my brother had money form tutoring, we went to the book fair separately and ALL THREE OF US brought home the exact same books, which was a total waste of money.

But, anyway, when I realized a lot of the peasant kids I taught needed more fun books, I begun starting libraries or enriching the ones that existed.  I convinced my Portuguese and English teachers to back me up in adding an SF section to the Highschool library, for instance.  It required them to convince the librarian that translations and science fiction at that could be “worthy”.  It leaned heavily to Bradbury, but I snuck in some Heinlein under the radar.  I also started lending libraries in two groups I was involved with.  Whether they lasted past my improvement Bob (Heinlein) knows.

Coming to the States was a shock to the system.  First of all, my host family had no books in the house.  None.  I don’t mean to imply they were stupid, they weren’t.  But their entertainment ran to TV and magazines.  I suppose dad had technical books but there was no reading-as-fun.  This was odd even amid neighbors.  Dan’s family down the road always had books lying about.

But just as I started to go on a jag of withdrawal, my host mother said something like “Well, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you go to the library?”  I was still new and didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t tell mom that I didn’t want that KIND of boring.  Instead, I let her take me to the public library.  And I fell in love.

Books.  Not just fun fiction, but fun non-fiction.  Who knew people would write things like the life of Shakespeare and other history, and books about quasars in ways that common people would want to read them?  (They came to Portugal, too, eventually, but at that time popular non-fiction was news to me.)

Yes, it was sort of like locking a kid in the candy store.  I ended up volunteering at the library because that way they’d trust me to take more books out, and besides, I’d discover stuff I’d never seen before.

Then I went back to Portugal and, shaky from withdrawal and also wanting to keep my English up, discovered that American tourists, bless their wealthy hearts, often abandoned the books they’d brought over to read over summer (understandable, since that meant they had more room for stuff bought cheap in Portugal.)  I’ve read more thrillers and beach romances than I care to admit to, but it kept both the English and the reading bug sharp.

Back in the states, newly wed and frankly broke, I both developed an unhealthy relationship with a used book store called The Bookworm in Rockhill, South Carolina, and I learned to drive PRIMARILLY so I could drive to the library.  In Charlotte we routinely borrowed books from three branches, and when I was bed-ridden with Robert, Dan took our biggest three suitcases (the ones we took when traveling to Portugal) down to it, with strict orders to fill them to the top and the order of SF, Mystery, historical, nonfiction consisting of biographies, history and science.  I think he bought out MOST of the sale and all in those categories.)

Then we moved to the Springs and we were somewhat beyond broke.  I’d also abandoned 2/3 of my books when moving from the Carolinas (truck space) which left me HUNGERING for books.  Yeah, I had the local bookshops free-bookshelf where they put the books they didn’t think they could resell.  I used to go early in the morning, with Robert in a carriage, to snag the most readable stuff.  But there is only so much gothic romance a woman can read.

So I used the library.  We lived downtown, in a student apartment, and the library was thirty minutes walk away.  I used to make that walk every other day and the pouch at the back of the carriage was full of books for the return trip.  The library was also where I sought refuge on weekends, when Dan was watching the kids, to get a little bit of writing done (longhand.  No laptops.)

This was the period where my relationship to the library (practically living there) was the one described in the stuff the fan posted.

When we moved away from downtown that relationship became more distant.  I still did some library sales (it was at one of those I found Dwight Swain) when I was aware they were happening, and I still went to the library when the preliminary hints of an idea started bothering me.  Say “something about Africa.”  This allowed me to read forty or fifty books for free before I decided if the idea worked.

The last time I read the library out of books in one section was … must be 6 years ago (I was homeschooling the kid.  Might have been seven) when I was considering the idea of a series about women of the War of the Roses.

A little earlier, while we were working on the other house to get it ready to sell, I borrowed audio books at the rate of two a day.

But even then it wasn’t as essential as it had been, once upon a time.  I could now find the precise book or books I wanted on Amazon and often very cheap even with shipping.  This became more so with electronic books and the possibility of sampling a lot in the free section.  Also the preliminary reading on some theme or other can be done on line.

So, a year ago I needed to find information on a particular Romanian ruler, whose name evades me now.  I found hardly anything on line – a page or two – and usually just mentions in the books I could get hold of.  So I thought “library.”

My older son and I set off on an expedition.  It will show you the kind of hopeful idiot I am, that I took a shoulder-sack, convinced we’d fill it.

I should have known better.  The last time I tried to WORK at the library – four? – years ago, I couldn’t, because the place was full of homeless AND social workers interviewing them at a volume usually reserved for public speaking in a crowded room without microphones.

But they still had books!

A year ago… not so much.  Oh, there were still SOME books, most of them put in places they shouldn’t be and a lot of them missing that should be on the shelf.  BUT half of the space was taken up with music, games, videos and other things that, last I checked, weren’t BOOKS.

The library was also serving as an informal, ersatz homeless shelter, which made me afraid of going to some of the lower levels and looking for stuff.

I found not one book to check out, not even a tangentially relevant one.  I won’t be going back.  And while I’m sure the suburban libraries are better in terms of not having patrons urinating in the corner, I can check the stock on line and they too seem to be going video/game/music.

However, the festivities on line started with Bill Quick saying that his own library was unusable being full of homeless.  I concurred.

Enter the bleeding heart brigade, saying that if we had better services for the homeless this wouldn’t happen.

Bill immediately pointed out he lives in San Francisco, possibly the city with the BEST homeless assistance services.  And I pointed out that Colorado Springs is known in the region as having some of the best assistance services (many of them private) from soup kitchens to shelters.

We were then accused of being heartless and wanting to sweep poverty and need under the rug.

So…  I know it took me this long to come to the point, but I wanted you to realize what libraries as they used to be in America can mean not just to me but more so to people who have no books at home, and the theory of comparative scale of use.  (Also I’m ill and writing long is much easier than writing short.)

First let’s start with the fact that homelessness as it exists in America isn’t poverty.  In fact part of the problem with it is that it ISN’T poverty.  Look, regardless of what you’ve seen on the movies or tv, most homeless are not families fallen on hard times.  Yes, there are some of those now, but most of those while technically “homeless” aren’t living in your local park.  They’ve just taken over mom and dad’s basement, moved onto a friend’s living room or whatever.  Terrible – I’ve been JUST short of that at least three times in my married life – and humiliating, but NOT “stand in the park and wheedle on yourself.”

90% of the homeless in America and the hard core ones are people with mental health issues, people with drug abuse issues and people who have found they can live without having to do anything for it, and can be “free” and outside society.  I’ve overheard conversations in the park, and I suppose that most of the people who “dropped out” in the sixties are dead, but a lot of them are alive and going from soup kitchen to free clinic, with a bit of begging in between.

Yes, there are entire families in this system, including homeless children – but for them to stay in it, the parents need to have some sort of serious issue.  Otherwise, even if they can’t find work, there is assistance available to get them at least into public housing, which, nightmarish though it is, it’s not living in the park.

I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t happen to normal families too – see where I came very close to that level and more than once too – but normal families usually tend to bounce back.  They go through a few months of mess and horror, and then they claw back to some semblance of normality.  (This might change as our economy dives and programs of necessity get cut.  The ones for the DESERVING poor will be cut first, of course, since they rarely riot.)

The problem with this is that when people get appalled at the conditions the homeless live in and start offering “homeless services” there is an entire network, not just of homeless but of social workers who direct the homeless to the cities with better services.

I swear to you and I’m not even joking that right now there are plenty more homeless on Colorado Springs streets than in Denver, despite the Springs being much smaller.

The Springs also has its soup kitchens and other services downtown and within easy walking distance of each other.

This means downtown businesses are closing, except for bars and restaurants which can control access.  And that the library is of course a place to camp in the cool/warm during the day.

It means more than that.  We moved within easy driving distance of downtown, because when we lived downtown when we first came to Colorado Springs, I used to take walks every day.  When we moved to our little mountain village, without these, I gained ten pounds a year.  I used to love walking downtown, dropping by the deli and the three bookstores (only one left, and it’s MOSTLY a restaurant now) checking out the other little shops which ranged from yarn to weird import crafts.

Now those are gone.  Worse – the last two times I walked downtown alone (i.e. without commanding the muscle, aka older son to go with me) someone FOLLOWED me and I had to employ stuff from my childhood to lose them.  Once it was a large and addled looking male, and yes, he was following me.  And once it was TWO large and addled looking males.  For the icing on the cake – not related to this, but from a blog entry – I clicked on the sex offenders registry.  Yes, I know, a lot of people there are there because someone accused them and was never proven.  Our local one at least has notes on whether it’s accusation, trial or conviction and also whether the crime was against children or adults.

The downtown zipcode is FULL of registered sex offenders who’ve done hard time and who have committed their crimes against adults.  The faces are very familiar from my walks, and yep, one was the guy who tried to follow me.

Which means, if I walk I take the boy with me.  Even then at least once some guys tried to flank us.  You see, the vagrancy laws are not being enforced AT ALL because the city is “compassionate.”

Let’s talk about compassion – most of the shops downtown were mom and pop operations and many had been there since after the war.  But when customers are afraid to walk around (and when the stupid meters with requirements you move every two hours makes it impossible to park close by and just go around the more popular area, because city planners don’t understand you don’t shop downtown like at the mall) and when you can’t keep homeless from coming in and peeing on your books, the stores either move elsewhere and close.  Which, arguably destroys wealth.

This same “compassion” makes it impossible for women and children to walk downtown in their lawful pursuits.  This same “compassion” makes the library which could help a lot of kids fall in love with books as we did, and meet other people who like books (even if they are reading them mostly online) into a dangerous no-go zone.  This same compassion is emptying the smaller office buildings that don’t have doormen.  The office I rented, which was the only one I could afford, eventually became unusable.  These are the times they are, and a lot of small businesses are going under, so when I moved in the office building was half full.  Only you know how it is…  small businesses, we worked odd hours.  Sometimes when I was there there was only me and two or three other people in a building with forty or so offices.

And then other people started moving out.  I didn’t understand why until the day I was alone on my floor and I came across a clearly homeless guy in the hallway.  I’d seen them there before, they usually roamed in and roamed out, and you walked past them.  Only this one was… well… feral.  There was no human in the eyes.  I barely got into my office ahead of his jump for me, and then I was stuck there until I was sure he was gone (which took a lot of looking through the bulls-eye) which was about four hours, and the room didn’t have either water or a bathroom (those were down the hall.)  I had the presence of mind to play one of my audio books – with male voices – loud enough to sound like I had a guy in there with me (I talked in between) and he moved off very fast.

After that I didn’t use the office and let it lapse when the rental ran out.  That building is now completely empty and for sale.  Is that compassionate to the owner who is btw an immigrant and not particularly wealthy?

Is it a matter, as someone once preached at me, of my wanting “poverty and deprivation swept under the rug?”

Oh, h*ll no.  If these homeless people were the kind of down at heel families or working-class people the movies depict them as, I’d feel sorry for them, but I would NOT want them swept out of the public view.  Poor people – no matter how much maligned poverty is by being accused of causing crime or whatever – don’t usually try to attack people and rape them, poor people aren’t evil.  They’re just poor.  I know.  I’ve been poor a lot and some of my best friends are poor.

But instead, most homeless are … feral.  The sort of people who don’t recognize the social compact and don’t care about the rules of society.  At best they are insane and unpredictable (read My Brother Ron by Clayton E Cramer, for a look at what many, many of the homeless are like) at worst they are drug addicted and … how do I put this?  Contemptuous of those of us who play by the rules, have jobs, and make an effort for a living.

And that’s the problem.  The problem is most cities and private charities misdiagnose the issue.  They look at their mounting unemployment and they think “we must do something to help these people.”  Heaven knows that’s true and getting worse.

But then comes the non-judgmental gospel of the age, where you can’t judge, and you can’t ask what these people were doing, require that they keep clean, require they see a psychiatrist in order to get food.  No, you can’t do any of that because that would be discriminatory.  So you just give freely and as much as possible.

And the vultures come.

I pity the REAL “homeless due to need” families that have to raised kids in that kind of hell.  They should get help, but they shouldn’t be forced to get it next to sex offenders, chronic drug abusers and people who frankly couldn’t give a d*mn about getting out of that situation and getting better.

And I pity the businesses who have to cope with this invasion by feral humans, supported by other people’s money but not feeling the slightest obligation to other people.  And I pity the children who will never get to experience public libraries or the guidance of a friendly librarian.  And I pity the women and teens who can’t simply take a stroll downtown.  And I pity the owners of downtown buildings who aren’t wealthy enough to hire doormen.  I pity the drug addicted/mentally ill (often a covalent group) who don’t find guidance or help in keeping up with their medications and becoming functional again.

Compassion?  I’m full of it.  But not for those who are feeding the beast of dependence.  Not for those who make it possible for people to live off society but not in it.  Those false bleeding hearts just want to feel good about themselves.

And by being kind to the cruel and parasitical they are much more than cruel to the kind and helpless.

I’m sorry this post is so late.  I wanted to read the “offending columns” at SFWA before I wrote about it and last night I had the worst sinus headache of my life descend on me right after I put up the post for Mad Genius Club.  The remains are still with me.  I’m fine provided I don’t move my head in ANY direction.  So I’m developing very good posture as I write this.

There is a civil war raging in science fiction.  Of course, the immediate image that came to mind when thinking of this was the old Woody Allen sketch – back before therapy cured him of being funny – talking about the game of the nail biters against the bed wetters.

No, I’m not saying that you have to be crazy to work here – but it certainly helps.  Besides, the way the field was, and as hard as it was to break into writing, the sane people with healthy self esteem gave up long before being published.  It was only the ones driven by the demons of writing who stuck it out.  Then there is the nature of the work.  I swear I was normal socially and somewhat extroverted, but after I got published and had books due, I was so busy that the social life fell by the way side, and now large gatherings seem odd.

We are, most of us, painfully non-social people, more at home in our own heads than out of them.  With few exceptions, we were not the type to get picked first for… anything physical, when we were young.  We were the lonely kid in the corner, with a book.

But the thing is, we geeks punch above our weight.  And we geeks in science fiction, really punch above our weight.  We very much dream the dreams of humanity, as it were.  Or at least we do when we’re doing it right.

And that’s part of the issue.

Look, I have been ribbed by older pros ever since I started going to conventions.  I came from a background as teacher and translator, which means you dress well for public events.  Now, I was smart enough to dress “well for sf” which is different (though I’m now reaching the age where it should become similar.  Older women look funny in slinky, hugging outfits, so I’ll wear skirt suits and nice pants and blouse combinations.) but I still tended to show up put together.  I also have an unfortunate ability to stay up much after twelve.  I used to be a night person, then the kids entered school and next thing you know, my internal clock is set for six am.  And I rarely drink at cons, though I’ve been known to nurse a glass of wine.

So the old pros teased me.  They said stuff like “you people who come and stay in your top of the line rooms with breakfast included aren’t really science fiction.  Real science fiction is gritty and the writers and fans cram six to a room and some in a closet and sleep in shifts and eat maybe two meals the whole con.”

That was the scene in sf writing/reading a few decades ago – loud, youthful, boisterous.  Keep that in mind.  They were cutting edge and they knew it.  Did they embrace some pretty silly fads?  Well, look at pictures of the 70s world con for an answer.  Both in looks and in the stuff they wrote some of those people make me giggle.

But remember back then the fandom was weighted at the very young end.  In your mind, add about double the attendees at current worldcons, and make them age sixteen to twenty five.  Would they get silly?  Sure.  Loud?  Sure.  Boisterous?  Sure.  Would they sleep six to a closet?  From what I hear from friends who go to anime cons, you bet your bottom dollar.

Reading Resnick’s and Malzberg’s columns took me back to that atmosphere.  The columns are very much a “We were young, once and wrote science fiction” – very enjoyable and tons of fun as a sort of peek behind the scenes of the field.

It is about women they admired, women who shaped SF.  They even worry about the gender imbalance in guests of honor at world con and other recognition but identify the cause accurately as residing with the gender imbalance till the seventies since the honors and recognition tend to descend on the older writers in the field and women are just now reaching that stage.

So..

So how in living hell did these columns – innocuous and reminiscent – become the latest fire storm in the long-drawn civil war in science fiction.  And who is fighting this war, anyway?

Ah, sit around my children, and make long ears.  Aunt Sarah will tell all.  Well, actually not, but I always wanted to say that.  I have guesses and ideas at what is causing this series of conflagrations starting with Orson Scott Card’s non-calling-for-the-death-of-all-gays but opposing their belonging to his church (this my atheist, Budhist and various other flavors of Christian gay friends find a non event, btw.) and continuing to what can only be called the wilding hunt for Malzberg and Resnick.

This hunt has gotten out of control.  I won’t post links to the blogs, but they are on trial for being “older white men” and for being horrible horrible people who appreciate female beauty.  Words like misogynist are thrown around with abandon.  The columns are never posted and rarely ever quoted.  Instead they’re alluded to in the sort of tones you expect.  And what they’re supposed to have said and done grows in magnitude and “horror.”  At this point practically all the young and bien-pensant females in the field are outraged and feel that their womanhood has been slighted and that they’re being shoved right back into the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.  (Hey, if they could arrange for me to get pregnant they’d be miracle workers indeed.)

Anyway, so… I read the columns.

Earth shaking stuff right?  Hot and heavy sexism and lots of waggled eyebrows about how hot these “ladies” were, right?

I only have (for whatever reason in the transmission of the scans) half of the column about lady writers so I can’t swear that they didn’t talk about writers in bikinis, but if they did, from the tone of the rest of the column it was something like “And she wore a bikini that year at the pool in the worldcon hotel, and looked good in it too.”

Yep, the stuff of sexism.  I mean, guys, for the love of Bob (Heinlein – genuflects),  I was at least expecting a passing reference to an orgy.  I got that from Charlie Brown late editor of Locus, showing a party of us around his house and saying, about the hot tub that when they moved out there half of the sf people would get naked and get in the tub.  “Then in the mid seventies we took a look at each other naked, realized no one sane wanted to see us naked, put on our clothes and mothballed the tub.”

Even had there been something like that, it would be no more than the history of SF of the “we were young and hot once, and we read stuff about group marriages and got a little nuts.”

For better or for worse there is NOTHING in those columns that I couldn’t read aloud in church.

So, where’s the sexism?  Where’s the discrimination?  Well, they were talking about “ladies” you know, “Lady editors” and that’s an exclusionary term.

Okay.  Take a deep breath.  Now unzip your pants, lift your skirt, part your robe, and look right between your legs.  Unless you were the victim of a horrible industrial accident, there is a gender distinguishing characteristic there.

What’s more, that distinguishing characteristic and the biological functions it serves causes (my son, the human-biology-bs-holding-peeve in the next room) differences in how the brain grows, how the nervous system operates.  It affects how you move, how you eat, and to a certain extent – yes – what you think and how you think.

Now – okay, you can stop looking at your junk.  I’m writing here.  Some attention please! – does the fact that you’re an innie or an outie make you stupid.  Nope.  Does it make your conclusions less valid?  Nope.  (Not unless you’re the sort of person who thinks “because I have a vagina is a winning argument in every circumstance, instead of just the trump card on an argument with your significant other on who is going to do the dishes.)  But it will affect you.  It will call up emotions that either improve or destroy your writing.  It’s one of those bad things about having a body.  Men and women tend to have different “flavors” of writing… and of doing everything.  This is good.  Why would you want everyone to be alike?

And besides, men and women in general like each other.  That’s why humans continue to exist.  We even like looking at each other naked.  Imagine that!  It’s why naked bimbos (of both genders) on the cover make a book do very well indeed.  Which is something else the not-ladies got offended about.

So, having looked at these articles, they call these people ladies, they mention the one who was exceptionally beautiful and the one they thought was in love with her boss.  Are you angry now?  Is your essential womanhood and all hope of equality gone?  Are you now living in Sheri S. Tepper’s worlds?

What in H*LL is wrong with these people?  What are they offended about?  Mention that they’re female?

Look, people, women came into the workforce, and they were going to be great and powerful because they were so much better than men (an opinion justified by the fact that the few who made it in when it was tough were very god indeed.)  They asked no favors.  They competed with men on their own terms.

And the vast majority of them failed, because women are not men and the business world was geared for men.  Women had obligations and aspirations men didn’t have.

So they set about changing the business world.  Well and good.  No discussion of lewd subjects and men cannot be men and have to behave as sort of half-female-castrati.

But women are still not doing as well as men.  Glass ceiling and all that.  Look, you can burn me after I finish writing this – I’ll tell jokes with Resnick and Malzberg while I burn – but the glass ceiling might not be fixable.  Or it might not be fixable in ways that allow the business to continue operating properly.

The part that’s fixable is being fixed.  As with women guests of honor at worldcon, the apparent blockage comes from the fact there were few women with any business/working power till the seventies, and that there is a reason the old males in charge are called silverbacks, and it ain’t just because they resemble old gorillas.  It also ain’t their youth.

The other part of this is that women tend to take time off in their prime earning years to raise their families.  Even those that don’t take time off – I was trying to write through it – are affected by the kids’ vagaries and how they’re doing in school and…

I swear the first of you to say “but why don’t the fathers—“ gets a smack across the mouth as the young and callow twit you are.  If you believe in your heart of hearts that when your kid is sick or has problems at school you can march on to your business meeting unaffected, you have never had children and you never looked closely at older women in that situation.  Men just aren’t affected that way.  It’s biological.  Remember that thing between your legs?  Yeah.  It affects how you bond to kids.  Fathers love their kids (at least those allowed to know their kids and those who are sane) and all, but they don’t feel the compelling PULL to nurse them through illness or “fix what’s wrong now.”  My husband lost nights of sleep to my younger son’s issues in middle school, but he didn’t feel the need to go eat lunch with the kid and cheer him up.  Yes, there are exceptions.  My dad was to a great extent the caregiver and comforter when I was little – BUT in general the way to bet is that men and women are different, and women are more likely to be the caregivers of the family and lose work time and mind space to that.

Fair?  What does fair have to do with it.  Life isn’t fair.  Life is life.

This problem will be hard to “fix” even if most of the economy are contractors who stay home.

Then there is well… “the female way of approaching problems.”  Women don’t like confrontations.  I think this is evolutionary, baked in the cake from when the pregnant female needed the help of the band.  Women are likely to go around, give hints, and try to solve the problem by other means.  I know any number of women who thought they were being paid less than they deserved, hinted, got nothing, got another job.  While a man would have gone in and gone “Well, Joe, you know you’re paying everyone else three times what you pay me.”

That one – THAT one might be the strongest thing holding women back.  And there ain’t much you can do about it, other than push women to understand what’s going on.  You sure can’t fix it by whining about male privilege and insisting no one mention anyone’s gender.  It ain’t gonna work.

Now, what I want you to contemplate is that Barry and Mike were talking about women who overcame ALL of that to become luminaries in the field back when no special accommodations were made.  Was it relevant to mention their gender?  You bet your *ss three times.

If someone won the Olympic Marathon, would you find it relevant to mention they were missing half their left foot?  I would.

So, Lady Authors and Editors?  These men were taking their hats off to them for running a more difficult race and arriving ahead of most men.

How could the younger generation have misinterpreted it and viewed it as a put-down as a “you are saying they only won in the kiddy race.”

Ah.  That’s because the younger generation ONLY knows “girls” things as exclusionary and with special help.  Because the law and the constant fits thrown by people like the these young not-ladies, women are now given a leg up in practically everything, and special categories are formed that only women can compete in: women awards, and women banquets and…

These women, most of them ten years younger than I, aren’t stupid.  They know that while all the older women were telling them they were grrrls and had grrrl power and could do anything they wanted, they were also ensuring they got special breaks the boys didn’t have.

Therefore “lady” anything became a put down.  A second best.  They want to be judged as writers and editors, d*mn it, not “lady writers and editors.”

And they have no memory of the past and want to erase it.  Which is why by keeping alive the memory of SF Mike and Barry MUST be silenced.

What they don’t understand, these younger colleagues of mine, is that their attitude only perpetuates their exclusion.  By refusing to admit that once upon a time “lady editor” meant “fought it up from secretary hand over hand and gave up normal life for it in most cases”  they’re casting the shadow of their own mediocrity into the past and assuming that women always had special concessions made for them, and that they always failed to measure up to men.  And the only solution is to get more and greater concessions and keep men running with their legs in a sack, otherwise women will be swept back to the kitchen.  Maybe they REALLY think that.  If so, no wonder they’re angry.

Or maybe they feel inadequate compared to the giant women of the past, who made it big despite working in offices where pinching your secretary’s bottom wasn’t out of line.  I don’t blame them on that – I am not a quarter the woman either my mother or grandmother were.

But one shoulders one’s weakness and marches on does the best one can.  Either trying to erase the past or trying to hobble men is not the way to either success or self-respect.  Take your blinders off.  They were put there by crazy people who wanted to give you the appearance of success without the effort.

Women and men are different, yes.  That doesn’t mean they can’t both succeed.  This won’t be managed by denying their differences, though.  And it won’t be managed by making women into second rate men or men into second rate women.

You want to compete?  You have a dream of making it in science fiction?  Then shut up and write.  And stop being convinced everyone is making you a victim because you have a vagina.  That will only ensure you ARE a victim.  Also tedious.

Write, study, stay one step ahead of the changes in tech and in the field.  Work.  That tends to lead to success for men AND women.

And read the history of the field, and even if you think you’ll never measure up to the lady editors and writers of the past, keep trying.  If you quit you already lost.

Oh, and about “sexist” covers with female bimbos…  Those too are the history of the field, and history we could stand to learn from.  This is not an office where your co-worker is displaying a mostly nude female.  This is MARKETING.  Skin sells.  Your product goes out to the market wrapped in a way that sells or doesn’t.  I’d prefer it does.  Some of the worst offenders are the UF and paranormal romance covers, and I don’t hear any of the women who write them complain about it.  Why not?  Because skin sells.

But these tough grrrrls have internalized that any nudity is bad and anti-woman.  And they’re now using their grrrl power to sound like their Victorian Great Great Grandmothers.  Next stop, little skirts on the furniture legs, lest the leg evokes the female leg and incites bad sexual feelings in men.  Which might remind men they’re men and women are women and that would be bad because “exclusionary” and “Sexist” or something.

They have become caricatures and they’re making each other more so every day.

And now, can SFWA perhaps get back to doing the things it SHOULD do, the things that might entice me into renewing my membership?  You know… fraternal order type of stuff, widows and orphans and old age funds? Finding us health insurance? Actually standing up to bad contracts and worst accounting from the houses?

No?  Of course not.  Much easier to go after Amazon and supposedly “sexist” writers who use words like “lady” and talk about people being beautiful.

And this is the war in sf – between the increasingly irrelevant establishment trying to silence all the opinions they don’t like, and the rest of us who frankly m’dear don’t give a d*mn what they don’t want us to say.  Complicated by the spiraling down of the traditional houses (thank G-d not Baen) putting everyone under stress it keeps getting nuttier and nuttier.  They want to tell us what we can say and think.  We want to tell them to shut up.

The Card outbreak was a symptom of this and so is the Resnick Malzberg one.

So are the not-ladies going to realize that screaming isn’t working and won’t make them relevant?  Of course not.  It worked their whole lives.

Carry on.  They can go to hell.  I’m going indie.

Oh, and because you need more than one starter for a proper bonfire, there’s a related post over at Mad Genius Club. 

Recently I posted about the fact that at least the gatekeepers in science fiction are solidly left – and by left I mean they’d shock many people in our college campuses – which leads to the selection of works that enforce (a rather colorless, drab, and frankly unreal) “political correctness.”

I thought there was no disputing this. Look, guys, as the country debated things like government take over of health care, 99% of my colleagues said a resounding “yeah.” Redistribution of wealth? A resounding yeah. Restrictions on doing business – yeah. The science fiction field is full of works with evil military, dastardly corporations and saintly public servants. Woman after woman in the field imagines herself downtrodden and preaches endlessly about evil males and thinks she’s fighting the patriarchy that in her mind existed circa 1950. (And in fact not since the thirties or, for some aspects, never outside Islamic countries.)

In fact, the only place you can find as far left as science fiction is the college campus.
Imagine my surprise when someone – a person I like actually, personally, and outside politics – informed me on my facebook page that I was mistaken and if I thought science fiction was hard left it was because I didn’t know where the center was.

Right…

He assured me that science fiction was libertarian. After all, Wikipedia says so. I have by the way had this quoted at me by foreign fans. Which at least makes some sense. They haven’t sat at panels in sf cons and heard writers and editors declare themselves socialists or say that their duty is to “unsettle the bourgeois.” (This due to the fact that these luminaires lack mirrors, I think.) And they might not know that the dreck that wins most of the peer-awards (really, guys, really? The Cultural revolution was nicer than the American suburbia? And you bought that because it was all wrapped in sentimentality or because you secretly agree? I’m not even sure I know which answer I’d prefer from you.) is not in fact the best that’s produced here. It’s like my poor mother not knowing anything about the IRS scandals because the press there won’t report them.

But that a local thought the field was “mostly libertarian” is jaw-droppingly strange.

And then I realized what the heck he was talking about. I’d “misestimated where the center is” because the center, like Pratchett’s turtle, moves. That is, he figures that libertarian is now anyone who isn’t openly a Stalinist and advocating the internment of everyone to right of Lenin.

At least that is the only interpretation that can be put to “don’t know where the center is.”

So… let me explain something – the definitions of left and right are at best flawed. But let’s go with the idea that the left advocates for maximum government control. Despite the flapping about keeping the government out of people’s bodies and private decisions, they do after all advocate for controlling what people can drink, eat, smoke, what kind of health care people can get, and what procedures are approved of (abortion) and which denied (life extending surgery of dubious value.) They in fact think that either the government or a group of enlightened people needs to keep the masses from making “the wrong decisions.”

I’m not saying anything controversial. Person after person at the Democrat convention in 12 said that everyone has to belong to something and we belong to the government.

That’s the left. And frankly, as someone who grew up learning Marxism (in every course in tenth and eleventh grade) and studying (and experiencing) both socialism and communism, those are the foundations of socialism and communism. “The individual counts for nothing, the collective is all. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.”

Let’s place that on the left pole, shall we?

By comparison to that, I AM the right. (I get called right but actually the current left/right continuum is on nationalist lines, not on the lines of individual freedom — which means libertarians don’t fit anywhere. Since I get called “right” I’ll take that. I’m certainly opposite both communism and fascism, both red and black totalitarianism.) I stand on the opposite side, holding my broomstick like a samurai sword and saying “I don’t care what you need, you don’t have the right to take from anyone against their will.” That is me. Or at least that’s me as I would like things to be. Morally – mentally – I stand solidly anchoring the side of the individual against the state.

Now, I am not stupid, and while in an ideal world, a system of all being extreme individualists would work, in an ideal world so would communism work. (It’s just that in an ideal world for communism, humans would all be termites or carpenter ants or something.)

So while my heart is pure I’m willing to compromise. I’m willing to understand that governments are needed in order to secure the individual’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I’ve read the constitution and I’ve seen that it’s good. Common defense? Yeah, we need that. After all the foreign nations aren’t all – or any of them – angels. Not letting the states go to war with each other? I’m all for that. Having the president negotiate with foreign powers. Yay. Most of the other stuff left to the states? Okay. It could be inconvenient having to move between states, but after all people do that all the time. So let the states be laboratories of governance. I’ll buy that.

I’ll go that far, but no further. There are evils already inherent in that compromise, like the critters who believe that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gives them the right to confiscate the results of other people’s labor or that “at some point you’ve made enough money” – because it arrogates to them to decide how much people should make. Like the people who think they should have the right to every email you send, to store somewhere and look over for signs of sedition. Like those who think that the people the country should be defended against are those who believe in the constitution.

But a government is needed. And if we can keep the intrusions to a minimum, we can take a little poison with our tea, like the nineteenth century people who took a little arsenic every day.

So, is my position center? Good heavens NO. There can be no center between the Stalinists who would enslave, silence and murder all who disagree with them and those who wish to keep a maximum of freedom, responsibility and power in the individual.

The center does not move just because one side gets more and more extreme. And the center holds no special virtue anyway.

Look, if half the people think that you should cut your head off, and half think the head should stay on, do you compromise by cutting off your ears?

Of course you don’t. Cutting your head of is wrong even if half the people believe you should do it. It is wrong even if all the people believe you should do it.

I don’t particularly care how many “experts” tell me a command economy is better – I grew up watching command economies up close and personal. I can also read seven languages and I KNOW the unholy mess Europe is in. I’ve also studied economics, which by the way is a science and not a sort conjuring wand that you can wave around to get the results you want. I know that you can raise the minimum wage till you’re blue in the face but it will not create prosperity. What it will create is the type of market distortion that makes illegal immigration unstoppable and makes the less-educated Americans already here unemployable (and dependent, and suffering from all sorts of pathologies.)

Because the people who believe in the magic wand of minimum wage are more than half the country, does that make the solution sensible? No. Not anymore than creating and raising a minimum wage makes it “real”. It just creates distortions and evokes the law of unintended consequences. It’s sort of like making cancer illegal so no one will die of it. All you’re doing is making the MENTION of cancer illegal and ensuring MORE people die of it.

Every time an all-powerful state gets power over individuals, it ends in tears. Sometimes – most of the time – it’s the mass murders, from Hitler (yes, he was left bucko. Kissing cousins to Stalin. They merely disagreed on whether state power should be national or worldwide) Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot. Sometimes it’s the soft glove of lack of innovation and settling for less that has taken over most of Europe (and how many young people who couldn’t find jobs have died of drug abuse or despair. Can you count them? No? Why not? Because you’ve been told it’s unbridled markets who cause the trouble? We haven’t had unbridled markets anywhere for a century.)

And sometimes, when it ALMOST works, when the country is more a tribe than a country, as in most of Scandinavia, it just leaves you open for plundering by foreigners who come in and are unassimilated and inassimilable and hate you because you pay and pay and pay but you can’t MAKE them like you.
Every time the individual is left at least a bit of freedom (we are at best social democrats) unparalleled prosperity and innovation – UNEXPECTEDLY – flows out onto the world. Must be luck!

Is there a center between these two points? A place where only some people are killed? A place where only half of your earnings are plundered? (About where we are, at least if you’re self-employed.) Is that just? Is that fair?

If three wolves and sheep vote on what’s for dinner, is it the center to make the sheep only half-dead?
And if all of science fiction writes about the glorious future when the wolves eat the capitalist sheep does that make the wolves right? Does that mean that’s the center now?

Let’s not kid ourselves – the fans who remain hardcore fans and still attend cons are those who believe the center moves. They have gone along with the stories of all men as villains, humanity as a plague upon the earth, redistribution and glorious statism forever. There are exceptions: some cons in the South East. Baen books. But by and large the field tilts further left every year.

Is this where the center is? No.

Is this where the rest of the country is?

Snort. If it were the printruns wouldn’t fall every year.

Yes, I know. It’s because those… those… those… rednecks refuse to be enlightened. Weirdly, Baen doesn’t have that issue. Baen continues to sell. Yeah I know “they sell to those rednecks” because they publish “right wing tripe.” Actually Baen publishes all political opinions and finds readers of every political color. Maybe the other houses should try it? Maybe they should look at how sf from different perspective sells indie to people who in fact haven’t gone along with the ride to the far left? Maybe they should consider that in fact people who disagree with them are not some sort of evil fanatics but simply people who believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

People who, in fact, know the more you feed the beast the more it will – eventually – eat you. Turns out unbridled unaccountable power is not held by altruistic scientists somewhere, always looking to serve others but by self serving bureucrats who will torture those who oppose their power – for now psychologically. And that’s wrong. It’s always wrong.

Because the consensus might move and the center means nothing, but a government that allows for individual freedom and human dignity?

THAT is the ideal and it doesn’t move.

Go on – tell me that because I don’t believe in controlling others, nor do I grant you the right to take from me my freedom, my labor, or my property without my consent, I am a “fascist” and “extreme right.”
I’m only extreme right when opposed to the fanatical devotion to faceless bureaucratic government the left now seems to believe in. And if that’s the left, I’m so far right that by definition everything else is to the left. (Fascist? Good Lord! You mean Hitler didn’t believe in power to the government? Who would have thunk it.)

I am what I’ve always been: a believer not in the masses but in the individual.

The RIGHTS of the individual outweigh the WISHES of the many.

Pero NO si muove.

And for a glimpse into our “not at all left” SF professionals field, go and read Amanda’s column at MGC today. She says she had a devil of a time taking out all the swear words.

One of the joys of living in the modern days is the ability to listen to (almost) all my favorites in audio books while I do stuff. (Hey, AUDIBLE! James White Sector General stories. Don’t make me come over there. Also, Operation Chaos.)
I’ll confess it’s been years since I read The Number Of The Beast. I actually don’t have objections to Number Of the Beast – unlike most Heinlein fans. As most of you know, I started with the recent (in the eighties) stuff, and worked backward. Yes, the relationships are weird, but it’s a parallel world and their history is not the same as ours, and perhaps they’re different, too. (We know they are long lived, like the Howards. I mean, everyone in that world is.)
And the end of TNOTB did not disturb me either, but then I’m weird. I LIKE The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag and All You Zombies and introduced my kids to them at an early age, which is probably related to Robert’s preternatural fear of mirrors… (As for what damage reading them Dandelion Wine when they were toddlers might have done to their infant minds, it will take psychiatrists YEARS to dig that up.)
Anyway – TNOTB disturbed me less than audio narration of I Will Fear No Evil or Time Enough For Love. It has less seventies lingo, and the voice is more “right”.
But as I said, it had been a long time since I read it. For those who haven’t, they’re traveling through a quantum apparatus, and they land in “fictional” worlds. They decide to collect the names of authors they all like/worlds they all read repeatedly, so as to figure out where they’re most likely to land.
Now, I was listening to the book and de-catting (by the weekend we’re up to our knees in Havey hair) the house, when suddenly an exchange started a scream of laughter from me. I’m quoting from memory, so probably not exactly, but it goes like this,
“Any Heinlein in there?”
“Four votes, but two for Stranger and two for his future history, so I didn’t count him.”
“I didn’t vote for Stranger, and I won’t humiliate anyone by requiring he admits to it. My G-d, what some writers will do for money.”
I laughed WITH Heinlein (it isn’t so much the money, but that was the big step up in his career and if he did it on purpose I wouldn’t even blame him) and I laughed with the characters, because Stranger didn’t weather well for me, and Robert had to come and find out why I was laughing insanely. So then I had him listen, and it made him laugh. But then it started a discussion about what OUR number was, so to put it.
If you had a quantum traveling apparatus that lands you in certain universes, those universes in which you have, so to put it, long lived part-time, where would you land?
The specification in TNOTB was that these were the books you read and re-read, your reading comfort food, the places you visited when you were too tired and out of it to read anything new. (Note, which seems to be true for me, that there isn’t an option for not-reading. Of course you’re going to read, but when you read and you’re tired, ill or simply out of spoons, you’re not going to read NEW stuff that requires high engagement from you. You’re going to read old stuff, which is like shrugging into your favorite jeans or something.
To me these can be divided into several categories: Old favorites I don’t blush for; comfort food; guilty pleasures and the last hideout.
The last hideout would make for a fun quantum trip. When I’m totally out of it, and warbling (meaning my mind is not obeying and stopping worrying about things it can’t help) I read about dinosaurs. Not cute named dinos, no. I read the sort of listings and classification books that could be used to tranquilize a T-rex, if only you could get him to sit still while you read the first ten pages. At some of the darkest points in my life, when we were broke and didn’t know where and when we’d get out of trouble, I spent weeks or months reading the equivalent of biology manuals. (Mind you I also read what I call argument books “no, you duffos, that dino didn’t eat plants.” “Yes he did, yes he did” “Well, your mom wears dino claws.”… anyway…) I got these from the library and, one glorious day, found a bunch of them in a bookstore’s “free” bin. Yay.
So, at least one of my likely stops, just call me “crunch.”
I haven’t been that bad lately, but it’s not been a picnic. Dan’s company is still… treading water and we’re not sure how long it will hold. Could turn out works out great forever. Or… yeah. I’m trying to do all the needed health stuff just in case, and figure out several escape hatches (I’m Mrs. Belt-and-suspenders) in case it all goes South financially.
So I’ve been reading the other stuff. Even the guilty pleasures.
The ones I don’t mind confessing to:
I read all the Heinlein, in rotation, every few years. Some of the books rotate more slowly than others, like TNOTB, not because I dislike them but because there are always other books I want to read MORE. Like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Then comes Clifford Simak, whom I’d read more often if my kids didn’t like him so much. He tends to disappear into their rooms, which means I own three copies and normally can’t find any. (Pournelle also has a disturbing tendency to do this. Kids!) My favorite of favorites is The Werewolf Principle, closely followed by They Walked Like Men. But mostly I read whichever one the kids have forgotten to hide.
I also re-read Pratchett at least once a year. All of it, except Death. (No, don’t call me a heathen. My guys already do. But I don’t GET into the Death cycle. I slide off.) And Diana Wynne Jones, though lately I’ve been “off” Chrestomancy. I guess I’d read him too much before.
F. Paul Wilson maybe once every two years. Yep, all the books in the Repairman Jack cycle.
I will also admit to my mystery addictions: Agatha Christie (particularly Miss Marple), Rex Stout, Ellis Peters. All of these are on heavy rotation (and out of covers. I should buy them on Kindle.)
All I have to say is I could probably deal with Heinlein’s future history. I would be okay with The Werewolf principle. The world of The Goblin Reservation would be interesting. I’d just as well not land in They Walked Like Men, if it’s okay with everyone. Ankh Morpork? I could do business there. I’d enlist in the guard. Terrorize the city.
Jones could be fun too, but I’m not landing in the world of Repairman Jack, and you can’t make me. It’s as close to horror as I read.
The mysteries… England between the wars? No problem. NYC early twentieth century? I’d figure it out. Shrewsbury in the middle ages? Well… I’d rather NOT, but…
I also regularly re-read Heyer romances. Eh. Regency hygiene. Ew.
Then come my comfort foods. These were things I read while very young. Tom Sawyer. Three Men In A Boat. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Tom Bailey, Story of A Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, (I challenge you to read the chapter of the drowning without being washed in tears,) Giovanni Guareschi, Don Camilo, (if you are a Catholic and/or lived through the cold war these will appeal to you.) Dumas. I will at some point download Sir Walter Scott, whom I haven’t read since childhood, but which I suspect will have the same effect. And if I can ever figure out who wrote the serialized Adventures of Captain Morgan I read as a child (great Grandma’s edition with the original illustrations) I’m sure I’ll love them too. I spent so much time there… would I still land there? Not a good thing. He hated Portuguese and a pirate ship is no place for a woman.
Then there’s the guilty pleasures. First – least said the best – we’ll just say I could very well end up in vintage metropolis (the vintage being circa sixties) or Duckburg, or this little village which still and always resists the invader (yes, my home village. No. I mean the homeland of Asterix and Obelix.)
And then there’s Patricia Wentworth. Don’t judge me. She’s pretty good with the Cinderella formula…
Interestingly ALMOST all my movies are guilty pleasures: Independence Day, Galaxy Quest, Prince of Egypt, The Incredibles, Grosse Pointe Blank, 1776 (sit down, John,) Chicago, Romeo + Juliet (DO NOT judge me!), Sliding Doors and the A & E six hour version of Pride and Prejudice which is reserved fro when I’m ill and need to park somewhere that long. It is nice to doze to, on the sofa, in front of TV.
So… What is YOUR number?

I  was going to put up Sabrina Chase’s post on create space, but she sent it to me on Google document share.  Since my only google email is Goldport Press, I had to ask permission to view it and… argh.

So…

The other post I was going to do (if you get the idea this is one of those “I was going to do this” days you are right was on old friends – old books I read and re-read when I’m too fried for anything else.  (Reading new material requires emotional investment and half the time I just don’t have the spoons.)

But I woke up thinking again of Wombat Socho’s question “Why are so many SF writers on the left?”  He could have expanded it if he moved in my circles to “Why are most writers on the left?” and this could be expanded to “Why are most artists on the left?” and “Why are most professors on the left?” and “why are most soft scientists on the left?” and “Why are most journalists on the left?” and “why are most civil servants on the left?” and “Why are most teachers on the left?”

I’m going to attempt a more comprehensive answer than I gave before.

Part of it is that in SF at least, our “ancestors” were men of the left, at least for a period of time.  This came in early 20^th century and was part of a belief in “scientific governance.”  (Avert your eyes, my friends.)

Part of it is that any non hard-scored field in which a vile prog gets a foot in power will become completely vile prog within ten years.  This is because we hire for a lot of things but vile progs hire for only ONE thing, and they will bring in more of them and ONLY more of them.  This is how foundations started by conservatives are to the left of Lenin in three generations.

Part of it – at least in my opinion, and I saw this stuff on three continents – is that the Soviet Union made the “commanding heights of culture” an objective to take over, and paid for it.

All of those are contributing factors, and I’m not denying it.

On the other hand, we might take in account the … essence of the field.  The way you become successful in a field, the way you’re picked for your chance at success.

Something I’ve always been very aware of with my own field is the enormous role “luck” plays in it.  Okay, not always.  When I was a green writer, knee high to a grasshopper, I thought that if I got ANYTHING rejected, it was all because there was something wrong with it.  This leads you down the chute of the “must rewrite” and you might never emerge.

Was something wrong with my early efforts?  Tons.  My first world in and of itself was unpublishable in any sane world (now that the world isn’t sane I’m contemplating an imprint and name JUST for it.  It will probably sell two copies.  OTOH the world being infinitely insane, it might make me a millionaire.  I’d like to be a millionaire.)  Then there was the fact I had to LEARN plotting like babies learn to walk.  Tons of tumbles.  But, of the 13 years till I sold my first short story, I’d say for a good ten years I was doing publishable work, some of it brilliant.  (Well, DST was written in this period, and though re-written before publication, large swathes are the same)  Three other books written at this time have been published, as have about 50 short stories, most of them at pro rates.

So, why couldn’t I get anything but straight out standard rejections?

Well, there were tons of reasons, including the fact that in my day you were more likely to get an acceptance if the editor knew you by sight, and I had no money to go to conventions or workshops for most of that time.  Then a lot of it is that I didn’t get the political slant.  BUT a lot of it was just luck.  Later on, as an established writer, I had two occasions (one a novel series, and one a short story) in which I got rejected then accepted by a publisher who had no memory of having rejected me.

I suppose this is gone, in the era of electronic submissions, but in the times we sent out paper submissions, between the “send back the paper” and the “You may discard this copy” there was a shining moment for serendipity.  Say editor got your story.  Read it, or at least gave it a cursory look.  He already has an evil cow story for his magazine that month.  Toss your story on pile on desk, send back rejection.

Two months later he’s putting together a new issue and starts clearing the old submission pile.  Comes across your story.  Wow, evil cows.  He could totally use that.  Reads it through, sends you an acceptance.

Now, by the times this happened to me, I was a “pro” and those sales were nice, but not make or break.  BUT when you need those essential first sales for the cover letter, luck like that can make the difference between another year spinning your wheels and not.

By the time I broke in, I was very aware of this element of luck.  I had friends who wrote as well as I did or better, but hadn’t sold.  And other people – my husband – sold his first short story to Analog after about a year of writing.  Now, he’s talented – of course – but the luck was also with him.

In fact, one thing we quickly become aware of is that talent is sort of pre-requisite, but from there one…

Well, we’ll put it this way, you have to be COMPETENT to have a career (though not to publish) but how much success you have from there is dependent on other factors.  In our field, other than luck breaking in, you needed luck with covers and with a publisher who REALLY would push you.  The last often had more to do with your physical appearance, whether you’d gone to college with the editor, and your political color.

Add all those factors in, and what it meant is that the difference between a mega bestseller and someone with ten novels under the bed and no credits was… luck.

This is a corrosive state of affairs.

Yes, I’m aware that the world isn’t fair.  BUT humans feel a need to believe it is.  This makes us very uncomfortable in any situation in which we have it rubbed in our nose that the world is very far from fair.

And because we are “fair” we NEED to believe that other’s success – and ours too – is all the result of merit.  Even when this is OBVIOUSLY, PATENTLY false.

(Hell, even when it’s true.  I recognize “voice” when I see it.  As in “this work has a very strong voice.”  And voice hides a multitude of sins, including silly plotting.  BUT I can’t tell you how to get “voice” or really what “voice” is.  All I can tell you is “this has it” and “this doesn’t.”  THAT fails to explain much of anything.)

Go back and look at those fields.  What are those fields?  Fields where gatekeepers determine your success.  The decision might be made on some element you just don’t see.  Or it might be made on your political views, on the fact you’re cute, on the fact the gatekeeper owes you a favor, or sheer luck.

Throw all those factors in and “random” is the best description for those who make it.

So… so… Humans being wired for fairness, under the old model most struggling and mid-list writers were sufferers of Stockholm syndrome.  We convinced ourselves the gatekeepers were right, and we piled on behind their decisions.  (Sometimes I still catch myself doing that.  No, seriously.)  Add to that that kissing upward might be the only way to help your career, and you have a caldron of hypocrisy and dissimulation, part of which involved lying to yourself.

The other side of this was envy and resentment.  Because you can only lie to yourself so far, if you’re even halfway good, you’re going to resent everyone who gets bigger and who is worse than you.  (And there will be a lot of those.)  But you can’t say anything – gatekeepers, remember? – so you seethe in silence.  There were writers I simply couldn’t read because it was like having my face rubbed in their oh so obviously inferior craft (and yes, voice.  I know it when I see it) but they were getting pushed and outselling me by a thousand.  And everytime I came across their pap political correctness that earned them the push, the book would get thrown hard enough to dent the walls.  We only have so many walls.

This has changed.  It is still this way for the Prisoners-of-Traditional and over the next couple of years, as the system crumbles, there will be some interesting episodes of hysteria.  I suspect stuff like “you will not call us ladies” is an effort to distinguish oneself in the “lefter than you” category and get some push or – the state the field is in – some sales, under any circumstances.

But for those of us in Indie…

I’m not saying luck doesn’t have a place.  Yes, it does.  But luck is understandable.  And most of the time it’s not exactly luck.  I can look, say, at a mil sf novel selling better than anything I have out indie and go “Well, there’s huge hunger.”  And what is keeping me from writing one?  Well, I don’t want to.  I don’t think I can do it competently.  BUT that doesn’t mean I can’t write space opera with military overtones.  It just goes on the back burner.  As does writing romance.  And I collect data on what does well and try to reason why, which satisfies my feeling that my fate is in my hands.

That’s the huge difference.  In traditional publishing, the gatekeepers had all the power.  To succeed you had to surrender.

I know it’s the same in the soft sciences, in education, in journalism.  The difference between a superstar and a competent practitioner is… How do hit the gatekeepers?  Do they like you?

That system breeds the sort of double think last seen in the soviet union, where even the victims of it pretend to support it.

Fortunately most writers who want to take the opportunity are now free.  Which means we can support and help each other, and this is enough.  We can also take control of our own fate.

I look forward with interest as innovation sets the other fields free.

The totalitarian mentality will remain for a while, out of habit (as I said, even I have to fight the reflex, now and then.)  But in the end it will be individual ability and responsibility that will win out.  And I think that will change the type of work and the type of mind in those fields.  (Except maybe federal bureaucrats, unless our system REALLY changes.)

For now, knowing the lock is approaching the key is enough.

You know, as though I didn’t have enough to worry about, particularly when it comes to A Few Good Men, a book I worried about before it was even written, after it was written, and now that it’s published, the world has now gone bananas.  I mean, more so than usual.

I expected some people would object to the character’s sexual orientation.  It never occurred to me that ANYONE would take issue with the Usaian religion.  At least it never occurred to me someone would take issue with it seriously.  I thought people might roll their eyes, or grin, or say “OMG, don’t go L. Ron Hubbard on us, Sarah.”

Then came this review of a game by a colleague of mine, over at PJM:  Walter Hudson, on the anti-gospel of Bioshock Infinite.

First, let me point out that I have no interest in the games and that the best I can say about the designers is that the worldbuilders are the product of American self-hating schools and were probably raised on the gospel of Howard Zinn.  However, Hudson’s pov is, to put it mildly, weird also.

I particularly like the point where he more or less concedes that to make a religion out of adherence to the US constitution would be evil and anti-Christian because, well, all humans are evil and stuff.

Having wakened this morning to find out that the tough grrrls purity brigade Ladies Victorian Morals And Purity Society that SFWA has become is now hunting for Mike Resnick for the dual crimes of a) calling women “ladies” and b) pointing out that skin on covers sells to women as well as men, I feel like I’m inside a tiltawhirl.

When did the two sides exchange places, again?  When did the left, once upon a time the purveyor of free love, freer skin and the more pervy the better stories become the purity squad, and when did the right decide that there would be something wrong with believing in the constitution?

In other words – have you all gone frigging mad?

I’ll deal with the Resnick issue later – aka the “SFWA makes itself even MORE irrelevant, now approaching black-hole irrelevancy levels” fuss.  That will probably lead to several columns and allow me to set several pious and self satisfied ladies grrls on fire.

Right now I’ll explain the why and wherefore of the Usaian religion and also why – while of course Bioshock is doing it WRONG – to consider it a terrible idea that someone should believe in the constitution with religious fervor is inane from someone purporting to be a conservative.

First let’s define religion.  Religion is a set of beliefs that can’t be fully justified by rational observation.  A lot of our nominally Christian – or atheist – population in fact holds fast to several religious beliefs.  For instance, the belief that calling a woman a “lady” is a mark of disrespect.  Or the belief that only males like to see the opposite (or same) sex naked. But I digress.  Then there is the belief that every single human being is harming planet Earth by existing (as if you know, we were somehow intrinsically different from every other species on the planet); the belief we’re “overpopulated” at a time when people enjoy more living space per individual and better food than at any time in history; the belief all cultures are equally valid, particularly those that cause death and horror; the belief …. Should I go on?  I could go on for years.  All of these have the force of religion in influencing everyday life, often in contra-rational ways.

But Sarah, you’ll say, most of these beliefs don’t promise heaven, and they’re not supernatural.  Were you under the impression all religions needed to be?  At its most primitive, religion is a set of appeasing, fetishistic (not in that sense, grrrls purity league!) behaviors that are supposed to keep the wrath of the gods away from you.  And actually, in most cases these modern versions do believe in a paradise of sorts “if everyone were enlightened like me, then we would live in this sort of paradise.”

Given humanity and the limits of the human mind – unlike Walter Hudson, I don’t believe we’re inherently bad.  I believe we’re inherently limited and unable to fully grasp the results of our actions and about evenly divided between good and bad impulses (as a species.  As an individual, your mileage may vary.) – we’re all going to take in any number of beliefs as a sort of unexamined religion and adhere to them with cultic fervor.

My idea, of course (though it started as a joke in Darkship Thieves) is that the Usaian religion was created rationally and on purpose by people who knew history and who believed that the best way to ensure the return of the constitutional republic was to encode those beliefs they had anyway as a set of dogma and ritual.  This would both bind their community and give them the ability to transmit the religion forward through the generations.

The idea was something like “we all got to believe in something.  I believe I’ll create a community which will lead to a society in which eventually individual liberty can flourish.”

But Sarah, you say you’re a believer.  Isn’t that heresy?

Why?

Did I at any time say that no Usaian could have another religion (or none at all?)  I don’t believe so.  In fact, I explicitly stated the opposite in the book.  There are people who are Usaians who don’t believe in G-d, but who believe that the principles set forth in the constitution are the best form of organization any society has ever had (as judged by results.)  Some others (some are explicitly Christian subgroups) believe G-d especially blessed the US and will make sure the idea doesn’t vanish forever from the Earth.  Yes, that is a form of heresy.  But many of us believe G-d helps those who help themselves, and also that he wants the best for us, and this nation conceived in liberty is the best for us.

But when things get tough, people default to community and religion, and having the beliefs explicitly stated and surrounded by rituals gave them a chance of withstanding the centuries.

But… but… but… you had stuff about the founders as prophets, and the return of the George.  Yeah, well.  I grew up in an OLD culture, where a lot of pre-existing religious beliefs got accreted onto Catholicism.  I kind of have a feeling that sort of thing, through five hundred years, would sort of develop.  Though I’ll point out that’s a “folk religion” version, not the religion that unites them all.  There’s also hints that at least some of the people (the Remys – or at least the Remys as viewed by Lucius, which is NOT the same thing)  believe in reincarnation either earthly or into a world of liberty elsewhere.

Am I promoting the idea that the founders were prophets?  Well, I’m allowed to believe anyone and everyone can be divinely inspired, and I think there was a miraculous convergence of events and men at that time.  (If you want to know how miraculous read about it.)  On the other hand, no, I’m not lighting candles before statues of Ben Franklin who likely would have pissed himself laughing at the idea, anyway.

What I am doing is starting from an idea, and then having people behave as people.

This is where the Bioshock designers fail.  Starting from the constitution it’s D*mn hard to get a fascist state, unless you toss the constitution out the window and replace it or make it irrelevant (something we’re on our way to doing.)  Starting from communism, it’s inevitable that you WILL end up in a totalitarian society.

But to say they are wrong because humans are inherently evil is yet another form of heresy.  If man were inherently evil then the path to redemption would be making itself not-man.  This leads to some of the more interesting heresies of the middle ages, newfangled cults like the Heaven’s Gate Cult, and of course Environmentalism.

As a religious person, I believe that humans are inherently FLAWED.  I believe that G-d can help heal our flaws while keeping us human.  That’s my religious belief.  You’re not required to buy into it, and I’m not going to argue it.

As a human being who has studied history, I believe the American system of government has the best results – flawed though it is – of any other system ever tried.  And I will do my d*mndest to make sure it neither vanishes from the world, nor, should it vanish, remain forgotten.

I am a Usaian.

UPDATE:  In case you’re confused about the disappearing post: it’s over at Mad Genius Club, where I’ll be conducting a Cover and Blurb Clinic.  That is if any of you want to play.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case this week, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

In The Halls Of The Fish King

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of The Earl of Savage:

I beg the gentle readers of this tale to believe I’m not a ninny.  I was not the sort of little girl who demanded her brother bring her kitten back to life – oh, I admit, once, but I was very young and Jonathan explained to me the idea of necromancy and I didn’t do it again – I didn’t cry when I got hit on the face by a ball, I didn’t complain to nanny when Jonathan’s friends played horrid practical jokes on me, and I never cried to mamma that I was left standing in the chaperon corner, without dancing, ball after ball.

Life and its unfairness were early apparent to me in that mamma preferred my insipid sisters to Jonathan, who might be a rogue but is certainly interesting.  And by the age of five, I’d come to realize that unfairness cannot be stopped or cured.

So it was a shock to hear the words emerge from my lips, in the wowwwowww tones of Betty’s cry, “But I don’t wish to marry youoooooo.”

It is gratifying to me to report this must not be the image I present normally, because the fish man looked shocked.  His eyes widened as he stared at me, and then he glanced sideways at other fishmen who stood on the steps of his throne and were probably his counselors.  You know the type of look.  It’s exactly the same look gentlemen will give you when you start crying at a ball because someone stepped on your flounces and tore them.  Not that I’ve ever done it.  Well, perhaps my very first ball, but only because the gentleman – would you believe an officer of the Private Guard? – tried to convince me it had been my fault that had somehow got my flounces under his big clumsy foot.  After mamma had given me a lecture about how one didn’t argue with gentlemen, certainly not in public, and how this would give me a reputation as an archwife, I’d decided that was another of the manifestations of unfairness and kept my mouth shut, even when gentlemen would say blatantly false things, or talk about my inferior female mind.  Instead, I’d amused myself by thinking of replies to give them, but had never uttered.

Of course, mamma says it’s because of that that I spend so much time in the chaperones’ corner, even when there are more gentlemen than ladies at a ball.  She thinks it’s because I refuse to utter and glare at gentlemen as though they were “the lowest thing in creation.”  I don’t think so.  I think most of those gentlemen are used to being glared at because they are the lowest thing in creation.  I believe I stay in the chaperones’ corner because I’m not beautiful, and I’m not even plain in the common style.  My face is too narrow and long.  My chin is too pointy.  My hair looks rather like overgrown black brambles, and my eyes are dark and with no brilliancy.

Which is why it would be better for everyone if I became a pirate, but certainly not if I became the wife of a fish man.  For one, mamma would never approve.

The fish-king looked scared like any mortal man would at my wowowowow exclamation, but then laughed, as though the looks on his henchmen’s faces had reassured him.  “And yet, madam, you will undoubtedly marry me.  Your enthusiasm is not needed, only that you do it.  And when I marry you, you shall have the consolation of a great position and domain over all my subjects.”

And then, before I could realize what he was about to do — not that I could have done much about it, with his guards behind me – he came down the steps.  His movement struck me paralyzed with horror, because though he looked like a man and he wore a gentleman’s clothes, he didn’t move like any man I’d ever met.  There must be extra joints in his legs, if legs they were, or perhaps they were merely articulated like the tail of a fish, because when he walked his legs swayed and rippled, in an entirely wrong way.

I felt my gorge rise, but could not move, and next thing I knew he was holding me in his arms.  His arms were very cold, and he smelled overpoweringly of fish.  And then he kissed me, and his kiss tasted of day-old sardines.  Fortunately I must have repulsed him as much as he repulsed me, because he let go almost immediately and looked around at his court, and forced a huge smile – this up close, you could tell it was forced – and said, “Welcome my bride, denizens of the deep.  With this marriage we shall keep the intruder at bay and the doom from befalling us for yet another generation.  With this marriage we shall be saved.”

The din was unbelievable, and their voices were as weirdly wrong as his walk.  Once, when I was very little, I’d tried to talk into a glass of milk.  Their voices which were fine individually, when in a chorus sounded just like that.

And he really must not like the feel of me, because as soon as they shut up a little, he looked around and said, with an almost frantic effect, “Take my bride and her attendant to the royal chamber and attire her for the ceremony.”

I had a strong feeling no ceremony engaged in down here would be binding on me, though Mama was quite likely to make me abide by it, because it would get me off her hands, mind.  On the other hand, if they used magic, they could bind me to this man… well… man shaped heel, and make it impossible for me to escape.  That meant I must escape as soon as possible.

I couldn’t do it from this room.  Too many people.  People shaped sardines, at any rate. I wondered about the bridal chamber. Perhaps there would be fewer.

As though in answer to my prayers, three fish-ladies detached themselves from the crowd.  I noted that they were pretty, or at least would be considered pretty in my world, if they didn’t move in as weird a way as their king.

They undulated towards me, on whatever passed for their legs, and they bowed to me and to Betsy, for whom the novel experience was shocking enough to keep her thankfully mute.  I think they introduced themselves to me, but I paid no attention at all, though I retained the vague knowledge that they all claimed to be princesses.  Whether that meant they were the sisters of the fish-king I didn’t know.

Mama had once gone on a tirade about how one could never be sure of foreign princes and princesses, because what Russians called a prince might mean a member of the royal family, or, for all we knew, might mean a really good lawyer.  She was exaggerating and perhaps exercised by the recent intrusion into our king’s court by an endless stream of personages claiming to be high Russian nobility.

But if one couldn’t be sure with a human court, how much less could one be sure with a fishy one.

For all I knew they all thought they were princesses compared to land people.  But I followed them, and they showed a very proper deference, turning back to bow at me, only I wish they wouldn’t, because, really, they did not move right and it made me feel queasy.

They took me into a vast, vast room, as large as the throne room, made of an upturned ship and filled with what must be salvage.  At least I don’t think they could – anywhere in this watery world – find enough wood for that highly wrought vanity, that massive four poster bed.  And this left aside the row upon row of dresses hanging all along a wall.

The dresses had been embellished sea style with pearl rows and bits of shell, but they were undoubtedly material from my world.  At least they didn’t look water stained, so I thought likely they’d been taken from sealed trunks in ship’s storage area, and not from the bodies of dead drowning victims, a thought that caused me to shiver.

Upon a chair was the most ornate dress I’d ever seen, and from its cut not less than fifty years old.  Yards and yards of silk lace, and row upon row of pearls and rubies.  I wondered what ship could have sunk unnoticed with such a cargo, and then I thought that since this watery world wasn’t really in our world, that meant that it could have sunk anywhere.  Then I wondered if it had been caused to sink so I would have a dress, and I felt as though there were ice inside my stomach.

And then…

Betsy was crying quietly.  The silly goose had got her soaking handkerchief from her sleeve and was attempting to dry her eyes with it.

And my attendants were repeating for the third time, that I should undress, so that they could help me into the dress.  Well, then.  It was now or never.

I’d best, and quickly, get rid of them, so that I could get out of here.  I didn’t know if they had enough magic to stop a transport spell, but they might manage it, or else they might come with me, which would be just as bad.

When leaving home I’d used a purchased spell because I’d thought that would make me harder to track.  Well, so much for that.  This time, I’d do this in my own way and with my own powers.  As for where to go – home to recoup and find out how to go anywhere else, would have to do for now.  Mama would be shocked at my hair, and likely watch me like a hawk for a while, but she’d soon forget because Jonathan would do something to scare or shock her.  And then I could try again.  Given my recently acquired aversion to fish maybe pirate queen wasn’t the best profession for me.  Maybe I should become a mountain bandit.

I put on my most haughty airs – it helps to imitate mama – and said, “I will not undress in the presence of strangers.  Leave us.  My attendant will help me.”

To my surprise it worked.  They bowed and left.  But I was sure they’d be watching at the door, and when Betsy started warbling, “Oh, miss,” I put my finger to my lips to keep her quiet, then put my arm around her waist, and started to build the transport spell.  It felt like I was working against a great, wet weight, like trying to jump from under a soaked wool blanket, but I was always good at contriving ways to do magical things, mostly because I could never do them the normal way.  Possibly because of papa’s elven heritage.

Just before I put the last bit of spell in place and thought of home with all my might, I saw a long, long coil of pearls on the vanity.  GOOD rosy pearls, which should allow me to endow my sisters and have enough to live independently my whole life.  Maybe I’d not need to be a mountain bandit after all.  I reached over, took them, clutched them to me, and, holding Betsy, put the last key in place and thought home.

In the next moment I was falling onto a man.  The impact of my fall caused him to fall backwards.  Betsy landed beside me, on her behind, with a splash.

The man landed with a splash too.  We were in bracken water to our ankles, and if this were home, someone was going to get told off for flooding the basements of the house.

“Who are you?” I asked the man.

But he didn’t answer me.  He was looking behind me, his eyes wide, and he said one word, “Hell.”

Yesterday one of you reprobates called my attention to a post in Stacey McCain’s blog, by co-blogger Wombat-socho, about sci fi, mil sci fi, the attraction of sci fi authors to totalitarian philosophies, and the seeming monopoly Baen has on Mil SF.

And I realized it had been a long time since I did a post on the state of SF.  Or the state of the state in SF.  Or something.

I posted a comment with my human wave post, thinking it would answer at least some of it: I do talk about sf being taken over by grey goo and our chance to take it back.  But I knew the post was at best tangential and his questions needed more explanation.

So, let’s start from the top – Wombat points out that we, the Odds, the Geeks, the kids who could quote from Star Trek in High School (yeah, I could too, though you’d have needed to use the iron maiden to get me to admit it.  In public I’d tell you Star Trek wasn’t “real” Science Fiction.  That was Simak and Heinlein and others.), the people who grew up able to debate for hours the comparative strengths of Heinlein and Asimov…  We’ve won.  I realized this when there were programs with battles of robots on TV.  I realized that when things like Myth Busters became nation wide successes.  I realized that when most new blockbuster movies drew on science fiction.

Wombat goes from that to the politics of non-Baen Sci Fi authors without ever touching a central question in this: possibly because he’s not aware there’s a question to be asked.  He might not know that despite the phenomenal ratings of movies with sci fi or fantasy themes, despite the fact that sci fi and fantasy has leaked into everyday life, despite the fact that you can mention games and movies with a basis in sci fi and fantasy and every will understand…  Science fiction and fantasy books almost don’t sell.

There are exceptions to this, of course.  George R. R. Martin has a license to coin money, but only because of the TV series.  However, almost every other sci fi or fantasy success has to lean heavily on another genre that does well on its own.  Thus Harry Potter really leaned heavily on YA and on boarding school adventures (which used to be wildly popular in Europe in the twentieth century.  I know, I grew up on them.)  And – arguably – the most successful sub-genre in science fiction and fantasy, currently is the Urban-fantasy with various shadings of paranormal romance which leans heavily on romance and – at the other end – on erotica.

But by and large, your average science fiction and fantasy author going through conventional houses for the last twenty years was cautioned that he or she had in fact found a way to go broke slowly.  We were told to have another job.  I was strongly advised to get a job teaching in college to support my writing habit.  I was told that print runs for science fiction and fantasy were small and getting smaller every year.

No one tells romance writers this.  They do tell it to mystery writers and more on that later.

The exception to this is Baen.  Baen makes its living on Sci fi and fantasy, and doesn’t seem to think we need either YA or insane amounts of sex to make it saleable.  There is a reason for this too.

Part of the blame for this is Robert A. Heinlein’s.  It pains me to say it, but there it is.  You see, in the beginning there were the pulps.  The pulps were written for those the glitterati hated: schoolboys, young men in manual professions, young women who’d never admit to reading them, anyone who wanted a sense of adventure.  Great literature they were not – nor did they aspire to being.  They were what comics used to be before they got all snooty and “graphic novelly.”  If you were caught reading a pulp mag you were assumed to be no great intellectual shakes.  However, there was a good chance that the people you went to school or worked with were reading them too.

They were entertainment for normal people.

It is part of the history of science fiction that Heinlein made the genre respectable, dragging it from magazines to the book shelves, and giving it respectability.  Parents who scanned his YA were more likely than not to approve.  The books dealt with serious themes in a serious manner, just projected to the future.

Unfortunately this made the genre respectable enough that the generation who came next – the new wavers – tried to get it a seat at the table of “respectable literary fiction.”  This folly lead to a whole of lot of nonsense, mostly belly-button-gazing, dystopia, a heck of a lot of sex and a “I Hate Humanity” ethos.  (At least Athos only hated women.  Never mind.)

This happened because by the time SF/F tried to get taken seriously as Literature, Literature was going through its hysterical retreat phase.  What I mean is that literature, like most other arts of the Western civilization went into a sort of denial of themselves after WWI.  It is something I’ve mentioned before.  The entire civilization is seriously shell shocked and kind of up its own behind, and the arts reflect that.  Part of what Western Civ arts have become is a toy of the elites (aka status markers) and at the same time a way to deconstruct civilization.  This is why we get “installations” of an author’s excretions acclaimed as art.

Literature got kind of like that too.  I know.  I have a degree in the stuff.  I still remember – not fondly – the novel that tried to get away with “deconstructing the idea that something has to happen.”  But the sad thing is that most modern novels try to do that too – and sci fi jumped immediately on the high literature bandwagon.  A lot of novels that are taken seriously are literally about nothing.  In fact having a lot of sex (because that proves you’re mature, doncha know) a lot of victimhood (particularly female victimhood, because we’ve run male readers off the genre in droves) and a lot of nihilistic despair passes for deep thought and philosophical maturity.

The problem is that science fiction lost its vast number of middle-of-the-road readers with this. The people only looking for fun.  On the other hand, it failed to gain the high brow readers it craved.  In the world of snobs, sci-fi origins in “bug eyed monsters” tainted it.  People like Margaret Atwood writing – mediocre – science fiction refuse to admit it’s science fiction, because that would make them “non serious” and stop their award money.

Sci fi, in fact, resembles the high school girl who left her nerdy boyfriend to compete for the captain of the football team, and the more the jock rejects her, the more hysterically she tries to ape the cheerleaders and proved she’s worthy.

It is more like that than you think.  Because the only people who remained behind in science fiction were those who were truly odd and who liked the themes so much that they’d endure everything to get their sci fi fix, the field started suffering from its own kind of “isolated culture” syndrome.  They had to prove – to themselves, if not to anyone else – that the reason they were shunned and considered weird was that they were smarter, better, more “special” than the crowds.

So sci fi (and to some extent fantasy though that was almost always more popular, first by relying on Tolkien and producing an endless stream of quest fantasies, and then moving on to historical fantasies and others – fantasy was less part of the pulp culture and, I guess, had less to prove) became weirder and weirder.  It also became further and further left, an effect of most of the gate keepers (editors, agents, publishing houses) being men (and women) of the left, and of sf wanting to earn “recognition” and “legitimacy.”

By the time I came in, the structures of what we’ll call “recognition reward” in SF were so far to the left that having a “young communists” club among sf writers is a given, and that people proudly proclaiming themselves communists at panels is also a given.  However, I once was treated to a half an hour rant by an editor who thought libertarians were the devil incarnate, and also thought (!) they wanted to ban the internal combustion engine.

Whether the genre by itself also attracts statists is something completely different.  I don’t think so.  It did, early in the 20^th century, but early in the 20^th century people ASSUMED that the future was statist.  It was part of the view of history then.  It’s possible that the idea of creating a world and setting up how the future will go is, inherently, something that attracts people who think society should be planned.  Again I don’t think so.  I think the reason this happened was the gatekeepers and their twin drive for recognition and “improving message.”

If you refused to play that game, you were considered at best a light weight and at worst an enemy.  And then your only chance to be published was Baen.

I said Baen was doing better with the public – if not with the critics – than most science fiction for a reason. The reason is that Baen does sci fi as the movies (and games) do sci fi.  It is the pulps cleaned up and with real science (and history.)  While the books can have a message (us SF folk are horribly opinionated.  Part of it is that we read so much history) the message is not why the book is written.  The book needs, most of all, to be about people who have exciting adventures in a future that can be wonderful or horrible (or in the case of my futures, yes) but which must be interesting.

And that is what makes Baen different.  The fact that Baen also publishes every political color on the spectrum makes them a pariah with the con organizers, the award givers, and the layer upon layer of status seekers, but if one of my kids’ friends read sf at all, he was likely to read Baen – and I once got a huge discount on an appliance purchase because I wrote for Baen.  (Turned out the entire staff of the store read Baen.  You’re not going to find that for any other publisher.)

Now, is Baen a mega blockbuster selling house?  No.  But when you consider that until the last two years or so it was hard to find Baen in most stores (the store managers, too, and their bosses, were status seekers and knew Baen was “fascist” because it publishes writers of every political stripe, from communist to libertarian.)

As for Baen’s affinity for mil sf – part of this is because when you write the big stories, the important stories, in a future history, you’re going to end up with battles and wars and revolutions.  Even I, who am not a mil-sf writer (not that I have anything against it, but I lack the background) have ended up writing a story about a revolution.  Well, several novels.  That’s why it’s called “the Earth Revolution.”  I think it will be four books.  Or maybe five.  Could be six.  The other part of it is that men as readers have been run off sf/f by men-as-wimps and men-as-villains.  You literally couldn’t sell a novel with an heroic male except to Baen when I broke in.  You might still nto be able to.

Part of the problem with the rest of SF is that it’s tied itself to such a fringe leftist philosophy that with few exceptions, they can’t even write mil sf or if they do it is to prove that “war never solved anything” which means the average person who has graduated Kindergarten is going to throw the book against the wall with gusto (and occasionally with disgust, too.)

Now… is Baen serving the entire market available for this?  I don’t think so.  Since the advent of indie I’ve seen the hunger out there for the old style, fun SF.  Did you know that right now if you want to make a mega hit right off the gate in indie publishing, you’re better off writing mil sf or even space opera than Romance?  And Romance, as a genre published by traditional publishing outsells science fiction more than ten to one.

But the hunger is there, and it’s unsatisfied.  And it turns out the market for fun science fiction (and fantasy) was not dead, just sleeping.  Men (and women, but men were the ones who walked away in droves) who thought they’d gotten over science fiction are coming back in droves and making some authors very happy.

It’s a great time to write science fiction and fantasy.  We not only have a shelf of our own, but it’s an exploded shelf fitting for an expanded universe.

All those people who like sci fi movies and themes?  They’re only waiting to enjoy books that are as much fun.

The critics and the status seekers won’t like us, but that don’t make no never mind.  We’ll overwhelm them with a wave of human-positive, fun science fiction and fantasy.  A Human Wave.