*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

*An additional note — the last several chapters haven’t been compiled into the er… compilation.  The last couple of months have been odd.  So you might have to do some hunting for them as you go.*

 

The Land, The King, The Magic

Nell couldn’t make much sense of where she’d fallen.  She was sure of only two things: There were two dragons in the room, and one of them was attacking Seraphim.

The second impression she got was that there were too many people, too many factions, a woman-shaped oak tree – of perhaps an oak-shaped woman-tree – growing branches towards one of the dragons, the other dragon reaching out a claw.

In the middle of all this,  she was conscious of one thing: Caroline, and the centaur Akakios and Michael, all young, were all under her protection and her responsibility.  In this room of intersecting attacks, she could not protect them, or not enough.

Across the room, Seraphim’s erstwhile – or was she still official – fiancée stopped pounding on the dragon wing and rounded on Nell, raising her hands in the initial evocation of power of every witch.

And Nell realized the crown she’s assumed – in ephigy, as it were, to get here, still existed and still weighed upon her.  If she were just a woman, any woman, as she’d thought, an Earth woman with some accidental power transported here she didn’t know how, and living in a fairytale, then none of this would matter, and the safest thing for her to do was to transport out and to ignore Avalon and its troubles.

But not only had she been told, and shown, this wasn’t true.  She could feel this wasn’t true.  She didn’t know where this room was, but she could feel it was home.  And she’d never had the title or honorifics of a princess, but she knew that she was the princess, the heir to the throne of Avalon.  And she’d never been responsible for other people – save Antoine when he’d got captured – but she was now responsible not just for the people in this room, but for all the people in Avalon.

She wasn’t sure what had been happening here, except she knew someone had kidnapped her as an infant and somehow kept her parents from searching for her – though they obviously missed her.  And she didn’t know how the intersecting currents of attack and defense in this room went, but she knew it couldn’t be good to have two dragons and a tree-woman in a place her magic identified as home.  And she didn’t know what Seraphim had been doing, but he looked very odd, as though – as though he were turning into glass – and there was filthy magic spinning around the room, enough magic to make the entire world dissolve, were it unleashed further.

Nell hadn’t learned anything about princessing, but one thing she did know.  In Avalon, magic was more than a way of achieving this or that result: it was woven into the physical existence of the very world.  And kingship was more than a political system: it was interwined and woven with the magic, one of the pillars of the world, and the reason that her disappearance as true heir had been so dangerous.

She could only do one thing, and, her eyes fixed on Seraphim’s fiancée across the room, lifting her hands to start an invocation that likely would blow up a room this full of magic, Nell did that thing: she raised her voice; she reached with all her being, she called with mind and magic and heredity, “I call the land.  I call the land to my help.”

From beside her came a smothered exclamation.  She was sure she’d misheard, because dukes didn’t swear like that, and even if they did, Seraphim wouldn’t have.  She’d learned to know him on Earth, and she should know some expressions simply weren’t in his vocabulary. “Oh, shit,” was one of those.

But before she could think it through, the room shook.  No, the entire building shook.  Not as an Earth quake, but as though  the building rested on a rug that had been given a good shake by a concerned housewife.  The building rolled.  From deep within it, past the door to the room, came screams and the sound like something really large made of glass had shattered in a million pieces.

But Nell couldn’t react, not even when Seraphim and the dragon vanished, and then Caroline and the centaur prince, and the tree and the man – Marlon Elfborn? – covered in blood.  Not even when the other dragon roared “Where did he go?” and bathed the entire room in a flame that wasn’t a flame but something other, something that seared the mind and twisted the magic.

She couldn’t move or say anything, even as Seraphim’s fiancée fell to her knees sobbing, and a man walking with the unsteady gait of a drunkard crossed the room in a shadowy, ghostly way that indicated he wasn’t fully there.

Nell couldn’t say anything, because in her mind was a voice.  Or perhaps it was not a voice but… something… a collection of noises that assembled into words, as though someone had orchestrated the grinding of rocks over millennia, the growing of trees over centuries, the growth of plants over seasons, and the buzzing of brief insects on a summer day into something coherent and joined together, which formed words.  “Yes?” the words said.   And then “Daughter?”

Nell turned all her attention inward tried to answer the call.

Suddenly, without a feeling of transition, certainly without passing through the betweener, she was somewhere else.

Deep underground.  Had to be.  There were earthen walls all around, it was warm, and Nell was there, alone, at the center of it.

From somewhere came the sound of a beating heart – a very loud beaten heart that, like the voice seemed to be composed of all sorts of small, natural sounds.

And then the voice came again, “Approach,” it said.  And Nell did, walking forward into the twisting and narrowing tunnel, towards a glow of fire and a feeling of warmth.

With our very own Cyn Bagley at her Scrambled Sage blog.  (Which might make a better read than my own post today, since I seem to be having issues ordering my thoughts.)

Oh, yeah, and Ganymede is free on the kindle till the 2nd.

And sort of blogtourish… I SWEAR I’m NOT drunk. (I was just utterly exhausted.)

I am still reading Paul Johnson – well, I’m not reading much, as any form of mental effort seems to result in lengthy naps.  I do think I’m over whatever the heck this was, but two and a half weeks of being ill, culminating in a stomach disturbance does leave you somewhat weakened.  So I’m reading this book in installments, mostly when I am eating or doing something else that won’t take a long time.  (I like books of essays or very short stories for this, because it allows me to read, then go back to what I was doing without being captured by a novel.)  I hate eating alone, so I read through it.

Anyway, one thing I’ve got as I read about all these founders of the currently predominating intellectual fashion, is that most of them hated people.  They “loved” broad categories of humans: the workers, the downtrodden, women, students, intellectuals.  They loved these classes in the abstract, often not knowing a single member of them, or if they do behaving horribly to the individual they knew.  In fact, that’s pretty much a given.  These men of intellect and supposed heart, usually left a wide swath of destruction in their personal lives – horribly mistreated parents, abandoned and mistreated women, emotionally crippled children, abused mistresses and unacknowledged illegitimate children.

I’d like to say this is because these thinkers and artists made a philosophy that dehumanizes people central to their life.  I’m not sure that’s the right way about though.

Reading about these people also brings a squirming sense of self-identification.  Oh, not fully – though for a mental packrat like me, it’s impossible not to sympathize with Marx’s issues with not fully integrating data – because their defects of character aren’t mine (though I have defects aplenty.)  In fact, in some ways they are almost the opposite.  But I can tell how they got there and by what pathway.  So could almost every reader of this blog.

To be absolutely blunt, most of these people were Odds, a name we came up with in the blog for those people who never quite fit in society, who are “goats” in the human flock of sheep.

These people are often smart, or at least test smart in IQ tests, which is one form of “smartness,” and are often identified as “autistic” of some form (About a year ago I had to bite my fingers hard not to tell an SF editor who was lamenting his son’s diagnosis as Aspergers, that I very much doubted the kid was any such thing, because the symptoms he listed were exactly the same as most people in SF/F and in fact a lot of Geeks:  Other kids at private school rejected him on sight and just didn’t like him; he was awkward for his age and could not ride a bike or jump rope; his fine motor control lagged his other development.  That pretty much fits everyone in my family as kids, with minor exceptions.  And NO ONE on my dad’s side has ever, that we know, been able to ride a bike or jump rope [something that bewilders my mother.]  Notwithstanding which some of us are socially gifted and almost the opposite of aspergers in affect.)  That diagnosis, as mentioned here, has got so broad as to be meaningless and seems to be in practicality “This one thing is not like the others.”

But they might not be smart across the board, and it seems to be more of a personality thing, or perhaps – who knows – a subtle body-clues thing.

Whatever causes it, the Odds don’t seem to fit in front the earliest age, and it seems to have nothing to do with personality as such.  You might have the brightest, happiest, most engaging toddler in the world, but he enters pre-school and you find the other kids overwhelmingly rejecting him, so he stands alone in the playground, while other kids play.

I am an odd Odd, which figures.  Until and unless I found myself in a position when other considerations made it impossible for me to have friends (a period of about two years when I learned what most other Odds experience their entire lives) or to be popular, I was always fairly popular.  Even when I couldn’t – motor control being a mess, though that might trace back to being premature – join in the agility games that were most of what girls in my elementary school played, I simply convinced them what they REALLY wanted to play was basically RPG with acting out of whatever book I’d read recently.  We played Robin Hood, and Three Musketeers, and War of The Roses, and World War II spies, and of course cowboys and Indians.  (This led our teacher to think we were the oddest bunch of girls ever to cross the school.  She apparently never figured out it was just one ODD subversive girl.)  Interestingly it never occurred to me to play the less physical stuff I did read, like Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories.  Mostly, I think, because I liked playing parts that got to use a sword or shoot.

After my time in Coventry, that form of popularity returned.  Through high school I was a noisy (if not influential) member of my form (my influence was mostly bad, like convincing the others it was a really good idea to sabotage the electrical system.  Don’t ask.)  One form of popularity at least I enjoyed, which was that everyone wanted to read the novels I wrote during the boring classes.

And in college I was a member of several intersecting and often mutually inimical groups.

But here’s a thing – even though I seem to handle the social stuff better than most odds, and even though people don’t tend to reject me on sight (It’s gone now, and I was never aware of it when I had it, but I wonder how much that ability to overcome most Odds social ostracism thing was driven by physical attractiveness.  Humans react oddly to beauty) in one respect I am still an odd – that is, while groups claimed me, while many people might think we were very close, I always had a sense of inner isolation – of not quite belonging.

If this had only shown up after the two years of Coventry, I’d say that it was driven by it, but I don’t think so.  My very first grades said something like “doesn’t play well with others” – which in my teacher’s parlance meant exactly that.  I would either be the leader of the group, or I really didn’t know what to do.  It wasn’t so much an objection to playing along, as the fact that what most other kids wanted to do was incomprehensible to me and what they found fun was either boring or  terrifying (and in an amazing amount of circumstances both).

And in college, while a ton of groups claimed me – the theater group, the would-be writers, the poets, the fashionable girls, the linguists, the philosophers, and most oddly of all since even back then I made little secret of my hatred for the ideology, the communists – I never felt I belonged to any of them.  I could hang out, or have a couple of them walk with me between classes.  I could care for them, individually – but I never felt as though I were a part of the group.  Even in the middle of, say, a Saint Lucia party, with the Swedish group, even when I’d had WAY too much to drink, I was still remote, inside, observing.  I might be joking and quipping and even leading on the dreadful puns and all, but inside, I was apart, not quite a part of this.

In this, I think I’m a typical odd, though I don’t know how I got that way.  I think most Odds get that way from physically standing apart and observing, so that even if they overcome it in later life, they never really feel they joined in.  But perhaps not.  Perhaps it’s something inherent in us.

And most of these philosophers, economists, artists were Odds of the sort that, for some reason, were rejected by others at an early age, and were held away from a group.

It’s easy in those circumstances – I remember my two years of hell – to start thinking of people in the abstract.  You’re not engaged with individuals, one on one, so your mind starts thinking of humans as categories.  (Of course dividing reality into categories is part of the human mind and its functioning.)

First of all you identify “like me” and “not like me.” I did this as early as elementary school and used my relative influence and my not inconsiderable size (I was larger than most boys/men my generation in Portugal) to either psychologically or physically protect the other Odds.  (This earned me an… well… odd group of friends which persisted through a great deal of my life and might still persist except for my leaving the country behind.)  But then, if you’re Odd and you know it, and you never quite fit in, you start looking for reasons why and assigning blame.

Somewhere in my heart there’s a cold spot for beautiful and fashionable blond women.  Fortunately it doesn’t apply to blond women in the individual, even if they’re very pretty and very fashionable, but only to a general category.  This means they might end up dying in my stories a lot, or being right b*tches in my stories, but it doesn’t affect how I view those I meet.

Marx and the like went for broader categories and out of the classroom/city/village.  “The rich”, “the oppressor class”, “Greedy people” became the scapegoats for the odd.

And because they were all typical “odds” and didn’t make friends easily, they were able to see these classes of people in the pure abstract, and the classes they wanted to defend in the pure abstract too.

When this is your formative years – when you’re left so much alone that in Pratchett’s brilliant phrase, you fall too much under your own influence – you end up “knowing” several things that just ain’t so.  One of them is that humans are interchangeable within the group they belong to.  “Oppressed workers” are oppressed workers, not Bob down the street.  The other is that there is an easy explanation for “why things are so messed up.”  And, probably the most destructive idea of all, is that humans are infinitely perfectable.

The only person able to think humans are that moldable at will is someone who has never really interacted much with humans in the individual.  You can look at categories of humans, throughout history and say things like “Workers have become less violent.”  And this leads you believe you can lead that change.

You can’t, of course.  What history masks and can’t show is how many times there was no fundamental change in a group or class, just a change in the ability to express it.  And how that change was unintended and the result of new technologies selecting a whole different group of people into that class or group.  Instead, it looks like a whole group of people changed beyond all recognition.

Meanwhile, if you have a lot of friends – or even better, friends, acquaintances and familiar strangers – whom you know close up and personal, one on one, you know how hard it is to change people even in minor things.  (In fact, if you’ve ever tried to change yourself, even if you succeeded, you know how near-impossible it is.)

And it would never occur to you to construct an entire system that depends on changing people wholesale into more perfect beings which will then be able to live in this system.

It also would never occur to you that – to go Trekkie – “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” because you’d go “What many?  Which one?” having known several crowds of useless shifters and knowing they have no right to what one single determined individual created or fought for.

But these … midwives of the twentieth century were Odds who never had much contact with individuals as equals or one on one, and therefore thought of people as broad categories, and found humans – who didn’t act like the humans in their heads – infuriating and sometimes despicable.  And who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just change individual humans out of all inconvenient traits.

In thinking about people this way, they devolved to thinking about people as objects, which might be the worst sin of all.

We live in an era when the creations of a few – mostly odds – have influenced the entire society with the idea of “how stories go.”  I wonder how many readers/watchers/listeners realize how little personal experience of individuals most of the creators have, and how much they rely on the theories of other Odds long dead.

This was, of course, at the back of the idea of my future history, where thy create “perfect rulers” who, in fact, aren’t because they aren’t a thing like those they’d govern and in a lot of ways they’re wounded just by being themselves.

All this to say that any collectivist thought that treats people as a lumpen group and which proposes to apply that to governance (which note my theory of how we Odds influence the world doesn’t) must be examined very carefully.

People who love the group but hate the individual might not in fact be able to perceive individuals as such or take human nature as it is.

 

I think the first person I hated was also the first person who tried to teach me manners.

In retrospect, the poor lady – who died relatively young – was absolutely right.  At eight, when she met me, I had the vaguest hints of civilization overlaid on a willful personality and all the grace and gentleness of an untamed monkey.  In a country like Portugal, which only isn’t as formal and tradition bound as Japan because… well, it’s Portugal and people can’t do the same thing in the exact same way twice, I must have been an offensive creature and also something really hard to understand.

Though honestly, it shouldn’t have been that hard to understand.  My parents talked routinely of how bad my manners were and how by the time he was three my brother could be taken into any company and behave like a perfect gentleman.

I’ve never fully understood if this was part of their illusion that, because I was smarter than the average bear, I should be able to pick up things I’d never been taught – for instance, they were disappointed I couldn’t play the very first time I saw a piano, and they dismissed my art talent when I didn’t draw like DaVinci by five – or if it was because I was ten years younger than my brother, who, in turn, was the youngest of the extended family.

I think it was a combination.  In retrospect, I wonder how much they taught my brother his manners, and how much he picked up from the cousins who were just five or four years older, and who would have, in the way of kids, found it funny to teach the toddler.

Anyway, I came afterwards, and it had certain advantages, like the ability to learn whatever the older kids were learning in high school and college, by serving as checker of answers; like the inheriting of a vast library that had grown with each cousin; like not being taken very seriously and therefore being able to disappear for the whole day into the depths of the backyard with a book, and not having anyone do anything but be relieved you’re not tagging along and bugging them.

It had the same disadvantages, though.  Perhaps my parents thought that by letting me grow up as I wished, I’d pick up manners through observation.  In which case, they failed to note I had the world’s worst visual memory and lived most of the time in a world of my own that did not intrude on reality.

The lady who tried to teach me manners was probably in her thirties and childless – the friend of one of mom’s best friends – and she went about it entirely the wrong way.  In retrospect, I think she was a deeply conventional person who liked things in their proper places at their proper time.

The problem was not that she told me things like “You should say thank you when someone gives you something” or “The proper answer to ‘would you like some cake?’ is ‘no, thank you’ not ‘no’ or even ‘you should say excuse me before entering a room’ (a Portuguese thing.  Go with it.  It’s actually “do I have permission.”)  No, the problem is that instead of informing me of these rules, she assumed I KNEW the rules and was breaking them willfully, which was furthermore – in her opinion – proof of a low character.  So she accosted eight year old me in corners and hallways with such charming diatribes as “You are the rudest child I’ve ever met.  Why will you not ask permission to enter a room?”  Or “You are the most ingrate person in the world.  Why don’t you say thank you when someone hands you a glass of water?” or, my ever favorite “If I had you a week under my command, I’d teach you not to be such a vile, self centered little monster.”

As I said, I hated her.  I spent hours plotting horrible deaths for her.

Because I hated her, I extended my hatred to all manners.  For a while, in pre-adolescence, I did go out of my way to be as rude as humanly possible.  You see, I was wounded because I was actually full of good intentions.  The first money I earned I used to buy gifts for my family; I was always trying to think of ways to help the people I liked; I TRIED not to be a selfish little beast.  But here was someone telling me I was the world’s most self-centered person because I’d not thought to say “Thank you” when handed a glass of water I hadn’t asked for.

For a while I became like Rousseau and his ilk, full of explanations that the “natural man” was better than all this mannered and carefully cultivated society.

Fortunately, somewhere between eight and ten I realized I was wrong.  I think what made me realize it was leaving the village where people wrote off a lot of what I did because I came from an eccentric family, and going to middle school about ten miles away…  where people didn’t know me.

Also, my best friend came from an impoverished family of aristocratic background and I noted people – just common people, on the street – treated us differently.  It wasn’t her clothes or her looks, so it must be her manners.  For the next five years, I watched her family like a hawk, and studied to behave as she did, with all the little flourishes of manners and mode.

And it worked.

I never met the lady who wanted to teach me manners after I was about ten – my parents were probably afraid I’d kill her – but I run into anyone who commented adversely on my manners, after that.

So, what is this long disquisition?

I came to understand, particularly through changing cultures, that manners are more than a senseless form.  They are things people do to let each other know that they belong – that they are part of the group.

Humans are a social animal.  Little meaningless rituals are built in to us, as a way of saying “I belong in the nest, don’t throw me out.”  Also, while manners are slightly different in each country (for instance, I think Americans would think I was out of my raving mind if I asked “Do I have permission to enter this room” – except in SFF, where they’d probably stake me through the heart.  While Portuguese would find it bizarre for a shop attendant to thank them for buying something.) they are also not entirely meaningless.  They are things that get automated, at a trained-in level, so you don’t have to think about it and don’t unwittingly offend someone.  I could be dead tired, for instance, or in the hospital, but if someone does some minor favor for me, I’m going to say “Thank you” out of automated reflex.  And that thank you lets the other person – no matter how tired or dead on their feet THEY are – know their action was seen and appreciated.

As Heinlein put it, it makes things run smoother.  In the same way, I might not be aware of the shopper coming out of the store behind me, both arms loaded with parcels.  But I am aware someone is behind me, and at this point it is a reflex to hold the door open so they pass.  When I’m the one on the receiving end of this kindness, that manners-reflex is much appreciated.

Why this matters – since the sixties we’ve gone on something like my tantrum between eight and ten.  We have been worshipping the natural man, saying exactly what one feels, and the total lack of artificiality and “meaningless ritual” as a supreme good.

Where this is probably the worst is in politics, where one side tends to come from places where they were taught – or taught themselves manners – while the other side worships the “natural man” and is therefore free to throw tantrums and scream.  (Hint, only one side thinks papier mache puppets are a masterful political argument.)

For instance, no matter if I were sure that 90% of the people in a room were of my politics, UNLESS it was a political gathering, I’d never tell a convention dinner “Let’s hear it for so and so, our next president” – when the man wasn’t even there, and wasn’t called into the matter at any level.  And yet, a well known science fiction writer did just that in 2003 at the World Fantasy Awards banquet, causing those of you who didn’t want to clap and cheer for the – er… rather screamy – politician to feel deeply uncomfortable and wonder if our editors were marking our reaction.  (They were.  Probably.)

I wouldn’t do it, because it would be bad manners to make people who couldn’t escape (awards banquet) and who weren’t counting on this, were forced to withstand proselytizing with no means of countering or even saying “Yes, but—“.

Part of the problem is that those who worship the “Natural Man” tend to think that if you can control yourself, then you don’t feel strongly enough, and if you don’t feel strongly enough, then you can’t be “right” or, pardon me, “on the right side of history.”

Lately I’ve been wondering if I should have kept that reservoir of “manners are bunk” and used them over the last thirty years whenever I was ambushed by one of the Natural Men – particularly the female ones – in the most unlikely of circumstances.  I’m wondering if that would have made any difference – if puncturing the bubble of self-affirmation and these noises they make for group coherence, (Perhaps they’ve taken that instead of manners) or in the case of the deeper thinkers, questioning their principles, would have made a difference and not have got us where we are: in danger of destroying our kids’ futures because the Natural Man is sure the “Man” (those untrustworthy people who can control themselves and use manners to mask their worst feelings – and who also, occasionally, make more money) is hiding some mysterious stash that could get us all out of trouble and buy everyone a pony.

I don’t know.  I know at least half the people will say “No, no, we must not descend to their level” – but I think it is not a matter of levels, but simply a matter of not communicating.  Like my untutored self, they aren’t even aware that there are rules, or that the rules have any validity.  Instead, they’ve taken this ideal and these feelings, or always being “natural” with no disguise and no self control, and have elevated that to the center of “goodness.”

They get that from stories, of course.  Since at least the sixties, and for high culture before, stories have put “being natural” and “being true to yourself” as the highest good.

But because they get it from stories, unexamined, doesn’t mean we can’t make them examine it.  The problem is, we have to approach them not in a way that impugns their character – like the lady who assumed I was selfish and mean when I was simply ignorant – by saying things like “I won’t lower myself to your level.”

Instead, we might have to lower ourselves to their level – momentarily – and show them why the rules exist, and what they protect.  Unless, of course, we’re all very gifted teachers and can do it only with rhetoric.

Manners are an instrument of civilizational cohesion.  They haven’t been taught in three generations, and that cohesion has fallen apart, except where it’s been replaced by mindless repetition of slogans.

We can let it go on, but the thing is, mindless repetition of slogans doesn’t create a civilization.  Not one of free men.  Sooner or later things fall apart.

Or we can try at this late a date to bring the savage children into civilization and to explain the natural man is all very well in nature, but when dealing with other humans there is this thing called “signals of belonging to the band” and this thing called “Not offending people who don’t need to be offended.”  We need to explain to the wolf-boys and girls that there is such a thing as self control and that it not only can and should, but has to be exerted, unless civilization is to revert to a wilderness with everyone’s hand against everyone else’s.

I wish I had any idea how to do it.  Perhaps for now it is enough to know it has to be done.  Somehow.

Note: The Post over at Mad Genius Club is different and is now up.  (Slow today.  Now #2 son has been hit by dread stomach flu, which means interrupted night.  I seem to finally be okay, though.)

UPDATE: And the blog tour has started.  First post here.  (And I think I completely forgot to mention Darkship Renegades.  Maybe I should sleep more?)

I’ve now reached that uncomfortable stage.  It’s too late to ignore the b*stards but too early to start shoot–  Er… I mean…  I’ve reached the equivalent of that uncomfortable stage in the present illness: I’m much too well to do nothing, but trying to work or even blog coherently reveals a total lack of strength underlying my purpose.  That is, I can think of ten topics, but carrying them to the end leaves me feeling dead as though I’d lifted a very great weight.  Even art, which is how I rest my mind when I feel like this, I can start, but I sort of lack the patience to finish.  About halfway through I start feeling exhausted, and then I must nap.

I’m hoping by tomorrow I’ll have napped enough to resume normal behavior.  BUT for now, I’m hoping I can just throw a bunch of disconnected topics at you, and that it will be enough.

It occurred to me, for instance, when re-reading Rousseau’s quote about his “true freedom” being found in following the opinion of the majority even when it disagrees with his, that this explains why people on the left feel VINDICATED when they carry the electoral contest, even when they carry it based on negative advertising, and not their ideas of what to do, and even when they know the polls are corrupted and distorted by fraud.  (Well, most of them must know it, judging by how hard they fight things like ID laws and proof of citizenship to vote.  There might be a few naïfs who truly believe it is all about access to voting.  But not most of them.  My mom, btw, was shocked at how lax our laws for registering to vote and voting are.)

Anyway, somehow it seems to me the left has substituted the polls for an oracle, to divine the will of heaven.  If the polls say something, then it is the “right” path of history and therefore if we were against it, we must be wrong.  This ignores, of course, the fact that history has no “right” path and that it obviously, several times, took seriously wrong turns.  At least if one considers the massacre of millions of human beings wrong.  Perhaps they don’t.

While on that, I’m very suspicious of this supposedly super-information machine that the Obama (permanent) campaign has built.  You know, the one which is supposed to have a file on every American, and therefore allow them to know exactly how each of us will vote.

Yes, I know similar claims were made for Orca, but frankly I always viewed it – had it worked, and I guarantee to you if half the volunteers had yelled at them as I did, it WOULD have worked – as spin and gloss.  What it would actually have done is get to the polls those lukewarm republicans sitting at home.  (This is assuming the lists aren’t corrupted.  Over the last two election cycles I’ve come to the conclusion the lists ARE corrupted, to a level that can’t be incidental.  But that’s another story.) Look, I don’t half believe the marketing people and other “glossy bastards” who put a scientific veneer on hunches and guessing.  Perhaps it is because like Miss Marple I grew up in a village, and if there’s one thing growing up in a village gives you it’s an inherent distrust of city slickers who think they’re superior.  If you look closely, you can see them sweat in an argument with a foot-in-the-muck farmer.  Just any foot-in-the-muck farmer.

If the Obama campaign is all that, why are they still calling me and wanting to talk to me?  Yeah, yeah, female, novelist, post graduate humanities degree, Latin country and, not least, cat rescuer, shops organic if she can help it, and oh, yeah, takes art courses.  But for heaven’s sake, my voter registration is no secret, nor is my volunteering record, including the books I read.

It occurs to me this “spin and gloss” we’re getting about the infallible campaign makes a d*mn good cover for massive election fraud, though.  Perhaps that’s just me.  Perhaps I’m a suspicious b*tch.  Or perhaps we’re – still – being gaslighted.

I think we’re a long way from Heinlein’s idea of psychometric and persuasion as “science” which facilitated the rise of the first prophet.  But we might not be a long way from using it as a cover.  And it might be enough for Nehemiah Scudder.

Other thoughts – reading science fiction is bad for me.  Lately I’ve found myself thinking, “If Puppet Masters” were really happening, how would things be any different?  Supposing the shoulder riders were at least smart enough to keep their slaves clean, that is?  In conjunction with this (you guys know one of my favorite ways to waste time is what I’d call the “National Enquirer” (before it became America’s paper of record) “side of the internet” right?) I note that sometime around the eighties, people stopped thinking of UFOs as real phenomenon, real travelers from other worlds in real physical machines.  Suddenly, come from somewhere unidentifiable, this theory of the UFOs as “Spiritual” vehicles, bringing enlightenment or whatever, was everywhere.  It spread at the same time as the wave of anti-space-travel (with the stupid justification that we have to learn to take care of Earth first.  Just like, you know, we took care of overpopulated Europe first, before moving to other lands – never mind.  Half the kids would scream about the age of exploration, unaware that yes, while people died – they always do, when cultures meet – we are now wealthier, healthier and better off than we were ever before.  Even the descendants of native peoples.  We are also more of a blend than these kids are taught, as proven by the troglodyte sleeping down the hall at the moment, trying to recover for his bout of stomach flu.)

Both these ideas, of course, are what real space invaders who seized control of our society would promulgate, to keep humans from figuring it out and throwing them off.

No, I don’t really think it’s true, but hey, it makes for a great umbrella theory for how divorced our elites are, not just from us but from reality itself (by elites I don’t mean ivy league graduates, so you may stand down – you know who you are.  I mean those people who are actually at the apex of various fields.  That many of them are ivy league graduates it’s a coincidence.  If it makes you feel better, most of them were ushered along on their beliefs, not their ability.  And if it doesn’t make you feel better – yeah, it’s doesn’t make me feel better, either.)  It would also conveniently explain away oikophobia and their determination to tear apart the very society that permits them to exist and prosper.

But I suppose the perversity of the human heart is enough to explain that.

I think these are enough crazy thoughts for one day.  Most of all I feel incredibly tired, and I hope it’s just the aftermath of the flu, and not old age setting in.

When I get old, I want to get old like Miranda, our Cornish rex cat who goes around beating all the boy-cats twice a day, as far as I can tell for having the effrontery to be alive and be young.  … a little old lady, scary beyond all reason.

Other notes:

Since I raised stories to 2.99, I’m not only making more money (expected, since each sale is worth five times as much) but I’m selling more of each short story.  As someone who never likes spending money and who is always happy when she finds what she wants at a lower price than expected, I don’t get this.  I have however long since arrived at the conclusion most people are not like me.  Which is, all things considered, is a good thing.  If all of humanity sat at home writing epic novels, who the heck would grow the food or make the clothes, let alone all the computers and stuff that have become necessary to my job?

Lest I forget – I do, rather – next time I call for entries on the “what have you done” is the time for ya’ll to ping me also with your offers to proofread, etc.  I’ll make a little section for it, and note they should call you for fees.

Also, lest I forget, Valerie Richardson, wife of my friend and colleague Pat Richardson, wishes to guest blog some places to promote her book, Wounded.  It is a Christian, non-fic, inspirational book, and I know some of – many of? – you have Christian/spiritual blogs, or blogs with a Christian/spiritual bend.  If you wish to host Val, please ping her at healedpublishing@gmail.com

And now I’m going back to bed, so maybe I too can do some guest blogging later on.  Before you get all worried, no, I’m no longer REALLY sick, or I suspect sick at all.  My breathing seems okay, and I’m no longer sick to my stomach.  BUT – who knew? – two days of little sleep and not keeping anything down, REALLY take it out of you.  Sleep seems to help and move me towards fully functional faster.  So, sleep it is.  (The fact I can sleep at all, particularly during the day, is usually an indication I need it badly.)

I’ll check by in a couple of hours.  Y’all behave, and don’t go setting fire to the blog, now.

I’ve been reading a book called Intellectuals by Paul Johnson.

Before you criticize me for reading this sort of summary, a third source at best, be aware that I’ve read all of the people mentioned  — almost all.  I don’t recall having Edmund Wilson inflicted on me – in their own original lucubration in full and ad nauseum, since for my sins I have a Masters in Modern Languages and Literatures.

However, lately I’ve had a niggling feeling at the back of my mind – about what has gone so seriously wrong and how we must counter it.

What has gone wrong, at least in the modern era, is the assumption that a certain type of firebrand, a certain type of what I would call “political mystic” is always right, and when not right yet he has the sort of moral and philosophical high ground, he’s “on the right side of history.”  This assumption has moved our intellectual establishments further and further left, indoctrinating even the most casual TV watcher with the rotten principles of Marxism, and pushing us more and more towards a philosophy that has nothing to give humanity but death and oppression.

In reading Paul Johnson’s work, I was looking at the fathers of this “moral high ground”, this assumption that “all the smart people” think this way that has penetrated media, entertainment and academia, from another perspective.  It was the same as, when taking a portrait, I might look at the subject from a slightly different angle to see how things look from there.

Paul Johnson’s view of Rousseau did not startle me, except to the extent that when I read Rousseau himself I was very young and lacked a certain experience of the world.  Among other things I lacked was the understanding that those seeking to tear the establishment down usually do it for reasons of their own, not out of great altruism; the understanding that the very worst of men – narcissistic psychopaths – can pose as the very best, and be seen and worshipped by others as such; and the understanding of the intimate relationship between growing up in a broken home and longing for an all-powerful and paternal state to look after one.

All of those have been born upon me over the last twenty years (over and over and over again.)  So seeing Johnson’s view of Rousseau rang several very loud bells.

Here we have a man who grew up in a family that was at best inadequate and who went through life serially friending and abusing benefactors.  He lived, in fact, at the expense of others and never returned  even the most elementary gratitude, instead choosing to revile his benefactors as being out to get him.  (In his defense, he was probably at least somewhat paranoid.)

Normally such a man would be seen for what he was and reviled or at least laughed at.  But Rousseau took his shortcomings and made them into virtues.  If he was socially awkward, well then, the affectations of society must be wrong, and it was savages like him who were noble; if he was ungrateful, well, it was no less than should be expected of a genius forced to endure the presence of mere mortals.

To every one of his defects of character, he applied outward force and defended it not as a defect, but as a virtue, which the cruel world had just failed to appreciate.

Rousseau has been dead a long time, and if it were just a matter of Rousseau – no matter how much his execrable theories still infiltrate us – it would be time to let the dead horse lie.  But it’s not.

Rousseau is the prototype for beardo the weirdo who has infiltrated Academia, the arts and – in its more shaven and rubicund version – journalism.  How many times have you found yourself talking to a gentleman of dubious hygiene and ultra-left opinions and when you point out to him some minor social solecism, or merely look offended by it – say, double dipping from the dip bowl, or perhaps shoving past someone with no concern – you get told he is “the natural man” and therefore somehow more virtuous than you and your carefully minded tongue and manners?  Even if it’s not vocalized, such superiority is assumed.

It is assumed on all levels and by everyone on every side.  TV commentators who would need a brain transplant to be capable of thought and actors who would need a brain transplant to be TV commentators and whose private lives brook no scrutiny, are nonetheless considered good enough to be arbitrators of who should lead us, and smart enough to lecture us on such issues as Global Warming.

His ideas of the natural man, of the evils of civilization, of the way one should behave in public, and his assumption that ruder and nastier is by necessity better, infiltrate not just our institutions, but our stories.  It’s got so that if a man has achieved anything of significance in the world of business he’s considered guilty until proven innocent, and in our fiction he’s rarely considered innocent.  It’s gotten so that the “angry young men” are always justified by reason of their anger.

Around the necks of those who would stand with civilization, with decency, with parents being responsible for their children, with children being grateful to their parents, with each generation understanding and revering above all the culture in which it was brought up – no matter how understanding or empathetic it might be to other cultures – they hang not our civilization, not our prosperous society, but that of the seventeenth century, with its powdered wigs and its excesses.

Around our necks, they hang aristocracy and wealth from birth, ignoring that in the present age and in any truly economically free society (which ours hasn’t been for almost a hundred years) inherited wealth rarely lasts more than three generations.

And they do this while proposing a regime that, if implemented, would in fact, lead to an aristocracy of birth.  (They are already well on the way there, how far you get being a matter of the right connections, the right schools, all of which require the right opinions and the right pedigree.  Unless you think the recent spate of ivy-league presidents a mere coincidence.)

They reconcile this duality just as Rousseau reconciled his belief in the natural man and his opposition to revolution.  You see, in his own words, the state he envisioned was one that would OWN its citizens.  Since the citizens who would prosper under it would be totally submissive to the state then in the end, the state would create the ideal citizen who would be nothing without it. (How submissive?  “When the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this simply proves I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the General Will, was not so.”  In fact, “If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and I should not therefore have been free.”  Or, if you prefer, the oath to the constitution he proposed for Corsica: “I join myself, body, goods, will and all my powers to the Corsican nation, granting her ownership of me, of myself, and all who depend on me.” )

In the eyes of the current followers of Rousseau, such a state needs wise people to lead it, and they are the wise people, and they have, therefore, the presumption of right on their side.  Their virtue is indistinguishable from their opinions.  It is these opinions, this “anger at society” this “revolutionary zeal” which sanctifies them, so that they need do nothing else.

These opinions protect them from the media, who, steeped in the same “firebrand” mythology refuse to look at the underpinnings and consequences  of their avowed goodness.

Which is why when talking about, oh, Chakra Gore, with his palatial mansion that uses enough electricity to supply a small third world country, or John Advocate of the Poor Edwards, who kept his mistress in style, we hear people say “they’re good people, but…”

No.  They are not good people, just like Rousseau wasn’t a good person.  And while in Rousseau’s time we might not have known where this sort of intellectual tomfoolery led, now we know.

It leads to the terror of the guillotine; it leads to the Holomodor; it leads to the killing fields of Cambodia; it leads to the dead of Africa in the grip of communism – so many that there is no particular name for their  demise, and still ongoing.  It leads to misery, famine, destruction.

When the individual belongs to the state, that makes him the slave of those who run the state.  We divide again into noblemen and serfs, but this time the noblemen have not even the pretense of a religion that believes the serfs are made of the same material and by the same G-d who made the noblemen.  Instead the serfs are mere pieces, cogs in a giant machine, to be used and discarded at the pleasure of those in power.

Monsieur Rousseau, we’ve seen your paradise, and we reject it.

The only ones who like it are those who like the idea of THEIR boot stepping on a human face forever.  And every time they rear their heads, we need to hold up the result of their ideas, to point out they view themselves as the feudal lordlings of a new, never ending dark ages.

There were no trials at the fall of the USSR, more’s the pity, and we never hanged the commissars from their own guts.  Maybe that’s yet needed and yet to come.  Maybe humanity only learns in blood.  But until then – and perhaps to avoid it – we need to point out to them that “natural man” is and has always been an animal, and that our way of individual responsibility and self-respect has created the most prosperous society the world has ever seen, while their way of subjugating all to the government has brought back only the old horrors of tribalism and mass killings.

They are not on the right side of history.  They never were.  They are merely the modern incarnation of  very old human vices.

*And on a personal note, the stomach flu has now gone on to #1 son, which means I’m almost well, but I have a PILE of bedclothes to wash and three bathrooms to clean.  I TRULY feel horrible I haven’t answered all those blog requests and interviews, but I think before I even attempt it I need a nap, and then we’ll see.  I’m fully cognizant I’m pushing the time to an extreme — but the last three weeks have been insane and when there is no strength there is no strength.*

Jason Cordova:

First off, my solo debut novel, “Corruptor”, is available on Kindle for $3.99. Good YA/Teen adventure book with lots of gaming for the teen boys (and girls) to wish we had the technology for.

Next is one of the two anthologies I have stories in. The first, “Lawyers in Hell”, is the continuance of the Heroes in Hell series edited by Janet Morris. Originally published in the 1980′s, the series has seen a resurgence over the past two years. Here is the Kindle link for that (sorry about the price; publisher controls that, not I.

Lastly, my latest short story is in a horror/thriller anthology titled “Sha’Daa: Pawns”. Again, price quibble, but my story, “Crouching Seal, Sleeping Dragon” is a humorous tale about the end of existence and the SEAL team sent to kill it.

Celia Hayes:

Ok – I launched the German version of Adelsverein – The Gathering this last weekend.

And at my wordpress blog, I just posted an amusing entry about Sally Skull – the original pistol-packing mama.

Martin L. Shoemaker:

My latest, “One Last Chore for Grandpa”, is now available on Kindle and Nook.  It’s the story of a young man who leaves Haiti and Vodoun for a safer life in America; but first the earthquake and then a vengeful Bokor draw him back to defend his family.

Valerie Richardson:

“Wounded” by Valerie Richardson is a frank look at the wounds dealt to Christians by the Church, and by each other, and biblical ways to fix them. Warmly personal, using stories from the author’s life, herself a wounded Christian, “Wounded” is a must read for pastors, youth leaders and every Christian who has ever found themselves hurt by the Church or fellow believers.

Gina Marie Wylie:

I have published a novel called Starfarer’s Dream posted on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats.  The series (and everything else I write) is human wave. This story is an account of starship Starfarer’s Dream in the opening days of a war where humanity faces an implacable enemy.

Stryder Dancewolffe:

I’ve put up another stand alone short story, double the length of my others. Snow Angel is a story of a mother who has to make some tough choices in a post plague Earth where the water has all been poisoned and the tough rules that see to humanity’s survival stand between her and the survival of her child.

Pam Uphoff:

I ran the duster over a bunch of shorts in my Wine of the Gods Universe (quicker than polishing), packed them together and tossed them up on the Kindle store. Book #4 in that universe is free for a few more days, and the first book of the series will be free Monday and Tuesday.

Outcasts and Gods (Wine of the Gods)

Explorers (Wine of the Gods)

A Taste of Wine (Wine of the Gods)

Mike Weatherford:

My computer is playing stupid little games — again! I posted “Greenfields” to both Amazon and B&N about a week ago. I just did the final edit of “LOST!”, and I’m just waiting for a cover. LOST is the book triggered by the wild party we had back the end of June. Luckily, exploding penguins were not able to interfere with the novel’s completion. The sixteen people at the party that night can get a free copy by emailing me and letting me know what format you’d prefer to have it in. I’ve begun the second novel in “The King’s Men” series, but I don’t have a title for it yet. The first novel in the series was “King’s Cross”, which is still on sale for 99c (until I get enough time between headaches to make the changes… 8^))

Mackey Chandler:

“Down to Earth” the second Kindle book in the “April” series is free the rest of today (Sat 24th) pacific time. The third book in the series “The Middle of Nowhere” will be coming out next month.

Thomas Sewell:

Sharper Security, a Sovereign Security Company Novel.

In trade paperback and Kindle.

It’s set a couple of decades into the near-future with a liberty view of society based on individual choice and free market economics, taken to enough of an extreme to make you consider what’s really possible.

 

Plot summary:
In a near future alternate history, America has split. Sovereign security companies compete in the booming Arizona Zone.

Evie retired as an anti-terrorist detective sergeant and emigrated to escape from Britain. Who is hunting her for revenge?

Evie hires Sam Harper, from Sharper Security, to protect her. Who is her mysterious attacker, plotting from a distance?

How will Sam defeat the soldiers, intrigue and legal maneuvers of his competitors to capture Evie’s nemesis and deliver justice for what really happened in Paris 18 years ago?

Answers involving forgiveness and redemption are revealed during a week of mystery, intrigue, technology, heroes, villains, action and adventure in the Sonoran desert.

Oh, and humor. The book definitely has humor.

Also some interesting characters. I especially like…. well, just go read the book.

Sarah Hoyt:

My short story An Answer From The North is free at Amazon.

Sabrina Chase:

The audiobook version of my fantasy novel Firehearted is all complete and uploaded, but I don’t know when it will actually go live on Audible. Soon… (my first audiobook!)

*I had asked RES to do a follow up to his post — then politics intervened, and then I lost it, as I tend to lose things in the deluge of emails I  get everyday.  I asked him to send it again yesterday, and I’m glad I did.  Partly because it’s an excellent book, partly because a series of symptoms that had been afflicting me for the last 24h or so resolved itself into stomach flu.  BAD stomach flu.  I’ll be going back to bed now.  The nausea is not at bad as last night, but my head is still going around, so… I’m returning to bed.  Meanwhile enjoy RES’s take on reading older books, which is more or less the same as mine, but far more more reasoned and elegant than the donnybrooks I tend to get into when put on an Heinlein panel.*

A Reader’s Obligation — by RES

 

Along with the importance of authors recognizing that their writing cannot help but reflect their society — and thus the need to make that reflection as true as possible — there is also an obligation on readers.

C.S. Lewis, in his essay “On The Reading of Old Books”makes the point:

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.”

If readers fail to recognize that they are embedded in a particular culture and fail to take into account the ephemerality of that culture, they will make serious and unfair mistakes.  A book, any book, should be recognized as first and foremost an artifact of its time.  Contemporary standards should not be used to judge the work, nor its constituent elements.  Apples should be judged by the standards of apples, not oranges, and books should be accorded the respect of being judged according to the standards of their eras.

Styles change.  It is unreasonable to criticize the style of a book written in 1920, 1870 or 1820 because that style is less streamlined than today’s books.  All of those works are artifacts of a different time, preceding mass media (other than the written word.)  In 1920 there was no television nor radio, competing for audience attention.  Movies were still silent.  People viewed leisure differently than we now do, and did not desire books which could be zipped through while standing on line at the grocery check-out.  It is not unreasonable to prefer contemporary writing, but it is unfair to find fault with books written for a different time and different audience.

Equally, it is unfair to criticize authors for being less enlightened than our contemporary selves.  First, no author is more enlightened than their publisher permits; that is self-evident.  Second, because any author is speaking to a contemporary audience (and only dreams of being read by subsequent generations) the author cannot too far outpace the attitudes and values of their era.  The thoughtful reader should consider carefully the likelihood that our contemporary enlightenment is in part a consequence of that author having pushed the envelope of their culture.  As Newton recognized, “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”  Do not forget how we climbed to the heights of enlightenment from which we now view the world, and do not casually disparage the trailblazers who we followed to get there.

Jane Austen’s novels, written when the form was young, describe a culture entirely foreign and yet entirely familiar.  The social rules governing actions conceivable to Austen’s characters are largely unfathomable and in many ways irrational to modern eyes.  Yet these characters are motivated by the same things motivating modern readers: status, finding a compatible and desirable mate, “making” their livelihood.  The thoughtful reader looks beneath the surface differences into the deeper commonalties uniting reader and character.  By finding the truth in the society she limned, Austen has depicted a truth about human nature which allows modern readers access to her work if they focus on that truth.

Mark Twain’s Huckleberrry Finn is nowadays famously banned because of its“n-word” use,. Yet at the time it was published the “n-word” was not only in common usage (along with a plethora of other disparaging ethnic and racial slurs), its omission would have made the book far less effective in reaching its audience.  We should recognize that much of that which has rendered the “n-word” social anathema is a consequence of Huckleberry Finn’s effectiveness as literature, its focusing attention on the content of Jim’s character in contrast to the color of his skin.  Readers owe it to the author (and themselves) to view books as artifacts of the cultures in which they were written; you should not get your panties knotted over words that once were common and are now verboten.  Consider, also, that the hyper-sensitivity about that word is a recent artifact; as recently as the 1960s and 70s the word was commonly employed by such stand-up comedians as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.  Attention must be paid to the circumstances of a word’s usage and readers are unfair to leap screaming, onto chairs over the mere appearance of a word, no matter how offensive to the contemporary ear.

In his fifth Nero Wolfe novel, Too Many Cooks, Rex Stout accurately depicts race relations in American society of that time.  The solution to the murder depends on accurate understanding of that society:

In one of the best known scenes in the series, Wolfe meets with 14 black men, each of them a member of either the kitchen or the wait staff. A witness to the crime’s aftermath has told Wolfe that she saw a black man, dressed in the livery worn by the resort’s workers, in the dining room at the time that the murder occurred. The man was holding a finger to his lips, hushing another black man who was peering through the door between the dining room and the pantry. Wolfe wants to explore that statement with the kitchen and wait staff.

In contrast to the treatment the men receive from the prosecuting attorney and, particularly, the sheriff, Wolfe offers them courtesy and civility. Even that approach is bootless, though, until Wolfe makes an appeal to their sense of equity. He is looking for the man who was seen in the dining room, and says this:

But if you shield him because he is your color, there is a great deal to say. You are rendering your race a serious disservice. You are helping to perpetuate and aggravate the very exclusions which you justly resent. The ideal human agreement is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded; anyone helping to preserve those distinctions is postponing that ideal; and you are certainly helping to preserve them.

This speech so impresses Paul Whipple that he blurts out what he saw in the dining room from his vantage point in the pantry: a white man in blackface, warning him to be silent. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Many_Cooks]

Many of the terms referencing those 14 men are patently offensive to the contemporary reader, especially from the lips of narrator Archie Goodwin, but they are an accurate representation of that era and that accuracy is required to resolve the mystery.  It is also by such accurate depiction that the reader of that time was forced to confront the inequity of the racial discrimination afflicting American society.  So long as such bias is allowed to remain in background the culture can overlook it; bringing the unpleasant into the foreground forces readers to recognize and judge their society by it.  If the N-word stops you from reading this book you miss its condemnation of racist attitudes and discrimination.

When reading Rex Stout or Agatha Christie the sensible reader will adjust (or ignore) monetary amounts. $50,000 is a tidy sum today, in 1938 it represented about ten years income for a middle class worker.  Its power as motivation for criminal actions was correspondingly greater, and any reader who dismisses that significance is failing to appreciate the book being read.  Readers will make an effort (and smart authors will provide references) to appreciate changes in values.

Science Fiction is especially susceptible to this type of error.  The most visible example is the ubiquity of slide-rules for calculation.  But through the Fifties and Sixties Science Fiction was primarily a field of, by and for engineers (whether working in that field or not.)  For an engineer of that era it was taken for granted that people would retain slipsticks: it was the emblem of the professional.  It was an essential skill of their profession and nothing they saw indicated any replacement imaginable.

Other factors are less blatant but more pervasive.  Sarah has frequently commented about the views of population growth, of Malthusianism held by SF writers of that era.  Writing in a dynamic, aggressive culture they expected homo sap to procreate.  Education being much more available and far less expensive, they conceived no reason to think people would limit family size.  They grew to adulthood in a culture in which large families were the norm, they saw improvements in medicine and health care as increasing human happiness and lifespans.  It was only natural they would project the trendline into the future.

Computers were well known to these writers: they were large, unwieldy and expensive to build, to buy, to maintain.  Nothing they knew (and many of them were far more knowledgeable about computers than 90% of the people of that era) suggested this was anything likely to change.  Expecting them to have anticipated modern solid-state circuitry is unreasonable and readers who sneer at their failure merely display their own callowness.

It has long been trendy for critics to assail many of Robert Heinlein’s views as retrograde, as antediluvian.  Such critics miss the fact that such thinking was highly forward for his culture, was often already pushing the limits on what Heinlein’s audience was ready and able to accept, and frequently were the opinions of Heinlein’s characters.  As Niven’s Law reminds us, “There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is ‘idiot.'”

It is vain preening to disparage Heinlein’s portrayal of women or culture.  He was writing for a culture that was less enlightened than we today, as future generations will look down upon ours.  What matters is not the market in which Heinlein wrote but how he pushed that market, making it able to change and accept ideas leading to today’s enlightened thinking.  Given he was primarily writing books for sell to young men Heinlein’s representation of sexual relations was remarkably advanced for his times.  To focus on the flaws is to overlook his vastly greater strengths and the ways in which he pushed societal change.  It is to obsess over “the characteristic mistakes” of his generation while ignoring “the characteristic mistakes” of our own.  Decrying his women as unrealistic stereotypes overlooks one salient fact: they were based on real women.  That they might not fit the critic’s views on proper portrayal says more about the limitations and agenda of the critic than of Heinlein.

Asimov’s Foundation series needs to be read as reflecting the culture in which he was immersed.  A man of the Left, Doctor Asimov had fully imbibed the memes of his culture, seeing the world though the lens of socialism’s perspective on the forces of History and the relative unimportance of individuals.  His view was an expression of the idea of broad forces pushing society.  The themes and content of his work were shaped by the culture in which he developed and the audience for whom he wrote.  It is as foolish to apply contemporary moral standards and values to his or Heinlein’s work as it is to apply them to Austen, Dumas or Verne.

There are a few constant standards of good writing: grammar, vivid word imagery, engaging plots.  The modern reader has a duty to ignore the characteristic mistakes of a given period (including their own) and approach the work with an open mind.  Many an incredible tale is based upon even more improbable actual events and individuals.

In the visual arts there is a notable development of technique.  Painters learned how to create perspective, they learned pointillism and chiaroscuro techniques but no intelligent person evaluates Roman and Egyptian art by modern standards.  In film we have the development of story-telling techniques, addition of sound and color.  Anybody dismissing the brilliance of Chaplin and Keaton for being silent, who disdains the Marx Brothers for being in Black & White denies himsel some of the most marvelous of films.  Camera and acting technique evolve and it is absurd to not appreciate that evolution.  Anybody watching the Thirties Flash Gordon serials is reasonable to disdain the acting, writing and costuming, but to sneer at their rockets as “a pod with a sparkler up its butt” is to fail to understand that, at that time, that was how rockets looked when they flew.  The even burn and tremendous force of post WWII rockets would not have been believable in that earlier decade.

What matters about past authors is not that they have so much wrong with them, but rather how much they still speak to modern readers, especially if those readers do their duty and remember with whom they speak.  You would not conversationally engage your grandparent in the same manner you use for your parents, your peers, your children, your grandchildren.  When reading a book not of your time, read it as an relic of its own time and measure it against that time.

Family duties and obligations have claimed me for the last 24 hours, but I’m very much alive.

At this moment I’d like to request all passengers of According To Hoyt airlines who had indie or other work to promote, to please leave it in the comments here so I can collate it into a commenter promo post later on!  (Probably tomorrow evening.  I’m just not concentrating enough to collate things right now.  Yes, I know, but…)

I’m going to try to do some guest blogging now.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Mirror and Crown

A surfeit of sweetness, a cloying lack of self.  For a while Gabriel Penn was suspended in both, his mind more a memory of having a mind than a real thought, or real memories.

Then, from, in this place with no past, no future, no self, came the sound off footsteps, punctuated with the sound of a cane tapping cobblestones, not in the way of someone who needed help walking, but in the way of a dandy on the way to a concert or the opera.

That image – that memory – summoning up the very idea of memories and images and a world outside Gabriel’s head, brought with it other images.  He saw himself as an unfortunate fly, surrounded by a cocoon, suspended from a web, being devoured.  He saw himself as a spun sugar figurine dissolving in puddle on between cobblestones, on a street more familiar than it should be.

He put his back to that street, to that memory.  Like a man bracing himself against a physical object in order to leverage his physical power, he put his mental back to that street – the streets he remembered, the streets that he’d seen, just before—

He was in the middle of the look-alike London, empty as the real London had never been.  It was raining.  Rain guttered from the roofs, fell into gutters, sang merrily along the gutters to join the other, overflowing effluvium.

Gabriel was an adult, and his clothes were soaked.  He understood the necessity of the rain.  The phrase “a bucket of cold water” ran through his head like a clue, but he didn’t need it.  He needed the feel of cold on his skin, he clammy feel of his soaked wool trousers clinging to his legs, the feel of that trickle of water down from his head down the back of his neck and his spine, under his already soaked shirt.  He could feel his hair plastered to his scalp and his face.  He imagined he must look like a drowned rat.  But what he looked like didn’t matter.  He was not in any sense of the word somewhere physical.

He was in fairyland.  The thought crossed his mind, with all the strength and urgency of a warning, and was followed by another: he’d been damn near dying in a trap.  He was in a trap still.

The awareness of this made him even more aware of the steps and the tap tap of the cane approaching.  He was in fairyland.  Only two things operated here: his own mind, and the mind of his uncle, his opponent.  One of them would emerge victorious from this struggle, and it must be Gabriel.  It must because Gabriel was needed for fairyland to go on existing.  And fairyland was needed…  His thought cut off.  He wasn’t sure why fairyland was needed.  He suspected it was something he could not know until and unless he ascended to its throne.  But he had a gut deep intuition it was needed.  Else, why not have destroyed it, long ago?

So – where he was now, only two minds worked: his and his uncle’s.

“Not… quite,” an educated male voice said, and Gabriel spun around.

The man who stood between two buildings, as though he’d just emerged from an alleyway, was strangely familiar in a way that Gabriel could not place.  He did not exactly look like Gabriel, but he was of the same type: dark hair, light eyes – in the man’s case a greyish blue – features that could be considered beautiful but which were still, undeniably, masculine.  And his build was also the same, tall and slender, with powerful shoulders.  When Gabriel looked up from surveying the man to the man’s face, he found the man was smiling.  “Well?” he said, in the tone of someone who asks the answer to a riddle.

Gabriel frowned.  “You must be spun by the king from my memories, but… I’m not quite sure…”  Then he stopped.  The man’s clothing, too, was soaked, dripping with water from every fiber, even as rain continued to pour down to soak the man’s hair and plaster it to his fine featured face.  The fact that he stood there, under the cold downpour, grinning and looking debonair, as though he’d just emerged from the opera made everything worse, Gabriel thought.

As he watched, the man removed from his sleeve an immaculate white handkerchief hedged around with lace, and monogrammed with HG.  Then, ignoring the fact that the handkerchief was as soaked as everything else, he mopped at his face with it, and said, “Do you like rain, oh, king?”

“I am not king,” Gabriel said, and frowned a little, because if the man were his uncle’s creation, then the rain would not affect him at all.  The rain was Gabriel’s and the weaker effect.  To think his uncle might be pretending that rain affected his own creations was to go one step too far.  Gabriel knew the sort of mental state his unlce was in – none the better as he thought he’d been in his uncle’s mind and about to dissolve into it.  It simply was not coherent enough for that kind of fiendish cunning.

So…

“Truly?” the man said.  “Are you not?  Then why are you here?  What are you doing?”

“My uncle—” Gabriel said.  “The kingdom–  The prophecy—”  He couldn’t quite find a coherent point to make his start.

“You know the kingdom of fairyland goes by magic and power and the one who can hold it coherent and whole.  Under those rules your uncle has lost it long ago, before your birth, in fact, and his continued holding of the nominal crown will destroy it and all of us.”

“All of us—” Gabriel said.  “You don’t mean…  That is, you are one of us?”

An eyebrow quirked, and the man gave him a smile between puzzled and amused.  “You don’t remember me at all, Gabriel Penn.  Do I look so different then?”

Through Gabriel’s mind ran half-remembered lapses of judgement.  There had never been very many, and none of them had meant very much or gone very far.  He’d been too afraid of sullying the Darkwaters by contagion, particularly after his incident with Marlon and how close it had come to being public.  But there had been the man who’d kissed Gabriel – and soundly too – when Gabriel had brought him his horse after one of the Darkwaters’ parties.  And there had been that man who’d stayed over and who’d—

But the thing was, the gentleman who’d kissed Gabriel had been so drunk, he’d probably not been aware that Gabriel was not female.  Or else, he’d thought he was kissing Seraphim, something that made Gabriel smile even now.  And the others…  None of them had looked like this man.  Gabriel would have remembered someone who looked somewhat like him.

Something fluttered at the back of his brain, like a bird trying to beat its way out of a cage, and Gabriel frowned and shook his head.  “I don’t remember,” he said.

This got him a broad grin with a hint of malice… No, not malice, but malicious amusement, as though Gabriel were being particularly dumb and this delighted the stranger.  An immaculate white hand was pushed forward, “Hayden Gypson at your service, your majesty.”

Gabriel had got hold of Gypson’s hand, which felt warm and smooth and alive in his, but the name made him let go of it and take a step back, with a strangled cry.  “You’re not–  You can’t be—”

“Why not?” he asked.  “The problem is that my soul remains tragically attached to my body, because my soul isn’t able to die… to transition in the way souls do when the body dies.  And this is a place of the soul and the mind, so here I am wholly alive.  What?” he said, at what Gabriel felt must be the look of frozen horror on his own face.  “Did you think I didn’t know?  Did you think I was a passive victim?  He never told you, did he?  Of course he wouldn’t.  He’s three parts foolish and one part–  Never mind.”

“He never told me what?” Gabriel said, his throat closing.  “Marlon—”

“He never told you why he did what he did or why it went so horribly awry.  You should be aware that it betrays bad judgement on Marlon’s part.  He clearly has a taste for cowards.”

Gabriel was too shocked to be offended.  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I said, Marlon has a taste for cowards.  He’s picked me and then you in quick succession.  And I, you see, found it impossible to bear the double weight of not being quite human and never fully fitting in.  He came to find that I had just killed myself – the idea that I’d died of an illness was his, and he was the one who put it about.  Being a fool, he tried to bring me back.  Only, I am, as much as he, elfborn.  My mother was a nayad who–  Never mind.  He couldn’t quite bring me back, and once he’d done the magic – not being in full control of his own magic – he couldn’t kill me.  And so we came to my problem.  I’m afraid,” he said, and looked at the nails of his right hand, which Gabriel remembered yellow and dissicated and protruding from dried flesh but which were white and buffed and carefully trimmed, “It will take the king’s touch to set me free now.”

“But … How does that make me a coward?” Gabriel asked, and wanted to protest it wasn’t fair, that he would not be here if he were a coward, that he was here not out of his own ambition, but out of his wish to protect his family–  That he—

“Well, King, if you aren’t a coward, why would you spend so many years running from yourself?  So many years pretending to be just human.  So many years hiding and running.  And why would you now choose to let yourself be killed by a madman who can barely hold his kingdom together rather than take what is yours – the crown and the strength and the life of fairyland?  Why wouldn’t you acknowledge what is yours and make it part of you?”

Gabriel opened his mouth.  “Because I’m not—” he started, but that wasn’t quite true.  He couldn’t say he wasn’t mostly magical, because he knew he was.  The last few hours had shown that to him, if nothing else.  “Because I can’t—” but at the back of his mind he knew that wasn’t true either.  He could.  It would just take… wanting it.  Really wanting it.  His uncle wanted fairyland because without it he’d cease to exist.  Gabriel must want it like that.  He must, like a man at the races, take a final bet and stake all. But he still thought Hayden had no idea how vulnerable Gabriel was, how wounded.  “You don’t know what my childhood was.”

“Don’t I just.  Do you think the orphanages for elf children are wonderful places, then?  Has it occurred to you they might be worse?”

“Yes, but—”

“No, king.  Know yourself for what you are.  Then take your crown.”

Gabriel blinked.  He knew the man was right, and yet…

“First,” Hayden said, his voice clearn.  “Set me free.  And then go to your battle with my blessings.  What remains of me in this world, hopefully a very little and for a very short time, will go with you, as will all my good wishes.”

“But I can’t—” Gabriel said, and then realized that he could.  He could see a tangle as though of loose threads behind Hayden, and he knew they were the lines of magic holding him to his body and the world.

He reached with his hand, tried to break them.  Nothing happened.  Then Gabriel took a deep breath and told himself fhe was the king of Fairyland, this was his loyal subject, and he COULD.

His fingers moved forward as though of their own accord and pinched the threads.  For a moment an expression of utter relief painted itself on Hayden’s face, then his fading form bowed and he said, “Farewell, oh king,” and he was gone.

Gabriel turned.  He waved a hand.  He didn’t need the rain.  He didn’t need the street.

He narrowed his eyes to see the truth, the nebulous pathways of what remained of his uncle’s mind.

A hallway of spun sugar seemed to form.  Brittle and cloying, Gabriel thought.  About right.

But he waved that way too, and willed to see clearly, to see the true from.

It was time he claimed his crown.