Working For The Beer Money

I grew up in an odd time, in a very odd place. In practicality this means my reading had to suffer through two disparate but essentially the same blights.

When I grew up most of the books considered suitable for a young girl my age (what Regency Romances would consider a young girl of quality) dripped in Catholic and/or quasi-Victorian morality. No story could pass without beating home the “point” of the story. This annoyed me even in stories I otherwise liked. My brief and intense fascination with fairy tales for example led to reading all of the Countess of Segur – however I kept rolling my eyes at her heavy handed morality lessons.

I don’t remember if the Countess of Segur’s books (I wonder if I can now download them somewhere for free?) had that most ridiculous of bits at the end – the clarifying moral – it went something like this “Moral of the story: if you don’t do onto others as you wish it were done onto you, you will come to no good.”

These often caused me to fling books against walls.

And then the Portuguese revolution happened and the ethos of the sixties hit Portugal only one decade later.

Understand, my dears, by then I was so totally hardened against these didactic lessons in my books that it took me about -7 seconds to identify the new morals. Less than that to start spoofing it in the essays that guaranteed me As in school. I’m still rather proud – as far as one can be of a piece on cleaning ladies that I think my teacher slept clutching for several years, she was that fond of it. It was about the poor exploited cleaning lady who had to clean other people’s dirty houses, and how her knees hurt and she was illiterate and… I didn’t mention the fact I actually knew a few cleaning ladies who – in the seventies job crunch – were college graduates. Or that the good ones could clean a house in a couple of hours, clean five houses a day, probably not pay taxes (they were paid in folding money) and lived much better than my family (which I grant you was in deep financial trouble at the time.)

[Still later much too long after this, only least in the last few years, I’ve learned that doing that sort of thing is easy but makes it hard to live with myself. Perhaps it is the onset of middle age, but I’m simply not willing to play that game anymore.]

So, what does that have to do with anything? Well… The thing is those “morals” never left most books. I know why. At least until very recently, if you wanted to even get published, you had to make certain “identifying noises” to let the publishers know you were on their side. This is usually the fashionable/academic side, since that’s what gets identified as “smart” and most editors/publishers are liberal arts graduates.

If you are rolling your eyes at me, try this experiment – go read my book, Darkship Thieves, and have the main character be a male. You’ll never sell it (even if you adjust the romance <G>). No, I’m absolutely serious – I tried. For thirteen years. I got told my main character was a psychopath. If you have an action adventure character with er… marked character flaws, you can sell the character as a she, not as a he. This is by no means the only trope one has to put in. I know for a fact, without being told – I’m a liberal arts graduate, thank you – that if I want to sell the book about the overthrow of a murderous religion, it best be a patriarchal one, not a matriarchal one. The other things are so ingrained, I can’t even list them, but I’ll know if I’m about to break them. (Baen is the exception for this, btw.)

So, what is this in the name of? Well, you know my theory of writing doesn’t include sending messages. For that, there’s western union.

That said, there’s always some message in books. Sometimes it’s dictated by the logic of the books. Sometimes it’s the authors’ own opinions leaking in – we’re human and we write with our lives and experience, so that will come in in world building etc.

Weirdly I don’t resent even messages I violently disagree with if the story is good enough and the development logical.

What I do resent is unoriginality, the lack of any new thought attached to old tropes. (Another thing I resent is establishment darlings preening themselves on talking truth to power – sweeties, if your publisher is one of the big ones, is behind you all the way, and started you off with enough push to have a print run in the tens of thousands, you have my congratulations and a little bit of envy, but you CANNOT have the anti-establishment mantle. Sorry, no.) I hate “boring”. And I resent long breaks in books to explain to me how caring/intelligent/politically correct you are. Oh, please. Tell the story and get out of your own way. If you must put politics/social thought in, do what Heinlein did in the earlier books, and sweep it under the rug or make it part of the story.

As for authors’ opinions OUTSIDE their books – by and large, unless they become a form of literary tourettes that leaks into the novels – I couldn’t care about it one way or another. (If one of my favorite authors doesn’t write for Nation, she should. Which is fine, provided she doesn’t write THAT in her books.) I might (do) make fun of them as I make fun of a lot of other people’s opinions particularly when those border on religion (is it not written “One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh”? Why, yes it is, by Heinlein, I think.) But then I make fun of everything including myself, because if I don’t laugh I’ll start to cry and no one wants that.

I’ll say as Phillip K. Dick is rumored to have said of Heinlein – and as I say of Phillip K. Dick – I don’t agree with a single thing he’s ever written, but I enjoy his novels. (And sometimes I can even go so far as to say – “I don’t agree with a single thing he’s ever written, or ever thought, but I love him as a person.” – which describes half my friendships.)

It is no secret to anyone that Darkship Thieves is a finalist for the Prometheus award, which is given to books of a certain political bend. I’m not going to say I put ANY political bend in there on purpose, but I’m also not going to apologize if it is there.

I’m only going to say the book is, first of all, a story. If it makes you think about the future, relations between men and women and – eventually, maybe, sort of – politics and economics, good. But I wrote it, as Heinlein said of his books “to entertain.” I’m competing with your beer money and I hope it – and the sequel – will be worth at least a six pack.

(And now I’m going to see if I can find the Countess of Segur’s books online.  Or maybe not.  No work would get done.)

Unrelated Update — Those of you who read Footprints in Your Heart about my fan/friend John aka Saint Basset in my conference being in hospital and needing prayers and thoughts — he’s home and much better, though still ill.  Thank you.