Year: 2015

*With apologies to number 3 son by adoption for putting this up so late.  It’s been interesting around here for over 24 hours.  As in multiple handymen, fridge-stopping working, husband injuring himself “interesting”.  Thanks for your patience. – SAH*

I Am Excite – David Pascoe

No, not really. Well, sorta-kinda. I’ve been struggling a bit (more than a bit, really) with what I think is subclinical depression, brought on by, well, a lot of factors. Wee Dave being the Prime Mover (at least for this). Caring for a child is a lot of work, and while I understand that it gets easier – again, sorta kinda – as you add more of the adorable, little, psychic vampires, that doesn’t really help when you’re not certain whether the light down there is the end of the tunnel, or a train.

I want to call this subclinical (I’m honest enough to say I’m not certain one way or the other) in part because I don’t want to deal with the consequences of my brain not working right. Acute, rather than chronic, would be a heck of a lot easier to deal with. Sufficient rest (heh), ditto exercise (extremely important for endorphin production), proper nutrition (red meat, chocolate, cigars and whisk(e)y, check) I’m at a point where I’m trying to figure out things I’ve forgotten. Like how to relax. I’m really not sure what the feels like, anymore.

One of my most useful coping mechanisms is actually writing. Specifically fiction, though writing this post (and others like it (I’m working on more of the Star Wars/space opera related ones, I promise)) are also helpful, just to a lesser degree. I suspect it has to do with how men are wired, versus women, and how I am wired, specifically. The Daily Grind is just that, but when you perform the same tasks, day in and day out, and “well, the Creature survived, and so did I,” is the best thing you’ve got at the end of the day? This is survival, and surviving is good. But I want thriving. I need more than adequate.

As an aside, I’m told I need to get over myself a bit. Writing at all is a win, when Daddy is my primary job description, (more) objectively speaking. I’m making a stitching horse so I can make some footwear that won’t make my knees hurt at the end of the day. I built a Travel Writing Rig based on a Raspberry Pi fitted into a Pelican camera case (expect the write-up at the MGC during LibertyCon, as that Friday is mine) just so I could take my mechanical keyboard anywhere, and get use out of it.

So I’m doing things. And, honestly, listing stuff out like this helps. A lot. It gets me excited, which is really the whole point. If relaxation (not sleep: that’s just unconsciousness. Ok, not just unconsciousness (sorry, Robert, Speaker), but it doesn’t lower stress levels- ok, it does, but that’s not what I’m after) seems unavailable, then boosting mood through rediscovery of the awesome parts of life seems like a solid Plan B. And that’s part of what the whole previous paragraph was about. I’m working toward remembering what excites me. And not just in a “gets the blood pressure up, and the mind focused,” manner. If that was all I wanted, I’d read about politics. (Seriously, the GOP didn’t feel the super secret trade stupidity was worth fighting? We had to rely on Pelosi?! HulkSMASH)

E3 is … well, I think it’s ongoing, actually. At least, Bethesda Softworks had a showcase last night at the Dolby Theater in LA, and revealed a bunch of stuff. There was gameplay footage of the new DOOM game, announcements about Dishonored 2 and something about the Elder Scrolls Online (which I’ve avoided, despite my love of that particular world: I just don’t have time to devote to MMOs. Or sanity, speaking of the Daily Grind), and finally, a bunch of stuff about Fallout 4, which was only announced a couple of weeks ago. It looks amazing, and I’ve been watching the videos all morning. And I am excite. A lot. There’s speculation that this one’ll be set in Boston (just looked it up: yup, in Boston) and one of the videos has footage of a flying USS Constitution (I. MUST. HAVE). The setting isn’t washed out green and gray like Fallout3, or the desert of New Vegas. This looks gorgeous, and the Fallout setting has been one I’ve greatly enjoyed since the first one in 1998.

Which, really, is precisely what I’m after, here. I’m excited. I feel energized, in a way that I haven’t for quite a while, and I’m working to figure out how to keep that up. Or at least visit that place on a more regular basis. Unfortunately, Fallout 4 won’t be available until November, but there’ll be a few things happening between now and then that I imagine could be used as leverage to enjoy life a bit more than has been the case for the last … while.

Now, I’m still fairly young for a- for a whatever-it-is (long story), and I’m working through all of this from a teeny-tiny, little control station deep inside my skull (more or less how an introvert moves through the world), so things are often at a bit of a remove. Real things, like people, nature, and life. I’ve been doing this long enough, though, to have it impressed upon that skull of mine that there are a few people out there with a better grasp on things than what I’ve got. Or at least more experience. (Hence the aforementioned “get over yerself, kid.”) I’m not exactly meaning to crowdsource my therapy to the Huns. Though I won’t be upset if something works better than what I’m doing these days (really, I just can’t afford to self-medicate with the Good Stuff.) What do y’all do? Or, what have you done in the past that’s worked well?

So I sent my poor husband off to deal with electrician.  I have a good reason.  Electrician has a Russian accent.  Imagine us trying to communicate.  Now stop laughing.  Yeah.  Like that. So I have maybe an hour before other electrician comes by to give us his estimate and who knows how long before appliance movers (could be a few minutes.)

This brings me to something I was musing about this morning, right after I figured out what it meant that the lack-brains at File 770 (henceforth club 770) linked back to my post with “the hydrophobia that falls on you from nowhere” because apparently my saying something about “arrangements that must be made for people of different orientations as reproduction and sex become more divorced from each other” means I’m homophobic.  This despite the fact that you don’t need to scratch very deep in this blog to figure out I was pro gay marriage well (WELL) before their sainted president evolved.

Apparently not wanting to get lost — in an unrelated post — in the weeds of “no, I don’t think even temporary or multiple marriage are out of the question, but I don’t think we should force churches or people of different beliefs to ENDORSE any such accommodations, provided they’re legal.” makes me homophobic.

I know of course that part of this is the moral superiority stakes from the other side.  They must be better, more open, more tolerant.  And if they’re not, they’ll calumny you to feel superior.

Which would be fine, if for some reason their estimation of themselves and the rest of the human race weren’t so grimdark.

I.e. if these were reasonable people who think that human beings are normally fairly decent, but of course have a dark side too.

These are not reasonable people.

Look, I’m by disposition an introvert.  I can “flip” to a public persona and pass for extrovert, but if I’ve been sick (like now) or am not up to snuff, you can see me engage in championship marathons of avoiding human contact, to the point someone meeting me for the first time will think I hate them.

And like most people of a bookish and Odd disposition I went through some time periods of being considered a social pariah by most of my peers.  (like, being a libertarian professional sf/f writer.  No, I joke.  Like Middle School.)  Particularly when you’re young and not outgoing it’s easier to conflate this with “humanity is horrible and lives to hurt others.”  Particularly when one is exposed to the peaceful interaction of an all-girls’ school, of course.

But those are time periods (most of them in my teens.)

There is a reality check.  One doesn’t need to know much about the world, history or how grim things get some places and time to know that even in the middle of all that darkness there is unexpected kindness and love from humans who have nothing to gain by doing it.  One doesn’t need to be an angel to know that one’s worst impulses are checked by one’s best.

So — how can a whole swath of political opinion assume that unless tightly restricted by government individual humans are the scum of the Earth?  They clearly do.  It speaks loud and clear from their work, their entertainment choices, and assuming their entire opposition OVER A SCIENCE FICTION AWARD are “neo nazis” or “racist, sexist, homophobic” even in the face of blatant proof to the contrary.

Dorothy Grant in an unrelated post talked about what she found in a “fan” site:

I had occasion recently to go to a site that I rarely frequent, and skimmed the first three articles to get a feel for the place. The first was praising the gory dehumanizing of a show named Hannibal, which stars the eponymous serial killer. The second was a review of a season of Game of Thrones, lusting for more rape and murder. The third article was a book review praising a “dark fantasy” where a woman is traded by her people to a dark wizard.

I won’t be back, because the very tone was dreary and debased. No amount of top-end design or beautiful visuals can make up for content like that. This is what happens when people focus for too long on the darkness they strain to see in every human heart, so that they might declare themselves superior. There is no joy there, no sense of wonder, no hope, no celebration of mercy, charity, hard work, or moral principles. These people do not laugh, except to cover themselves in case someone attacks their attack as insufficient or overreaching: “It was just a joke!” is their defense as they scuttle away.

There can be no celebration of achievement, only open season to attack in the cleverest way upon its announcement. This is moral bankruptcy, and that the knives came out in comments is absolutely unsurprising. The knives are always out, and they’re always circling to see who’s got the best cut, and praise them while planning a more clever cut or backstab.

I had nothing to contribute there.

And it’s not that there isn’t a place for that kind of fiction, mind.  The same way it’s not that there isn’t a place for assuming someone is an homophobe.  It’s the fact that they assume these things by default, sight unseen, and that most of the “serious” fiction, SF/F and not has become this parade of small minds and outright mean opinions of humanity as a whole.

I run into this in mystery too, where no character will be good, admirable, or even have a spark of human kindness.  These people are not even evil.  They’re “petty nasty” all the time.

Dave Freer at Mad Genius Club today talks about book printruns falling steadily and tries to figure out why.  Well, as someone who HAD walked away from reading new fiction (largely.  There were exceptions) until Amazon made it easier to read stuff that wasn’t pushed, I had done so because I was tired of the soul-sloughing POINTLESS darkness pushed at me everywhere.

Note I’m not for polyanna happy go lucky.  Well, at least I also don’t believe it and can’t write it.  My worlds tend to be grim, but even in them there’s decent people.  And most people in them are decent, for a value.

It’s just that I don’t think everyone goes around tainted with all the venal sins and with a good swath of mortal sin too.

I don’t believe, in other words, that a poor young couple straying into a rough bar would get beat up for no reason.  Not in the states, not unless racial factors intrude, by which I mean they end up in a neighborhood that’s solid new immigrant or minority and think they’re under attack.  And even then, there would need to be serious issues to cause a lethal, unprovoked attack on strangers.  There would need to be aggravating factors of a serious and unremitting order.

But they believe it, because to one reader, the “other side” (for lack of a better term) thought If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love was brilliant fiction and plausible.

Realizing this, realizing they’re stuck in that very adolescent fear of “the other” defined as “someone not in my social group” makes it easier to understand why they are so desperately interested not just in a strong government, but in a government that intrudes into every little minutia of the human life and regulates EVERYTHING. And it stops anyone even SAYING anything not approved of by the group, because — gasp, squeak, “they could be mean.”

It’s not a grown up nor balanced perspective, but it is one that one can see from someone who is terrified of all of the human race whom they view as evil ogres ready to thump their poor little selves into oblivion.

I remember my 11 year old self, and wishing someone would intervene on my behalf (I was physically brave, but it was all too easy to kill me with unkindness) and I can imagine wanting a government powerful enough to “stop those evil people I’m sure are out to get me.”

The thing I don’t understand is how supposed adults (some much older than I) who have lived in the world and have such a horror of their own species and every single person in it, think that giving power to the government to intervene and stop humans being so evil is better.

Are they perhaps convinced that government is run by angels?

If not, how can they imagine that giving some humans unchecked power that those over whom they reign can’t stop or control would lead to anything but tyranny and horror?  How can they not see the advantages of limiting the power of government?  How can they not realize that most of the true evil of humanity comes not from individuals but from organized groups given power over other — not very well known — groups?  How can they not see the only antidote to that is to empower not vast faceless ill defined classes, groupings or organizations, but individuals?

I understand they want government to come and protect them from evil people.  BUT I don’t understand what they think government is composed of.

Because just had a call from electrician coming in less than an hour.  You might want to go here, read this: http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/06/15/the-plucky-bots/

Until I can post.

Good morning Huns, Hoydens, Rapscallions, Dragons and Creatures of ill-repute.  This morning I woke up to Peter Grant’s blog and news of a robot-army. 

This is the money-quote:

They reportedly believe the current backlash against that company is basically ‘manufactured outrage’, deliberately stirred up by Vox Day (whose name is allegedly an expletive there now).  Some have even asserted that the thousands of e-mails complaining about Irene Gallo’s statement aren’t genuine, but the product of a bot-net, a manufactured wave of pseudo-indignation that has no foundation in reality.  Apparently Macmillan and others involved aren’t so sure about that, but it’s a defense the SJW’s are using with might and main.  It’s also apparently why almost none of us have had any acknowledgment of our complaints, not even a notification that our e-mails have been received.  (Some correspondents who requested confirmation when their e-mails were opened have received it;  others have not.)

It took me about ten seconds to make sense of this, and then it clicked.  You see, progressivism, like most closed, self-coherent, all-encompassing faiths not only has its own eschatology that involves their ultimate victory but also involves beliefs about the enemies of their proposed paradise.  Beliefs such as that they’re older, hidebound, “racist, sexist, homophobic” and bound to disappear before the light of “rational” and “scientific” Marxism.

The fact that there is nothing rational or scientific in believing that ultimate human happiness comes from an all powerful state is not important, since the Marxist faith is internally-self-consistent, which means where it meets reality it can ignore it and cut itself off from it, as not being “rational”.  (I.E. not fitting the narrative.)

This bizarre belief that thousands of pissed off fans are just a “robot army” invoked by the Lord of All Evil is one of the ways of pinching off reality and self-insulating so the faith can stay strong.  They know that those who disagree with their progressive view for the future are few, old, and frankly probably too dumb to read for fun.  They know also that VD has some mysterious mastery of the dark forces of computing which they don’t fully get.  Ergo, presto, the annoying supposed evidence they might not be right is enemy action and fakery.

And this is why communists in Europe only went through a brief, confused time after the fall of the USSR before they found their feet in the certainty the unwashed masses of the third world were really what was meant the “proletariat” who was supposed to displace capitalism and also that communism had “never really” been tried.

Self-isolating faiths with narratives about a certain future are difficult to defeat with reality.  Look at how long the followers of the prophet had their nose rubbed in unproductive desert sands, and yet they still remain sure that the future is a world Caliphate.

On the other hand, those of us who are irreverent and see this sort of sideways and upside down find this entire thing funnier than absurdist plays.  For one thing because I have for some time now suspected the extreme left suffers from some form of self-induced Aspergers which leads them to want labels on everything and everything to match the label, to the point they leave no room for humanity.  You can see this in their demand for different genders for every passing thought that doesn’t fit the usual and most commonly applied labels, to the point there are now supposed to be hundreds or thousands of different genders.  (Every man/woman/critter/snail a gender!  Towards a brave new future!)

Then there is their insistence that you can only ever write precisely what you are, though you are of course allowed to write creatures of lesser victimhood, at least according to some, but not creatures of more victimhood.  So, everyone is allowed to write straight white men, because as we know they have no victimhood, ever, but to write a lesbian, one footed, Caribbean, deaf trans-female, you must be one, or you’re stealing her victimhood (it is the precioussss after all.) Also if you are privileged (see, white, hetero, male or any of those, or…) you simply can’t understand “disadvantaged” people so you can write them.

So, despite the fact my gay friends say I can write gay males just fine, I can’t really and I’m stealing their victimhood.  (I’ll never give it back guys.  It’s going into my victimhood dungeon.  mwahahahahahah.  That’s how evil I am.)

And despite the facts that great writers throughout history — Shakespeare included — wrote about and for people they couldn’t possibly be or even anticipate (which is why Shakespeare still speaks to us) the proper way to write and read is to write and read only what we are.

Mind you, this is not a new nor even a novel notion for humans.  It echoes through the ages to Puritan banning of fiction.  There is a certain type of human that can’t comprehend creating or imagining things that don’t exist, and which wishes to restrain others’ creativity to things their robotic-selves can endorse.  (We saw some of this when the anti-gamer gaters started denying that anyone could possibly want to play anything FOR FUN.  That was infantile and silly and playing games should be for enlightenment or consciousness raising or whatever.

The sad part is to give them a voice or allow them to have a say in the fiction or entertainment fields. We end up with things that are no fun at all.

So, understand, I don’t have anything against robots, but I don’t welcome our new robotic overlords.  They don’t like us writing or enjoying imaginative stuff, that’s fine.  Just don’t do it.  We’ll continue with our fun.  You can’t stop us.

Oh, and stop projecting.  WE are not robots.  (Except for those mechanical hands holding a middle finger aloft.  We only built those because I need all ten fingers to type.  They are not me.)

Speaking of other things I’m not.  Apparently at file 770 they’ve now decided I’m ignorant of American political history because I only came here in the mid-80s as an adult, and therefore clearly, not having taken required high school courses in American history, I know nothing of anything before the middle 80s.  (Will someone retrieve my eyes?  I rolled them too far again.)

Never mind the fact I did 12th grade in the US (Stow Highschool in Stow, Ohio) and took not only AP American History, but also Comparative Political Systems. The insularity of these people is on display, as they seem to believe not only is America of no interest outside the US, but also that American publications are arcane and difficult to acquire things.  From the moment I decided on an English Major (9th grade.  It’s required) I had subscriptions to Time, Newsweek and the foreign “news” put out by the US consulate.  IOW I had the same view of American politics that American liberals had.  Later on these were joined by access to the NYT and the Wall Street Journal, usually a week late, in my college’s American Studies Library.

And yes, these were of passionate interest and hotly discussed because — again, this is hard to explain to insular people — America matters more than they think in the world.  Much of the upheavals that shook the world in the 70s were the result of Carter’s strange ideas and weak hand on the tiller.  In fact in many ways the upheavals that shake the world when America loses its mind are far more strongly felt elsewhere.  Or as my mom says “when America sneezes, the world catches pneumonia.” (They don’t understand this, because they have a bizarre dream of America disappearing and the world becoming better off thereby.  This is because they think the world is zero sum.  Never mind.)

Beyond all that, what shocked me about that POV was their apparent assumption that people don’t read or study anything for FUN if they didn’t learn it in school.  I tend to read more or less constantly (it’s a reflex) and am constantly trying to fill in blank parts in my field of knowledge.  American history has been less of a fixation for me than other areas of history until the last five years or so, but let us be rightly understood, HISTORY is a 100 years ago or MORE.  American current events, which are anything from then on, are and have always been a passionate interest, part of my degree (I had a class called American Studies for four years running) and frankly a minor obsession.

One wonders if it’s part of the robotic point of view that they can’t imagine doing anything outside their programing and therefore everyone else MUST be the same.

Speaking of robotic: the cough and auto-immune mess (eczema included) are subsiding some — say halfway back to normal — but some of the meds are… weird.  The steroids make me a little hot on the trigger, something that Lin Wicklund had warned me about and part of the reason I’ve avoided them like poison, because, you know, excitable Latin is already bad enough normally, I don’t need enhanced heat on the trigger. I’m trying to compensate for it.

However the sneaky insidious med is the cough syrup with codeine, apparently at the level that they prescribe for throat-cancer patients (and contemplate this, for the firs three days it barely dented my cough) because I didn’t realize it was doing anything beyond making me sleep.  Until I discovered I was doing things like wandering away from half completed tasks without realizing I was doing it.  Or reading things that weren’t there.  (Though “East Anglian Stormtrooper” was a funny misread in a medieval mystery for “east Anglian Sharpshooter.”)  Or starting to take the bottle of refinisher to my lips, before the smell stopped me (after which I made sure that I kept my water bottle elsewhere and didn’t drink while working on the wood.)

So I’ve been a bit robotic myself.

On the good side, I’m almost 100% sure this was all caused by latex paint.  Yesterday I tried to do a very little touch up on latex paint, and the coughing started, though it hadn’t through the use of turpentine or stain.

Now, I’ve never before been allergic to latex and certainly not latex paint, but due to the surgery, etc, my endocrine system is in flux (that’s a way to put it) and also under stress, and also frankly I’ve never painted as much as I have now at a stretch, which makes it worse, I’m sure.

Anyway, this is actually good news because sons know how to paint walls, while the refinishing of the elaborate Victorian woodwork is more art than science and would have been a right b*tch to try to convey to them.  I’m sometimes mixing more than one stain to get different-age woods to match, and I’m working from 30 years wood finishing experience, plus whatever I acquired following my carpenter-grandfathers around.  It wouldn’t be as easy to get across.  Besides, I have automatic rollers and my guys are guys.  They love automatic anything.

Which brings us back to robots, I guess.  Hopefully I don’t get robotic in-laws, but hey, what happens, happens.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading KULL fiction, which is mostly indie, and a quick (non-robotic) pro-tip to those of you laboring in that vineyard: if you’re writing genre fiction, make sure the genre elements come in early enough.

What I mean by this is introduce the science fiction, fantasy, or mystery element in the first few chapters, please.  (Preferably the first chapter.) Look, when I’m reading a medieval mystery, I’m not averse to lavish descriptions of medieval England, but by chapter five there should be a crime being investigated, not merely a “tension” and vague mentions of spying, okay?  In this case, I side with the robots.  When I buy something because of what it says on the tin, I want what it says on the tin.

Your book might be a dessert topping and a floor wax, but it should taste good when on the dessert and make the floor shine, not just one or the other.

And that’s all for now, oh, (robotic) Hunnish hordes.  Go forth and enjoy the day and remember your programming: Bring chaos and mayhem according to plan.  No one likes unplanned, random chaos.

Oh, wait.  We do.   Right.  Go forth and plan on unplanned chaos.

I go and have cough syrup.

Laura Montgomery

Sleeping Duty

Gilead Tan and Andrea Fielding survived their stint in the military, got married, signed up to emigrate to a terraformed colony world, and went into cold sleep for the journey from Earth. While they slept, the starship got lost and settled for a different world, a wild world. Three centuries after the founding of a colony on the uncharted planet, Gilead awakens to find humanity slipped back to medieval tech and a feudal structure. Worse, the people who want him awake won’t let him wake his wife.

M.S. O’Brien

On Magic

De Magia

This Dominican friar’s famous lectures on natural law, international law, and human rights changed the mind of Emperor Charles V on how the New World should be run. Like others of the Salamanca School, he had a great influence on the US founding fathers. But since Salamanca was also a focus of rumors about doctorates in magic being awarded by the Devil, he followed that up with a lecture on the theology of magic.

Without denying that Scripture is full of miracles and devilish doings, but also without paranoia about magicians and their supposed occult power, de Vitoria takes a calm academic approach to the one of the most controversial questions of his time. He provides an overview of ancient historical and philosophical sources, consults both common legends and new lore from the New World, quotes a lot of Aquinas, and points out that he doesn’t know anyone who’s actually seen anything magical.

Fascinating in itself as history and theology, this book will also give you ideas for fantasy and science fiction. (Will the next colonial period also be fascinated with the occult?) And it’s just $2.99!

*I apologize for the length of this post.  As you know I’m not feeling quite well, which means I’m more meandery (totally a word) than normal. However, the steroids are working, so…*

Yesterday I found what I think is an indie mystery series, (okay, only two books but I’m hoping she writes more. It’s published by Steel Magnolia press which seems to be on the level of Naked Reader when it was going full tilt) which reminded me of how much I love mysteries and which in a way, backwards, swung back towards the Hugo mess. Not as what is going on in the award but as a “what the situation is in traditional publishing.”

As you guys know I’ve been feeling poorly. Feeling poorly means hot chocolate and a glass of port wine in the evening and historical mystery books.

The… ah… vineyard of historical mystery books, much less “historical mystery books I can stand to read” has grown mighty dry since about twelve years ago. There was some sort of a shift in publishing where they decided historical didn’t sell (as they told me over and over again) and the spigot of historical – by which I mean before the 20^th century, by the way. Sorry. I was raised in Europe. Less than 100 years old is not historical. For that matter, real historical is 500 years old — almost ran dry. And what there is…

Well, let’s just say that I started noticing two things in my historical mysteries: a) they often try to preach modern values to the time they are writing about. The women particularly are all modern women b) They make it a point of displaying their erudition, sometimes with lavish forewords. (I know why they’re there, I do. You’re dealing with an establishment that often “knows” wrong things about history and those lengthy forewords are self defense against the copyeditors who’ll correct you according to wicki.)

So, even though I adore books set between the wars in England – part of the attraction of Agatha Christie are the books set in that long summer holiday of history – and read almost an entire series set in it, around book 14 I got sick and tired of being in the head of a 21^st century woman set in the past. It’s not just how she thought. Yeah, there were people like that at all times. New Age for instance has a long pedigree going back to the 19^th century at least. No. It was what she noticed and didn’t notice. The character was, to put it bluntly, a graduate of a good university in the 21^st century America who looked at the world in terms of classes but not as an Englishwoman of the time thought of class. The woman looked at the world in terms of “class struggle” and “privilege” and racism and sexism and… evaluated everything through this lens.

This was roughly the equivalent of a character in the 16^th century whose guide to life is My Little Pony. Even if it could make for an interesting character if there were an explanation or time travel involved, since there wasn’t, it was just annoying a niggling itch that grew until it became unbearable and I abandoned the series.

Even series that aren’t that bad have this level of “tolerable annoyance.” I know from tolerable annoyance. I’ve had eczema since I was one and a half and I am rarely without a flare up. The high flare ups like right now are excruciating, but I learn to ignore the “slight itch” flare ups. And I’ve learned to ignore the occasional silliness or out of place observation in books – traditionally published books – since I know to some extent they’re there as writer insurance, and to some extent they’re there as a sort of reflex of excellently educated 21^st century authors.

For instance, I know if a medieval churchman is introduced and I’m not in Ellis Peter’s world, he’s either a bad guy or he’s a secret agnostic, who got sent to the monastery for family reasons and who views religion with distrust. I know if someone is very rich he’ll be the villain. I know—

Well, I downloaded, not expecting much, a bunch of historical mysteries at 99c by various authors, some traditionally published. One of them I returned. Yeah, the one I mentioned a few days ago. The foreword was never ending, and by the end of it she’d managed to insult everyone not to the left of Stalin, which meant I knew I couldn’t trust her to guide me through her world.

The other one I haven’t returned yet – I hate returning 99c reads. It seems churlish – but probably will because heaven help us, it’s set in a 19^th century that never existed. Like the mystery set in regency England, where you can kill peasants with impunity if you’re a nobleman, every detail of the setting jars. To make matters worse, like that other mystery, I realized on page 15 the character is female, though from the setup, manner of talking, etc, I expected it to be a man. (I probably should check if those are both written by the same person.)

The third one I started without great hopes. I’m going to say right here that it’s set in an era where I don’t spend much time – the time of Coeur de Leon in England – and therefore it could have mistakes I fail to see. However, I know enough by touch-feel that if it’s a truly clumsy effort it normally pushes me out and this one hasn’t. Now, I’m not saying it would pass Suburbanbanshee’s sniff test. But who knows? It might.

Anyway, against it even as I started was the fact that the day before yesterday I’d started feeling truly ill, so I couldn’t concentrate on much. The book starts with a convoluted Medieval sort of argy-bargy that left me cold, but the character had enough voice to draw me through.

I read it through in the next few hours, including through the night when I felt so bad. Halfway through the night I bought its sequel.

The books are The Season of the Raven and The Season of the Fox by Denise Domning, and they are highly recommended, even if those of you who know more about the middle ages than I do might find nits I didn’t.

They’re excellently convoluted mysteries, with an engaging protagonist, characters who come alive and who are not all bad or all good and who ring true to life, and with a lively enough voice to keep you reading. If you like Ellis Peters you’ll like these. The 99c sale must be done because they’re now 3.99, but it’s still an excellent price for historical mysteries.

I want to say something RIGHT HERE. I have no idea what the author’s politics are. And I don’t care. The characters have opinions I don’t necessarily agree with (there is a great scandal at usury for instance) but they’re perfectly in the time and place in which they’re set.

For the people who will inevitably be sent here to look for signs of recidivism or revanchism or reactionary thought or whatever, I’ll spell it as if in braile: The characters don’t need to agree with me or embody my beliefs. I can perfectly imagine reading an historical (what Americans consider Historical) mystery set in early communist Russia and loving it, even if the character is an avowed Leninist (at the time he’d have an excuse, since the horrors that always result hadn’t been proven by multiple experiments in multiple settings) because the character would be true to the time and to himself, and if the other characters (and that one too) were alive and individual, I can imagine enjoying the world and the plot.

What I object to is the intrusion of the “only correct way to view the world” projected into a past in which it never existed and also turning everything, no matter what the time period it’s set in into same old, same old.

If I read only books by libertarians, and what’s more by my flavor of libertarian, my library would be very tiny indeed, but more than that, it would be boring.

So, I enjoyed these mysteries, by this lady of whose politics I know nothing and whose ability to create characters made two very difficult days more bearable.

My one complaint is that she has only two books out, and now I’m done with them. I bought a trad. published 99c mystery and started it over breakfast. It starts with the obligatory erudite foreword. The beginning is good or at least not patently offensive, but… but I wish the other series had more. I already detect a defensive “I know what I’m talking about” tone in the writing of this other mystery that is setting my teeth on edge. And I’m afraid the hectoring about class or sexism or whatever will start at any minute. Mind you I can tolerate a certain amount of it if the rest is very good, but it grows wearisome.

And this is where we run into the Hugo thing. Or at least we run into Irene Gallo. I don’t know if it came across in Shout It From The Rooftops but what appalled me about her utterances was not what she said, as such. I mean what she said was strange and calumnious, but it was what has been repeated since entertainment weekly. No, what shocked me was the way she said it.

Look, I don’t think there’s any excuse for a thinking person of mature years to be a communist. Not after the history of the last 100 years. But I can excuse it in college kids, and people who mentally never left college. And I can excuse it in people for whom communism is sort of a family religion. People tend to be unable to reason through things they drank with mother’s milk. If I say “oh, he’s a communist” it’s usually with the feeling of rolled eyes, not with the feeling of “he’s Satan.” (With exceptions, of course.)

The way Irene Gallo said “Neo Nazis” though was more in the tone of “Satanist” for a medieval monk. She knows, on faith, these people exist and that they’re out there. And she’s been told by everyone she trusts that they’re “racist, sexist and homophobic” and she believes, because everyone around her believes.

She talked not as someone who had looked at the situation and come to the regretful conclusion that all these people were “bad to reprehensible” but as someone who’d heard it so much, and into whose inner narrative it fit so well that “of course this is the truth.” She didn’t need to examine it, any more than you need to run out the door and verify that the sky is still blue. You were taught it is blue, (even when it’s gray) and everyone you know says it’s blue. So, it’s blue.

My friend James Schardt said that she was utterly sincere, and he was right. The utter sincerity comes through. She’s not being insulting, she’s telling the truth as she knows it.

And that’s what appalled me about it. Oh, I knew it – sort of – from moving in these circles, at cons and from submitting/dealing with agents and editors for years. I knew what I had to do to pass, at an instinctive level, and I knew that any deviation would be interpreted as “right wing” even though I think the country in which I’d truly be “right wing” or “conservative” would be an improbable country populated by eccentrics. (Maybe Heinlein’s moon?)

But one thing is to know it instinctively – and even then when I write about it, people email me to tell me that I am wrong and “paranoid” and yeah, one is always afraid – and another to have one’s nose rubbed in it in the form of a supposed adult saying with the simplicity of a 12 year old that the people who oppose her are “racist, sexist, homophobic” and “bad to reprehensible” even before the “poopy-head” level classification of “neo-nazis.”

Look, it is the fact that Irene Gallo is sincere and, in her own mind, fighting on the side of angels, that is shocking and scary. And it fits perfectly with what I’ve seen in the publishing world (other than Baen, natch) in my years working as a professional writer.

These people don’t live in the world we live in.

Most of us – well, some of us – went through excellent universities, and read voraciously, and were subjected to the barrage of media that projected the same mental picture Ms. Gallo has: the left is eternally right (when they were wrong, their mistakes – like segregation – are now attributed to the right) and the future is a bright socialist utopia (really communist, but we’ll call it socialist so as not to scare the squares) and anyone who stands against it is an evil right winger, a fascist, a neo nazi and by definition racist, sexist, homophobic.

The thing is that this view was propagated pretty uniformly from the academic/media/entertainment complex for most of the twentieth century and people absorbed it to some extent. But most people in the real world come across enough stuff that doesn’t fit, or perhaps read enough about the fall of the Soviet Union to know it’s not just “this time it will be different” but the system itself is flawed.

And some of us come to view individual rights, individual conscience and individual freedom as the only best system (not perfect. No system is perfect.)

But that’s because the places we work in, the world we move in isn’t a unified front. Those who stay in academia, those who go into the arts or into publishing, though, move from a world of being fed a message into a world of being fed the same message. Not only is there no incentive to doubt, but doubting or showing any wobbling of belief will be detrimental to you. You stay within that world because it’s safe and because it’s what everyone around you believes. How can everything you know be wrong.

Shadowdancer in her excellent post about why “Nazi” is not a word to throw around lightly mentions her years in East Germany:

This was particularly emphasized by the fact that the Second World War was excised entirely from East German education at the time, and they were only taught about ‘The Great War’ – what the rest of the world was calling World War I. Socialist Germany was a big exercise in erasing the past and reconstructing it in a great big lie – and somewhat inconveniently, there were still people who remembered WWII. It was a verboten subject, and the younger generation knew nothing of it. They didn’t believe that someone as evil as Hitler could have ever existed.

Dad, the Aristotlean gadfly that he was, liked to smuggle in copies of Mein Kampf and give it away as gifts, his own little subversive fight for the truth. I know he horrified one of our babysitters with it, who was a college student and an avowed Marxist who enjoyed being able to pit wills and philosophical arguments with ‘someone unfortunate enough not to be educated in Socialist education.’ It was her awakening into questioning what she knew.

One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information. Everything had to be spoon fed. They had to develop a disdain, to instil contempt, pity and aversion to Capitalism, America and other countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

In a way Irene Gallo lives in a similar world. A world in which some verities are so absolute they can’t ever be questioned. The same world as the person whose book I returned because her foreword went on and on about how there had always been “progressive” thought even in the middle ages, and made it clear that by progressive she meant the 21^st century’s idea of it.

People are talking of boycotting Tor. That’s silly. This is not Tor. This is “all traditional publishing except for Baen” and a few authors at other houses. I will continue reading authors from Tor – Kevin Anderson, John C. Wright [Jim Butcher is Roc, and I even know that.  I’m just not functioning any too well. Thanks for the correction in comments.]– whose politics are of little concern to me because their worlds breathe and live.

But that’s part of the issue – people like Irene Gallo can’t help selecting authors who move and think within their construct-world. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just sense. If they think that’s the real world and there’s a side of angels and a side of devils and the devils are everyone outside the narrative, why would they encourage evil? If I were an editor, I probably wouldn’t buy any outright communist books (not the author, mind, the books) unless the author left enough holes that I could see doubt seeping in. I wouldn’t buy it because the pov would repel me, and because I tend to think 100 million sacrifices to the impossible ideal that always slips into medieval tyranny in the end are more than enough. It wouldn’t be a black list or an organized anything, but if every house were staffed with editors who felt about communism as I do, it would be impossible for a communist author to publish.

Now, I’d like to think my world view is complex enough that I wouldn’t be buying only authors whose villains are communists. However, my world view was formed in the real world.

The problem with the narrative construct pushed by the educational/media/entertainment complex is that its paper thin and that it leads its disciples to believe that bad think needs to be abjured, “consciousness must be raised” etc. I.e. they believe the only reasons someone would oppose them is because they’re either evil or insufficiently “informed”, so preaching is a great part of their work.

And this results in problems like the ones I have finding decent historical mysteries (and sometimes fantasy or science fiction) because there needs to be preaching in every book, and the preaching is not only counter-factual but and this is far worse, boring.

It never occurs to the Irene Gallos of the world that people who disagree with them might not disagree with their largely laudable objectives. It would shock her speechless to know that I personally would like equal rights for men and women (under the law) and that I think some accommodation must be made for different sexual expression in a world where sex and reproduction are increasingly divorced, and that I frankly think races are a construct with very little hold in reality. Where we disagree is where I – who read and study history – view governmental force as the worst way to attain those objectives. I also, with good and sufficient reason, view the government counterproductive (frankly) in attaining a fairer economic situation or in relieving the plight of the poor. (Of course, I also don’t believe all these problems have solutions. I believe at best most of them have palliative relief.)

They’ve been taught, they’ve heard from everyone they trust, that there is only one objective and one right way to get there. And those who disagree with them must be against their objectives/ideals and not against their methods.

The reality this creates is a publishing establishment that looks for markers of compliance from their authors and, depending on how much the authors are part of the establishment, in flat books about clichés.

This fight is not about the Hugos, nor about publishing, nor about a particular publishing house. This fight is about being able to create worlds that live and breathe, outside the rigid constraints of ideology and of “correct thought.”

The art of the Soviet Union and of Nazi Germany, no matter how much some people like it, had the same ridiculously flat and lifeless look, the same “I’m serving a larger ideal” tone. It came across boring and predictable.

Art or even JUST entertaining story telling requires looking at things another way. It requires creating characters we recognize. It requires a depth of emotion and observation that is impossible when it’s “in the service of a larger ideal.”

Which is why publishing has been in decline. Thank heavens for indie. Over time people with real stories and real characters will come back. Real story telling is always better than preaching to the choir.

Part of the screams we hear are a dying establishment struggling to convince us they still matter.

Ignore them and write and create. I need books to read. And the best way to destroy them is to outcreate them and outcompete them. And now we can.

Ça Ira.

The good news is that I’m alive, even if this post is ridiculously late.  Older son grabbed me by the scruff and dragged me to doctor.

Turns out this thing I thought was con crud isn’t.  It’s massive allergy attack triggering all three auto-immune, which explains why I’m eczemy, walking like both knees are broken, and suffering asthma attack.

As best we can tell it’s set off by the paints and woodstain I’ve been using on the other house.  Now, how in heck I finish the house without killing myself is a GOOD question.  We’ll figure it out.

But we won’t figure it out today or likely tomorrow.  I’m on steroids and stuff, and the REALLY good cough syrup, which means over the next few days I’ll be quite (QUITE) loopy.  Because right now cough is a huge issue, and also that with my auto-immune flaring anything will trigger an attack, as in I tried to die at the supermarket cashier stand, wheezing and coughing my head off, because… I don’t know.  I suspect the cashier was wearing cologne, though I couldn’t (consciously) smell it.

Anyway, the good news is that I’m not dead.  I’m not even sick.  My body is just conducting an all out war on itself.

What else is new?

I’m sorry for weaseling out on post today, but I spent the entire night awake and coughing and then son frogmarched me to doctor in the dark of early morning.  So, once cough syrup takes effect I plan to go crash.

It’s Only Words – A Blast From The Past Post from December 2010

It is one of the er… interesting aspects of a writing career that moments of heartbreak and the most fallow, dark years are inextricably linked to the moments when something clicks.

Perhaps it’s true of life, anyway. Human beings are creatures of habit. If everything is going along fine – or even tolerably – nothing changes. This in terms of society explains why wars and revolutions tend to change the world in scientific and innovation terms as well as in political and social. Because once everything is made “wrong” or “uncomfortable” and a mass of humans are broken out of their routine, then you can reestablish your quotidian life using new information/science.

In 1997/8 I’d come to the conclusion I’d never sell, not at the professional level. This required I rearrange my entire life, which had been geared towards my learning the craft and trying to get published for over a decade and strongly geared that way for at least six years.

I realized early on that I couldn’t actually give up writing. It’s an ingrained habit that long predates any dreams of publishing for pay. I make up stories and I write them down to get them out of my head. I finished my first “novel” (Okay, so it was forty pages) at ten AND wrote it during finals week in fourth grade (which actually determined what kind of secondary school I would attend, so it wasn’t as unimportant as it sounds.)

So, in 98, first I tried to write just for myself, but that didn’t work. When you’re writing for yourself, there’s no reason to make sure you are understood or understandable. There’s no reason to affix the details to paper. What you write ends up sounding like memories of dreams – things that come out of the subconscious and submerge again. After a while it feels pointless.

I needed to write FOR someone, but I had no audience. These days I might have written for online. How that would have turned out is anyone’s guess, and I truly have no clue. Perhaps I’d have attracted no readers, studied, and ended up about where I am. Or perhaps I’d have attracted a couple hundred, just enough to keep writing at the level I was.

As it turned out, though, self-publication at the time was – at best – silly. So I thought I’d keep writing just as a hobby and to get readers, I’d write for fandom. Finding a fandom was something else again. My dad used to introduce me to people with “this is my daughter, she doesn’t like television” – making sure people knew my handicap up front.

I’m not going to be high and mighty here and say I picked the one fandom that was out of copyright on purpose. If Anne McCaffrey hadn’t stomped so hard on all fanfic related to her work, I’d probably have fallen into dragon riders world fanfic. Hard. As it was all the traces of those that I could find were long since shut down.

Other than that, my tastes verge on the fuddy-duddy. I wasn’t going to attempt Heinlein fanfic, (I’m not that crazy) or the rest of the genre. Dumas fanfic is the ONLY fanfic that runs to foursomes. Er… same gender foursomes. And I didn’t want to write erotica, anyway. I wanted to write stories.

So I fell into Austen fanfic at Derbyshire Writers Guild and The Republic of Pemberley. I got myself kicked out of the Republic of Pemberley in short order. No, I didn’t want to write erotica, but I reserve the right to make stupid jokes. Apparently, that wasn’t allowed at RoP.

This left me with DWG. And because I had learned to write for publication – even if I hadn’t been published – I studied the market first. What I found was so surprising that it took almost a year for it to penetrate.

You see, partly because I am foreign born and an ESL speaker, I paid a lot of attention to words, always. I think I’ve shared that my idea of how my work was received at publishers when I first started writing – I thought people sat around laughing at my misuse of idiom and wondering where I was from.

Because of this, I obsessed on words for many, many years. In fact, when I went to the Oregon writers workshop, Dean Smith STILL had to order me to not think about the words. (For which I can never thank him enough.)

But DWG taught me how truly unimportant words are. If you start writing a story that puts Darcy and Elizabeth in a perilous situation, you can have malapropisms in every line and grammar mistakes in more than half the text, and you’ll still have a lot of comments and a large following.

I’m not saying that people don’t care about words and mistakes, and I’m not going to say that most fanfic authors are illiterate – both would be false. At DWG though there are writers from all over the world and from all avocations. People write in their spare time and don’t spend hours polishing for the best word.

Most of them are still easily on a par with published work. One or two are startlingly bad with words. And there is one who, for a while, had a “fandom” of this author’s own, devoted to analyzing and making fun of the tortured sentences.

And yet, even this language-slaying author had a real fandom, that followed the posted serials with bated breath and gave the author much love in comments.

Why? Well, because the plot of these series were almost unbearably tortured. There were kidnappings and murders and mad wives in towers, and men pining away for love, and women who were despoiled and… Yeah, I know, you’re laughing “all the elements of cheap melodrama.”

I will remind you that this melodrama sold more than any of our more plausible and restrained novels sell. I’ll also say that while the lack of internal logic annoys me – personally – a lot of people LIKE these extreme situations. Why? Because the extreme situations bring forth extreme emotions.

And in the end, people read to follow the emotions, to fee what characters they care about are feeling.

What I found at DWG is that the words mattered far less than characters people could love and situations that enthralled them or made them empathize.

What do you think? Should an author shamelessly play with the audience’s feelings? Do you read for the feeling of it? What makes you return again and again to an author?

There is a well-night unanswerable question that “progressives” ask in every arena. Say, for instance that politicians in Chicago are beyond corrupt and this has a lot to do with the Chicago machine and in turn is responsible for the raging violence on the streets (because elected officials know it won’t wash back on them) and they’ll come back with “yeah, and if there wasn’t a machine, who should have been elected?”

The same thing with the Hugos, where over and over the bright enough to be stupid puppy-kickers ask “Oh, yeah, who should have won the Hugo instead, then? If the process hadn’t been the playground of insiders and whisper lists this whole time?” (And please, don’t try to deny it. When Gerrold told Brad that he’d never win a Hugo it was an admission. And besides, we saw the effects of it.)

This is their “defense.” It amounts to “If you have no knowledge of a better parallel world, then your argument is invalid” but they’re very happy with it because the question is unanswerable, and therefore they presume that the best work won, and can strut around about how fair they are.

Dave Freer did a post on Monday on the “quality” of quality in writing. He writes better than I do, so I won’t repeat his argument, just give you a link to it.

The take away for TL/DR readers is “you can’t say ‘this is good’ because humans have individual tastes and enjoyment of a book as a work of art has nothing to do with the minimal requirements of “Words and grammar are used properly.”

I’ve known this for a long time, because my tastes are, to put it mildly, weird. I read just about everything, but rarely (except in some romance subgenres) do I like the bestsellers in the genre. The books that leave me resonating like a bell are often things the world didn’t notice. When I joined the Don Camillo fan group on line 10 years ago I was the only person there under eighty. I might still be.

It extends to other media too. For instance, in movies, I like Second Hand Lions, a movie almost no one ever heard of.

This is so prevalent for me, that usually when a friend pushes a book at me, I know I’m going to hate it. I read Harry Potter at last when I was too sick to leave my big armchair and those books were the only ones within reach.

So I’ve known for a long time that “won an award” was almost an anti-recommendation for me, since the mid-nineties at least. I still liked Connie Willis’ books, but most of the others that won awards left me going “Say the what?”
And here I need to qualify that notwithstanding the typos in these posts (I write them very fast and don’t proof, since I don’t really get paid for them – yes, the donations help, but it’s not the rate I get for books – and today is probably speshul because I’m slammed under raging allergies and con crud acquired via husband. So I had to take Benadryl and I’m extremely sleepy) I have a natural fluency with words.

When it comes to writing, words are what I do. Maybe words and characters, and yep, still working on plot, but words I get for completely free. I came at writing via poetry and come from a long line of poets, so perhaps there’s something hereditary there.

For years, at least since I’ve been aware of awards and what is considered “quality” in the field, it seems to revolve around wording and how beautifully ideas are framed. There is a reason for this, I think, in that since only certain writers/ideas were acceptable to award committees and publishing push teams, the competition was in “how beautifully it’s written.” Which is fine. It’s like the court painters in France before the revolution, all copying the same casts and competing on how realistic they could make the drawing.

Unfortunately, because this was the way to get awards, which are often all a book can get in the way of publicity (The Prometheus Award did wonder for my career, for instance) in these days of declining print runs and premium shelf space, it meant that the entire field oriented towards “more prestige/beautiful prose” books.

Now before someone misunderstands me (rolls eyes) this doesn’t mean nothing else got published. No one can accuse the 10^th incarnation of werewolf romance of being a prestige book.

What it means though is that if you had it in you to write beautiful prose, both your agents and publishers tried to push you towards doing just that. The only way this makes sense – literary fantasy sells way worse than adventure fantasy – is if they’re chasing awards and the boost of credibility they give.

Sure, you might burn ten author’s careers by pushing them towards the literary end of the spectrum, but if you hit the award-and-recognition jackpot with the eleventh, you’re going to be collecting for text book excerpts and such for a long, long time.

I got pushed to write literary fantasy and by and large avoided it, because the Shakespeare trilogy had taught me I became very unhappy working in that vineyard.

However most people who got pushed that way probably didn’t feel as strongly about lit fic as I do and just went along and did it, limiting their audience and sometimes (because bad numbers are always the writer’s fault) losing their career along the way.

So, what does that have to do with the question of “What should have won instead?”

The same thing that if I said “If we’d spent less on the war on drugs and channeled that money to space exploration we’d be much better off now” and someone said “like how? What would we have?”

To which the only answer is “Squid farms on Mars.” And then your interlocutor can point out how ridiculous that is, since Mars has never had squid and probably can’t be colonized by even humans.

To which the answer is “Sure. Now. But if we had started 40 years ago…”

Because you can visualize a pathway of incremental improvements in science that would lead to thriving squid farms on Mars if we hadn’t used the money on the war on drugs or the great society or any of the other boondogles into which we’ve poured our money and effort.

In the same way, if there hadn’t been an unspoken push towards “literary” in the awards, a lot of writers who tanked their careers might still be around and writing (almost anything sells better than lit. fic.) And a lot of people who are writing the “bit words, safe ideas” branch of our field might be writing something far more exciting, something that brought print runs out of the doldrums. Something that would engage the public, restore the value of the award as a signal, and in general be good for all writers of sf/f.

Is this sure? No. How could it be. We might have come up with another way to sink the field.

The sad truth is that those squid farms on Mars never existed, so I can’t point at them and go “See what you killed?” (Though there are a ton better books than those that won the Hugo every year, too, but that’s part of how the awards were oriented. I can answer with some, but mostly I’ll trip up in not knowing WHEN they were published. For instance, F. Paul Wilson’s Hosts should have won in that year. I just don’t remember what the year was. And it’s possible if the win went to Connie Willis, I’d be divided.)

BUT the most important effect of a corrupt award, that is given to right-think told in beautiful words is not that some books will be ignored for the award. It’s that many books will never get written, or never get that boost of attention that makes the author successful and allows for more, better books written in the future. (For instance, I found out about Ender’s Game when OSC won.)

The field, little by little, becomes diminished. Long before the award becomes meaningless for sales, the field has become narrow enough to not attract a broad slice of readers. And the print runs fall.

The tragedy of the commons is nothing to the tragedy of the squid farms on Mars. At least the commons got to exist.

Instead what we have here is a field in which masterpieces were never written or – as Dave Freer puts it – are moldering in a drawer.

Life isn’t fair, and we’ll never have a perfectly fair process. Some brilliant writers (maybe most) are bassawkwards on how to promote, let alone how to submit books for publication. But breaking up the “academic” and “lit crit” idea of what is good in sf/f might at least allow us to reorient the thrust of the field towards one that is likely to attract newer and more abundant readers.

And we’d all be better for it.

After all, squid farms on Mars could feed a hungry world.

Trust and Loathing – Cedar Sanderson

Most of us have a need to trust someone. Man is not meant to dwell alone all of his days, and those who do are usually crippled by internal problems. This is not a bad thing, trust. But taken too far in the other direction, it can be equally as crippling. There must be a balance in one’s trust and loathing.

We all loathe something. It’s most likely not even a conscious decision on your part. For me, it’s the sound of someone chewing with their mouth open. I’d rather listen to fingernails on a chalkboard. The social concern these days is that no one show any sign of loathing another race. The problem is that we trust these voices repeating ‘racism’ too much.

There are not, genetically and anthropologically speaking, discrete human races. Livingstone and Dobzhansky wrote at some length about this in the 1960s. Nothing has changed since then, and in reality, the more we know about genetics, the more obvious it becomes that what is labelled ‘racism’ is in fact culturism. Phenotypical features that appeared in different geological areas were once used to slap handy labels on groups of people, but there it stops. There is one human race, Homo sapiens.

Tishkoff and Kidd wrote for Nature in 2004, “One of the problems with using ‘race’ as an identifier is the lack of a clear definition of race. Historically, ‘race’ has been classified based on both sociocultural and biological characteristics including morphology, skin color, language, culture, religion, ethnicity and geographic origin. Morphology and skin color are not always good indicators of race because they probably result from adaptation to environmental conditions and may have been subject to convergent evolution (e.g., people with dark skin are found in New Guinea, Southern India and Africa, and even within these regions, there can be tremendous variation in skin color). Culture, language, religion and ethnicity have strong sociocultural components and may not always be a good indicator of shared ancestry (e.g., ‘Hispanics’ in the US include individuals of European, Native American and African ancestry in all possible combinations). Nor is geographic origin always adequate for defining ‘race’ because of recent, historical and prehistorical migrations of peoples.”

And yet the current climate of inciting ‘racial’ tensions exists for a reason. I’m going to turn aside for a moment and talk about another movement that exists in parallel and on a microcosmic scale to the vast turmoil over human ‘races’ since that term was coined in 1775. It’s only really been around for three years, a virtual infant in cultural conflicts, and it only rose to true global consciousness (in a mere year!) this year. I’m speaking of those who have been dubbed ‘puppies.’

The Sad Puppy campaign for the Hugo Awards is such a little thing, when you look at it. Run by fans, for fans, and yet… And yet it became a nationally aware movement, with opponents who defamed good men without a second thought in media outlets, even to the point where the media was forced to backpedal as they had gone too far in their snapping, snarling rush to mangle the puppies. In SFF fandom it seems everyone is reeling in disbelief and confusion over what happened and why. Politics in minor scale has been with fandom from the beginning. What is it about now, to bring this over-the-top reaction to something that has been done before?

Why has there been such a backlash of feeling and vituperation against the sad puppy movement? What is it about this relatively small campaign of voting, done legally and very openly, that leads people to scream, stamp their feet, and lie on the floor weeping and pounding their fists against whatever they can reach? Comments on the campaign have ranged from repugnant, to calling for the ‘puppies’ to be interned in concentration camps. (Comment by Patricia Williams-King on Facebook, May 18 “From what I’ve heard about these “Puppies” they ought to be sent to the dog-pound in short order.”)

And that is where I saw the parallel clearly. What is the motivation of those who called for the internment of the Jew in Germany, and the Japanese in the US? Fear. Loathing of the ‘other’ and fear that those others threatened them in some way.

The Sad Puppies threaten the establishment, shake them out of their comfortable delusions that publishing is still business as usual. That the only concern they ought to have is to get more ‘diversity’ into the Hugo Awards, by which they certainly didn’t mean diversity of thought, gender or culture (they showed this by their gleeful disregard of a pool of recommended and nominated puppies who were all three).

Racial tensions in the US? Look behind the news, to see who stirs the pot. What is lurking back there? With the Hugo Awards, it is the few editors who stand to lose the most as they can no longer influence the awards with a mere 40-50 votes. It is the people who are unmasked as the petty tyrants and lickspittle toadies of those who have traded what was once a prestigious award back and forth for the last few years, devaluing it almost past redemption.

And in the larger picture, where those who would declare that skin color matters, we find people who can be legally convicted of only seeking the limelight for money and power. We must look more closely, behind the curtain to see who is twitching the puppet strings, and why. Don’t trust too easily. Don’t snap into loathing without understanding why you recoil in horror. Sometimes it’s not what is being handed to you on a platter, but the hand that is offering it to you that is filthy and unclean.

The problem is, of course, that we are acculturated from childhood to believe what we are told. Some of us (especially we who identify as Odd) have always had trouble with that, and it’s gotten us into trouble. Anecdotally, I can tell you it’s gotten me shunned from a church, separated from my mother at a time I desperately needed her, and then later… well, it’s a long story. Suffice it to say that I’m stubborn. I’m also not inclined to blindly follow along with the narrative.

A friend shared a conversation he’d had with his son while out on a hike. He’d looked at the rings on the stump of a tree with the elementary-school aged lad and was telling his son that you could see the effects of weather, drought, and… the boy interrupted. I know all about that, Dad, he’d informed his father (being of an age where he knew it all) that’s what climate change is. My friend was asking how he could help his son break out of the habit of listening to his teacher without critical evaluation of the pap he was being fed in school.

It’s not easy. Children in school need to listen to their teachers. If not, they get into trouble. If they tell their teacher what teacher wants to hear, they are rewarded. Classic negative/positive re-inforcement. In order to create a mind that is capable of true insight and critical thinking, the art of the critique must first be allowed, and that is a tricky thing to teach, so schools don’t even bother any longer. For my friend, we in the conversation suggested that he offer other materials that could logically refute the theory of anthrophogenic climate changes. Simply learning of the scale and statistics behind what it takes to truly influence the climate on a global scale could be an eye-opener to a smart young man. At this point you’re wondering how I wandered off into the weeds of glowbull warmening from the topic of racism and cultural othering.

Simple. It’s all related. These are big topics our children are being fed by school, by media, and again, there are puppets pulling the strings who have less than honorable intentions. It reminds me of a tale I read once, that a child learns to react with fear and loathing from his mother’s reactions to a snake, even an innocent snake who kills pests and vermin that would infest the mother’s house. There’s a song about it, too, now that I think on it. They must be carefully taught to hate, it goes. We’re being taught to hate. They are hating with every fiber of their being, and that hate has to come out somewhere, usually the internet as that’s safer for them. The last vestiges of empathy, civility, and compassion are declared to be of no use. Decry the other, they are told, and they do, at the top of their voices, using the mirror of their own hatred to paint their foes with familiar visages. Projecting their motivations, they attack without quarter or mercy.