Month: November 2012

*Well, I’ve let RES speak twice!  I like the way she points out one thing we might forget in the heat of the approaching election.  The way to change the culture is not the force of government but the “still small voice” of stories — in which, btw, I’d include non fiction as well as fiction.  Win or lose, our fight is only beginning against the world of hatred-for-humans and the headlong rush to civilizational suicide.  Narrate the world as you wish it, inspire others with your vision.  In the world of ideas, ideas win.  See how many children Heinlein who was biologically childless has left behind.  Has any patriarch ever sired such a splendid tribe?  Go you and do likewise.  I’d change her “we have hope with a spine, to “we have hope with spikes” but that’s me…”  And thank you — from my heart — to CACS for relieving me from my duty as a blogger on this very busy weekend, and for her eloquence and warm humanity too, both as a commenter and a contributor.*

CACS Speaks

by CACS

The United Stated has long embraced the thought that there is always tomorrow. People came here because they fully believed that this is a land of hope. Ongoing despair has not been one of our particular cultural characteristics. (I hope that this will remain the case.)

Momma, who had been a sickly child, only survived to adulthood because of the miracle of antibiotics. During WWII she became the one of the first civilians to receive a skin graft. (She had been bitten by a bulldog and almost lost a finger to gangrene that she developed while a patient in a naval hospital.) I received vaccinations for all sorts of childhood diseases that had been a real threat when my parents were children. My childhood things never had to be burned because they had been contaminated by scarlet fever, as Daddy’s had been. Why wouldn’t my parent’s generation believe that science could hold the answer?

Yes, science was going to be their savior, and there was a religious fervor to this belief. They had the promise of unlimited inexpensive energy through the safe unlocking of the power of the atom, which was just on the horizon. At the same time, because it had been so horrible, they believed that the unleashing of the atom bomb meant that going to war would soon become unthinkable.

Through scientific hybridization, pesticides, mechanization and farm management food was becoming cheap and plentiful. Farming was becoming much safer for the farmer. Refrigeration and freezing meant that a wide variety of fresh foods would be available to everyone year round. With better practices in food handling food-borne illness would become a thing of the past.

It was believed that with the proper management of nutrition, vaccinations to eliminate illnesses and advanced treatments long lives of good health would be in reach of all. We had even begun to unlock the mystery of the workings of the mind. Once we did that we would eliminate the scourges of mental illness and crime!

What reason was there not to hope, we had our hands on the key?

Sigh. I wonder if that was how people felt at the beginning of the age of industrialization.

I won’t argue that my generation does not have a certain stupidity/naivety/what-have-you about them. Like an adolescent wanting the answers yesterday, we were angry at the imperfections we perceived and lacked much in introspection and humility. Still we had grown up during a time of incredible changes and wonders. We were a generation raised to be idealists in a world of real dreams come true. We were taught that all the problems in the world would be solved by mankind through science and we were profoundly unprepared for disappointment. We reached the moon! And in the end we felt we might as well have collected the tee shirt: My country went to the moon, and all I got was Tang.

 

(I know, I know, we also got transistors, integrated circuits, and a wonderful data base on the human physiology. But we didn‘t know that.)

Hope lost, disillusionment, can be a terrible thing. A contributing part of the problem of the boomer generation came with the slow nagging realization that something was wrong and science alone was not going to be able to produce a solution. The good times were not unending. We had been promised it would be done, and as it had not, someone must be responsible for the failure.

 

Some have joined their parents and are simply holding on for dear life to the promises they grew up with, even when everything before their eyes should inform them that that ship has sunk. They were promised that if they lived their lives according to plan they would have their social security, medi-care and their pensions. They did their part, so what is wrong with this world?

Many of the boomers, looking for a reason to be hopeful, adopted a system of beliefs that is thoroughly enmeshed with a form of scientific socialism, believing that will be an answer to all our ills.

They also embraced the belief that we might even be responsible for bad weather. If our actions are responsible for floods, droughts, hurricanes and other inclement weather, then wasn’t it possible that we could address and fix those problems as well? With the ‘inequities’ of capitalism and the ‘burdens’ that overpopulation, carbon based fuels, improper waste management and industrialization continue to place on the planet to blame, no wonder their brave new perfect world had not been delivered.

Even if it was wrapped in what you and I consider gray goo, they had found something to hope in, a new illusion. If we just elected the best and the brightest, if we let them manage the economy, if we control the population, if we got rid of the superstitions of (certain) religions, if we went green and if we let the people of the world know that we wish them no harm everything could still become a paradise!

Sadly and largely without their realization, the path they have chosen, should we continue down it, will end with us coldly reducing man to purely utilitarian modes. They have shrouded their actions with cloaks of rationality and tied them up with ribbons of compassion. What they seek will lead to elimination of that and those which are viewed as having no worth because they are seen as non-productive and burdensome.

And, yes, a few have gone to a greater extreme and have given up, surrendering to the view that all of mankind is utterly at fault, an irredeemable anathema. The Daughter has kindly suggested that they set an immediate example for their cause by eliminating themselves posthaste. She insists that this would be the only ethical thing for them to do.

 

Those who hang out here don’t seem to have adopted the belief that we can or should be able to create a perfect world. They also do not think that mankind is entirely disgusting. They are quite willing to celebrate that which is good, and condemn what is evil. (Although we might argue at the definitions.) While we sometimes despair at what is going on at this moment, we do not see it as a reason to give up. We are not without hope–we have hope with a spine.

How to express, explain and possibly inspire that hope in others? Human Wave stories.

*Sorry, it’s short.*

*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. *

The Tree, The Dragon, The Drunkard

 

There was a moment that Seraphim saw the creature clearly – a beautiful and stark naked young woman with chestnut hair and… well, the odd thing was that while she was alive and looked like a lovely, vital young woman, all of her was chestnut colored, and if one looked closely there was a hint of wood grain about her skin.

Seraphim, feeling as though an odd numbness were creeping up his arm from his palm, had no idea what he was seeing.  The woman looked around, frantic.  Put her hand to her chest and said, turning beautiful moss green eyes first to one, then to the other all around the company of the room, “The Forest,” she said.  “I must have…”

An odd sound echoed, like fabric ripping, and in the middle of the floor, just in front of Seraphim, the boards heaved up, nails flying.  One struck the guard who was holding Seraphim on the face, making an ugly cut.  The man let go of Seraphim, and started stepping back, as though he were not quite aware of doing it, till presently he’d backed up to near Honoria, as though looking for protection.

Honoria’s face was a study in shock, her mouth wide open.  Seraphim couldn’t understand why her hair was whipping as if in an unseen wind, until he realized the magic unleashed from the thick, dark, ropes, had submerged the room.  There was so much magic there, they were all in magic, like a fish in water, magic crackling and fizzling on their skins, magic making them stupid with the shock.

He knew that the spell that had held the various illusions together, down to the final illusion of Honoria being the princess would be unraveling too, now the sacrifice had been taken from the center of the weaving.

The sacrifice… As though pulling the magic up into it, the woman had …  Seraphim would like to say she had made an oak tree grow in the middle of the floor, only surely that was impossible, even with very great magic unleashed.  And yet in the middle of the royal nursery, pushing aside the cradle, overturning the finely wrought rocking chair, upending the chests of clothing, an oak tree grew, here, far from forest, far from soil, far from brook, it grew and greened, loaded down with acorns.

The woman – nymph – sighed and eased into the tree, like a person easing into a soft bed.  She backed into it and made a little “ahh” of relief.  You could still see her, sticking out of the tree trunk, and she still looked human, glancing around with wide-open eyes.  She looked at Seraphim and said, “You are not him,” and then.  “Good for you that you are not him.  Where is he?  My despoiler?”

Seraphim had the sense of her reaching back, searching through the world for…  He had a very bad feeling it would be for Sydell.  It shouldn’t be possible, and it wouldn’t be possible, not to a normal, human magician.  But if this was a nymph – a dryad?—then she would treat the human world as humans treated fairyland: a not-quite solid overlay on reality, to be rifled through at will for what it might contain.

And then…

There was the sound as though and explosion, and two men fell into the room.  The odd thing is that though they both fell from about halfway in the air, and both landed awkwardly, when they landed they didn’t seem to notice they’d dropped or that they were in a different place.  Rather, they each rolled, and stood, and turned to the other again, ready to fight.

This was when Seraphim recognized Sydell and Marlon.  His shock was not that, but that Marlon was losing and badly.  There were multiple slashes on his arms and his shirt was so torn and bloody it was impossible to tell where he’d been hit or how many times.

The reason for this became obvious almost immediately.  Although both of them held knives, Sydell was protecting himself with a magical shield while Marlon … appeared to have no magic at all.  There was no aura of magic around his head.  How could he have lost all his magic?

The puzzlement lasted only a second.  After all, it did not matter where his magic had gone or why.  All that mattered is that this was a very unequal duel.  Seraphim didn’t have magic to match Sydell’s, but he had magic.  He threw a shield around Marlon, just as Sydell’s knife would have found his heart.

Both men suddenly noticed him.  “You,” Sydell screamed, and ran at Seraphim, his knife ready.

And Seraphim, unarmed, seized on the only thing he had – the shard of the cage that had confined the dryad, which was even now in his hand, even as the splinters of it were making his palm throb like hell’s fire.

He struck out with it, blindly, while using his other arm to deflect Sydell’s blow.

His hand with the shard cut at Sydell’s cheek, making oddly black blood bubble up and pour out.

A roar echoed.  A feeling of scorch.

Before them in the middle of the room, steps from the tree, stood a vast red dragon with Sydell’s expression in his irate eyes.

And Honoria, for reasons known only to her, was pounding on the dragon’s wing with both closed fists.

Just when Seraphim thought things couldn’t get madder, they did.

Another dragon broke through the plate glass window announcing “I found you at last!” in words that were like roaring fire.

And Marlon looked Seraphim in the eye and screamed, “I gave him my magic.  Your brother.  Darwater, I fear he’s in a battle for his life.  I can feel his struggle, through my fealty to him, and I fear he’s losing.”

but I’m tired.  I shall post chapter tomorrow.  Sorry.  I’m the world’s worst serialist.

So, as you can see, chapters will be late.  I am however hoping to post them today.  The funny thing is that I’m not even VAGUELY blocked.  I know exactly where the book is going now.  But Thursdays I seem to write bombastic posts and Fridays I seem to be out of sorts.  I wonder why.
Post you publication stuff in comments here.  I know I lost some last week, sorry.  I’ll try to do THAT post tomorrow morning.

One of the more embarrassing moments of my childhood was when I approached a cousin’s wedding singer and asked why the group couldn’t play children’s songs.  I remember the look of shock on the man’s face very vividly.

Mind you, I was about five at the time, and the only child at that wedding, and I was bored, bored, bored.  Songs about lost loves and who’d done whom wrong did nothing for me.  It was so far outside my experience as to be… well… Martian.

If you think this is a post about the hyper-sexualization of society and childhood, you’re wrong.  Past societies were actually a lot more sexualized than ours, and childhood is largely a Victorian invention because that’s when society was finally affluent enough not to make five year olds start a trade.  Oh, and children would be exposed to sex and lovemaking from an early age too.

One of the funniest conceits is that people before the twentieth century (women particularly) knew nothing about sex until they were married.  Since I’ve met this in – some – contemporary literature, I can safely say these women were very good at lying (in fact, a lot of the literature has that sort of wink and nod feel to it.)

People before the twentieth century lived much closer to nature than … almost anyone, including farmers do now.  What I mean is, livestock and even wild animals were more like… your facebook friends nowadays.  And nature might be red in tooth and claw.  It is also horny.  At all times.  And it cares nothing what you see.

Also, while there were “children’s songs” before then, almost all of them had sexual double entendres, undertones or symbolism.

What I’d like to talk about is the infantilization of adulthood.

Look, yes, I know.  Teeny boppers put make up on, and I’ve seen middle school girls dressed like hookers, and, yes, yes, they’re talking all big and bad… as they always were.

In a normal, grown-up society, children imitate adults.  My reaction to the songs was so weird because I didn’t want to be an adult.  (Though I’d probably have had more fun if I had other kids around.)  Most kids do.  Most kids fantasize about being adults.  That’s what toy cars and wedding dresses for Halloween are all about.

What went wrong was that about the late sixties early seventies, society had a surplus of older juveniles and the powers that were decided – foolishly it turns out – that it was always going to be like that, forever, so they started catering to the youth.  Suddenly, the “hip” thing was to be a juvenile, act like a juvenile and value what a juvenile values.

Now those numbers are altered.  Society is weighting Senescence more.  So the young imitate their elders.  The problem is their elders don’t act like adults, they act like a frozen-in-time idealization of the juvenile.  They vote like it too.

I’m perfectly all right with “a safety net” though I’m still at a loss as to why it can’t be provided out of private charity.  Private charity has ALWAYS come through, while public “charity” always devolves to some form of oppression.  And besides, the only money government has is extracted under the threat of force (No?  Fine, pass a law that there are no fines and no arrests for failing to pay taxes and we’ll see how many do out of this great land.  I’m willing to bet high on less than 100.)  Is it valid to extract money, under the threat of force to give to someone else?  Why?  How can a faceless entity know that the one it’s taking from doesn’t need it, or that the other one needs it more?  Say I made 100k last year, this year I’m unemployed, but I still owe taxes for last year.  Say someone else makes no money, but eats every night with a wealthy relative and owns his/her house outright.  Which do you take from?  To whom do you give? Show your work.)  If this is moral, why aren’t muggings moral?  Show your work.

But a safety net isn’t what we have.  No.  Seriously.  Contrast our condition with that of most of mankind throughout most of history.  No one was safe from famine, and even aristocrats might go hungry now and then.  Yes, I DO hear a lot about the hungry in the US.  Pray tell, how many people have died in the most recent famine?  None, you say?  But they don’t eat all they want you say?

Sir, that’s not a famine.  That’s an appetite.  And before someone jumps down my throat, yes, I know what having insufficient food is.  In US terms, or perhaps a little worse, and for reasons divorced from my middle class upbringing, I went hungry that way for two years.  As a young newlywed, with zero budgeting hability, I managed to get to the point we survived on an egg, a handful of flour and some very old mushrooms for two days.

We didn’t die.  That’s not famine.

We should absolutely have programs that prevent famine.  I’m against people dying of hunger, and if private organizations prove insufficient (make sure they do, first) then by all means help.  Same for nudity and homelessness (not caused by mental illness.)

But the problem is that our safety net now is set at “accept no discomfort.”

So we have a society of adults who know – even if they don’t resort to it – that daddy-government will ensure they’re fed, clad, housed.

We have a society of adults that aren’t adults.  Like the spoiled children of noblemen of old, they have time to devote to things that are the adult equivalent of playing: sex, dressing up, taking offense at petty things.  And because discomfort is unthinkable, excuses are thought up for acts of thoughtlessness, carelessness and selfishness.

Children are being raised by people that bring them into the world, but don’t think they have any obligations to them.  They’re being raised by people whose sole sacred imperative is “have fun.”

The problem is that our children are trying to imitate adults that don’t exist.

This will end in tears.  And there will be no adult around to dry them and tell you to suck it up and be a big girl/boy now.