Year: 2015

The other day while I was shopping I was struck with a sudden idea: why don’t I buy a toy for the pretty cats?
(I’m convinced this is caused by feline mind-rays. There is no other explanation.  The impulse strikes randomly and has nothing to do with what they’ve been up to lately.  It’s never “they haven’t broken any good china recently” or “they haven’t played slamlom with my prized glass floats” .)

Like many other bad ideas, this one was fairly irresistible, and once it presented itself, I had to follow through.  Being cheap I bought — for $7.50 a little foldable tent.  I thought “Oh, look, they can cuddle in it or something.”

This shows you how dellusional I can be.  Of course, that is NOT how things worked out.  Once I brought the tent into the house and set it down next to my desk (“They can keep me company while I write,” I thought.  HONESTLY.) I realized I had not in fact bought a cat toy.  Oh no.  What I had bought and brought into my house was the world’s smallest and most fiercely independent country.

Tentistan, population one — D’Artagnan

This would be okay, if D’Artagnan’s possession of the crinkly red and yellow vinyl didn’t inflame envy in the hearts of his neighbors.  Unfortunately it does and therefore, the mighty army of the Miranda attacks:

With a leap across the room, Miranda secures the upper hand.  D’Artagnan’s attempts at defensive positioning overturn tentistan.  Miranda then skates it across the floor with two more leaps.

A surrender ultimatum is issued.  The defense burrows in.

The defense replies “you can’t make me” (and possibly adds “neener neener.”

I couldn’t actually capture the action.  The paw is faster than the camera.  There was a brief intense period of Miranda beating D’Artagnan like an old rug, from outside the tent.  I believe military bloggers cal this type of action “Beating his little pasty white b*tt like a drum.”  The pose captured here was “You won’t even fight?  You DISGUST me.”  After which she stalked away.

catnip mice — the war’s innocent collateral damage.

 

Tentistan, the world’s smallest and most fiercely independent country is at peace, until action repeats in a few minutes.

(Yep, best entertainment I EVER bought for under ten dollars.)

I thought I’d catch everyone up on what’s going on.  I did a post about the health thing on MGC, and I’ll quote a little bit here:

Here’s what I found so far, since the surgery: I was much more ill than I realized.

It started with them finding a large amount of scar tissue and endometrial tissue binding all my internal organs and filling up my abdominal cavity.  That amount had to be causing pain, but other than some bad nights in the last two years, I kept saying I’d never been in pain.

There were other things.  We’ll spare tender male ears and just say that my Caeserean (first son.  Second son was born the natural way) botched things so badly that some organs were cut almost in half and bound together with a growing ridge of scar tissue.  Which by itself should have caused tooth grinding pain.  Constant.  Except I didn’t have any pain.

Except…

Except that when I took super motrim TM I slept like I hadn’t slept in twenty three years.  Yes, that precise, because I remembered enjoying sleep before having older son, and after that I remembered bed being the place where I tried to sleep and sometimes managed cat naps.

The painkiller (strong) had such an effect I asked my doctor if it was soporific.  She said no, just a painkiller.

Which means my conscious had blocked the pain, but it still didn’t allow me to sleep soundly.  For close to a quarter century.

All of the symptoms getting worse as they went on, so in the last five years I’ve almost stopped sleeping altogether.  Which has its own host of problems.

I really am feeling much better, which is weird because when I went to the doctor for supposed checkout, I was told I’m not healing on schedule, or barely at all, so I needed to take what my son calls a “big hammer” antibiotic.  Which I’m now taking, and which makes me feel like the coyote when the roadrunner drops an anvil on him.  Which is a problem as I REALLY am almost done with Through Fire (which means this book REALLY is cursed.)  However I’m hoping to have at least a rough to Baen by tomorrow, then edited by Monday.

It’s a very odd book, but the people who’ve seen it so far tell me it’s good.

And I really AM feeling better, despite the dire faces my doctor pulled.  Which might just mean I was really, really, really — really? — ill before.  people kept telling me I was, but I had become adjusted to it as “normal” so I didn’t know it and thought it was all psychological.

So — here’s what’s going on — as soon as book from h*ll is delivered, I’ll spend three/four days painting at the house we’re going to put up for sale.  And then I’ll sit down and finish Darkship Revenge which is practically written in my head.  Right now my top wordage for a day is 10k, so I’ll assume if it doesn’t get better I need about a week to finish DSR.

And then it’s dragons.

Somewhere along the line, hopefully by the middle of May there will be a short story collection.

Also — somewhere there I’ll edit Rogue Magic and continue it (I’m hoping next week, but we’ll see what the antibiotic does to me!) and also Elf Blood.

Meanwhile, I’ll be attending Denver Comicon, though I don’t have a schedule yet, and ya’ll can find me at the Wordfire booth.

HOPEFULLY healing will actually happen and I’ll be even better, after the ten days with antibiotics.  We’ll see.  Keep me in your thoughts.

For now, just remember I’m feeling better, and stuff is actually moving forward, but more importantly, I’m reading again.  Reading new stuff.  Reading because it’s there.  I don’t have to force myself to read new stuff (as opposed to old favorites) for the first time in years.

Now the problem is not trying to do everything at once.

It is trite to talk about the law of unintended consequences because at this point — I think — everyone knows everything they do has unintended consequences, that is consequences other than the ones they were looking for.  Well, almost everyone.  I still hear people say things like “We should outlaw x” and never thinking of what that will mean for x, y and z.  More interestingly, I heard people saying “we should compel x” and never think of the consequences of evading that particular law.

But the really funny thing about unintended consequences (and by this I don’t mean funny ah ah) is what I call the third ending problem.

What third ending problem?

Well, when we were starting out in writing, we were told to reach for the third ending.  When you’re reading a novel or a short story, you expect one of two endings (the good and the bad.)  Depending on your level of sophistication, or the book’s accuracy of foreshadowing, you might anticipate the ending in precise and exquisite detail.  You just have to see which of the endings.  (For instance in the book I’m reading now all the characters seem to be mentally impaired, and I’ve guessed the ending and the little surprises all along all the way.  Yeah, it’s a disposable romance [not all romance is like this] because that’s what came to hand when I reached for a book.  Yeah, I have better things to read, but this sort of works because it’s almost at the Disney comics level.)

So we were encouraged to reach for the third ending.  Not precisely a surprise ending, but one that will close the book with a bang.

I’m not sure this is right, btw.  It is appropriate for a certain time in the history of the field, and for a certain level.  And yep, in mystery it’s a good idea to at least partially surprise the reader.  This is not necessary in science fiction.  Or not necessarily necessary.  There are science fiction books that are mysteries.  At the end you find out who was behind it all, say.  But still in the main, we want to know sort of how it will end, and are reading for the details.

Take Witchfinder (please.  I could use the cash) the ending I’m sure surprises no one except for one minor, personal detail.

But anyway, that’s a digression and I know you’re shocked.  The thing is that in real life, even those of us who know that actions have consequences and that the broader the action, the more general the up to down push, the more likely that the consequence will be the third ending, as it were.

For instance, take solar panels.  The intended consequence is to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.  The unintended consequence is to roast birds on the go.  The third ending consequence is that it convinces people who know nothing about energy or its storage that it would be a good idea to artificially burden fossil fuels with taxes and to make mining for them impossible, in order to make people go “solar.”  Because it exists, they imagine it could supply all our energy needs.  (I’m sorry, I’d say “he” but I’m not sure it’s all or even mostly his idea.)  There are other third ending consequences (there always are) like the flushing of public money down the unending rat hole of charlatans promising better and more abundant solar energy.

Or take the boondoogle the consolidated after many mergers publishing houses thought of: we can deal with the big conglomerate bookstores and tell them what to carry.  They’ll have sensible business men who don’t read the books and argue with us, and this will make the public buy the “correct” books — or at least those we want to push.

The intended consequence was the ability to manufacture bestsellers on command; to pick who would be a best seller (mind you, it wasn’t even political at first, or at least it’s unlikely it was just political.  Creatives are hard to work with.  They often have trouble working with themselves.  Being able to pick the “sensible” creatives for success would be enough of an enticement.  The fact those aren’t usually VERY creative is something that would never occur to the publishers.)   The unintended consequence was the spiraling down of print runs.  For decades publishers had been allowed to think they were in tune with the readers’ tastes, and later that they could form them without consequence.

But for decades, stuff had become hits that the publishers didn’t anticipate.  Under the old, chaotic system, enough small bookshop owners reading your book and hand-selling it to enough clients could make you a bestseller that no one had seen coming.

The new system closed that loophole and controlled completely which books even got seen, and certainly which got “buzz” and which got bought.

As I said, the unintended consequence was a lot of power readers (me!) retreating to other genres or to their libraries to read their old stuff.

The third ending consequences are … well, the least hard to see is Bezos.

But there are others.  The most important was the hardening of thought and belief in the small and incestuous publishing industry, by self-feeding loops.

If they can make whatever they want sell a bazillion copies, then they have an unerring ability to pick what’s good and what people will read, right?  This means that they are that in tune with the public taste that clearly what they favor and think is wonderful must be what everyone wants.  Even though they are the result of maybe a handful of colleges and the culture of one or two big cities, they can pick for everyone in the country.

End result, more bleeding of readership which is never attributed to their taste — because after all, look how well they “predict” what will sell (after they close off every other avenue, of course, but never mind)  and what won’t — so it must be people aren’t reading anymore.  People are watching TV and playing games.  That must be it.

And then the third solution walks in wearing the name Bezos.  And they’re so shocked all they can do is boo.

But there are other third solution consequences they never even thought of.  The very system encouraged conformity and anodyne writing.  They didn’t notice it because the conformity was to their beliefs, and the anodyne writing involved “shocking” non existent old ladies in Podunk whom they thought should be shocked.  For the last several years the problem with most “pushed” fiction is not that it’s shocking, or distasteful, or human-hating (though it usually is human-hating) but that it’s predictable and boring.

And then there’s the third solution consequence of that consequence, so far off they couldn’t anticipate it.

I’ll do them the courtesy of thinking that they knew they would be wasting a lot of talent.  I.e. that they realized that they would be cutting short the careers of people they plain didn’t like (for political or other reasons) and therefore destroying talent before it developed.

What I don’t think they realized is that those of us who managed to escape the scythe for years despite refusing to sing in the choir of their thoughts and beliefs would be versatile, able, and very, very resilient. Or that, if we found a way to bypass their rigged system and get to the public, the public would like us better.

Sometimes third ending solutions are a right b*tch.

So, when you’re tempted to despair or to think we’re ruled by evil geniuses, think of the third ending solution.  They’re not geniuses (though they might be evil) and they usually don’t think beyond the obvious solution.

Take importing millions of unskilled laborers into a high tech economy.  They do think that they can tax those of us already here and give them benefits and it’s a way to compensate for being richer than other countries.  They might take as an unintended consequence that it will displace our own unskilled workers, and therefore create an aggrieved proletariat which they can incite against “the rich”.  It’s an unintended consequence but not one they dislike.

What they don’t think of are the third ending consequences: that it will also fatally damage the economy, that rich people will leave the country and shelter their income (for some reason this always takes communists/socialists by surprise.  Every d*mn time.); that the reduced economy/benefits will cause those immigrants to go back to their homeland; that the stagnant economy will cause our best and brightest to go elsewhere looking for jobs; that the only businesses who can survive are massive corporations; that the discrimination they see everywhere will actually make a come back.

In the same way when they create ever higher minimum-wage, they can see that those who remain employed will have more money; they might see that it will cause a lot of people to be let go, but they think “generous welfare benefits.”  What they don’t see is that it will bias towards big companies who can pay that sort of beginning wage and deal with the paperwork for ever increasing regulations will be the only ones surviving.  And if they saw it they might think “well, they will deal better with the government, so that’s fine.”

What they don’t see is that choking off small business, not only chokes off innovation but results in a slow throttling of the economy.  They don’t see this because they believe in fixed pie economics.  They can’t be grown, and they can’t be shrunk.

They can look at Europe and see their future, but  the third ending consequence is always a shock.

And that is why top down control, in publishing or in business or in government is always ruinous.

The third ending consequences multiply and by being surprises they are inherently unanticipated.

Reading older science fiction, I come across government by “smart men” sometimes aided by “large computers” who anticipate everything.

Real life is more difficult.  There are too many intersecting plot threads, too many intersecting individuals and goals.

No one can know when their great scheme of controlling distribution will result in a Bezos and their ruin… metaphorically speaking.  And nobody can know how their wish to work with “sensible” creatives can destroy the very field they work in… metaphorically speaking.

The horror of this is that people who never think of the third plot solution will continue to pile their top down “remedies” on us and that we’ll also have to suffer the consequences.

The good news is that in an era when technology and creativity are key, there is a good chance we can survive and thrive.

Build under, build around, build over.  Create your own systems around theirs.

Be the unintended third ending consequence.

Be not afraid.

 

“Selective Outrage” – Jeb Kinnison

What I call “outrage porn” is stories designed to stoke outrage and make you feel passionately that your group (us) is righteous and some other group (them) are not just misguided or ignorant, but actively evil and out to get the Children of Light (us.) The “porn” in the phrase means something that irresistibly attracts you by appeal to your baser needs, but is ultimately bad for you and false.

I’ve been mostly a spectator to the storm of media and blog posts about Sad Puppies (abbreviated herein as “SP”) and the Hugos. Old-line insiders resent barbarian hordes seen as uncouth, and probably evil, who have attracted a large number of science fiction readers who never realized they could nominate and vote for the Hugos by buying non-attending memberships to the Worldcons. The media consult with the winners under the current in-group system, and not surprisingly most of them clutch their Hugos while seeing little that needs fixing in how they got them.

But what I’m going to highlight is the cherry-picking of extreme views and quotes used by each side to discredit the other. When you have tribes of highly-emotional partisans competing to support the side of Goodness, it should be no surprise that some of their words, taken out of context, can be used to discredit their fellows. The Insiders have their less-good eggs, and so do the Puppies; but *of course* these extremes do not fairly represent the views of either side. I’m not going to go over the controversy itself here, but point out one of the mechanisms that drives this kind of religious war online.

The Internet brings traffic to those who write something unusual and passionate that confirms the beliefs of (or frightens) the readers. Those passionate if less accurate writings are more noticed and more clicked on, and a whole raft of flash media have sprung up the feed the attention beast through “clickbaity” headlines hinting at threat or emotional payoff if the reader clicks through (and drops a few ad cents into the site’s coffers.) Underpaid young grads are employed to read the news (both real and faked) and generate parasitic stories with no original reporting effort which are designed to drive profitable traffic to the site.

Within that species of site you have even more specialized sites that cater to a single tribe, and offer up only stories that confirm the righteousness of that tribe and the evil of others. Partisans will subscribe to a selection of the sites that provide them with the most ego-satisfying stories that confirm their existing beliefs, and so see a world where most good news about people cooperating to do good things is blocked and the news about their enemies and activists is nearly all they see. Where once such sites filled a need to see news on topics not being covered at all in the mainstream, now they isolate and infuriate partisans, who are then easily manipulated by anger and a sense of grievance to give more power to the professional grievance mongers.

Once you recognize this syndrome, it is everywhere you look. Entrepreneurial activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figured out how to fund their organizations through extortion, subtly picking corporate targets to demonize when they weren’t supportive, and ignoring those who were; eventually their faction edged into power and arranged for settlements in Justice Dept. suits against major lenders to include large grants to their affiliate organizations, which actively assist candidates of one party in elections. This is political corruption, and rarely even noticed by mainstream media.

But this is not a phenomenon limited to leftist activists. When Hillary Clinton blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the real and imagined slanders against the first Clinton administration, she was not entirely wrong. While her complaint had the flavor of a Scooby Doo villain’s speech (“We would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those kids and their dog!”), a new media complex was already mining their real scandals and imagined crimes for material to satisfy readers and listeners, with ever-more-extreme allegations being rewarded by True Believer traffic and dollars. Similarly, a complex of organizations dedicated to stoking anti-gay beliefs and stopping gay rights laws mined the ample material provided by gay organizations for the most outrageous and thoughtless material, suitable for ginning up passions in social conservatives and traditionalists, and the more extreme organizations simply made things up as necessary to demonize all gay people.

After many years of being subjected to this kind of abuse, some gay people were permanently polarized to see all religion and all traditional ways of living as their enemies. Specialized sites now feed their prejudices with every possible instance of unfair or ignorant abuse any gay person anywhere receives. So programmed, many gay people are both unforgiving and happy to assume any religious person is out to get them, and happy to see the newly-Progressive state crush grandmotherly florists and cake decorators to punish any trace of badthink.

If you want to see what this filtering does to a worldview (and don’t mind some NSFW and NSFSanity content) take a look at Joe My God and especially its commenters, where you’ll find the harshest partisans of gay rights (and gay revenge.) Also worth a glance are Gay Star News, Queerty, and The Gaily Grind. For the feminist-victim complex, there’s Jezebel, Feministe, Feministing… and much of the Huffington Post.

Here’s an example of the kind of unconscious prejudice this leads to, where a friend of mine cites a deadly brawl between a religious family and the police as evidence that all religion leads to evil and should be suppressed:

Clearly, these religious nuts don’t need any help showing the world exactly who they are and what they stand for. But, we should continue to share these and other stories widely, so we can keep the pressure on. More and more Americans are becoming aware of the hideous, unconscionable actions perpetuated in the name of religion. Sharing the actions of the evil-doers are the most powerful weapons we have against religion.

Video captures chaotic brawl in Walmart parking lot

The Cottonwood, Arizona police department released a video that appears to show an officer shooting a man. Police say a chaotic brawl broke out between police and members of the [Christian] Gaver family that soon turned deadly..

This assertion of guilt-by-tribal-association is invisible to a partisan. One technique to get them to see the fallacy is to replace the religion with Islam, currently protected from the harsh judgement of Progressives by its status as the religion of “victims of Western imperialism.” If the group fighting with the police had been Muslim-affiliated, you can be quite sure that no progressive would think to tar all Muslims as sharing in the blame for the crimes.

For a second example from yesterday, I’ll turn back to Sad Puppies and the Establishment reaction to their success. Author Jack Dann, who by all accounts is a decent, right-thinking fellow in Australia, picked up and promoted a post citing selected quotes from your typical testosterone-laden exchange as representative of all Sad Puppies:

I’ve been told, repeatedly by one pleasant person, and by a few others, that Brad Torgersen, and the Pups are not horrible people, and that they can be worked with and that really they want a good outcome, and I try to see that, and then they show me otherwise. Here are a few quotes from the Pups over on Brad’s blog that I glanced at this evening.

• If you think for one nano-second that we won’t burn this mother fucker to the ground and roast marshmellows over the corpses…. you’re dead wrong… And if you think we give a tanker’s damn about your appeal for civility…. you’re also dead wrong.
• Hell… We may nuke the Nebulas too… just because.
• We will burn it to the ground, plow the ground, and salt it. You fuckwads don’t understand war. We do.
• in my opinion, Theresa Hayden’s parents were both: a.) circus people; and b.) first cousins.
• Try to come up with something better, turdnugget.
• I really don’t care about the Hugos, qua Hugos, to any measurable degree. I don’t care if I ever get one and I don’t really care if anyone else ever gets one, either. Rather, I care about the war in which they are just another front.
• Scuttle back underneath the kitchen sink, and rejoin the rest of your chitinous cohorts.
• The endgame, besides using your guts to grease our tanks,
• Heeerrrrreee pussypussypussypussypussy.
• Vox isn’t a side show, he’s just the warm up act.

And then the following, made by a lead Pup, in response to a person, who without profanity or insult, disagreed. The comments were made while the Pup was claiming to be tracking down the home of the person who disagreed:

• Hey, anyone know who that pussy is in real life?
• You’re a pussy, boy. You don’t even have the guts to be an asshole
• Pussy, you’re not worth a discussion. You’re a cockroach. Roaches are only to be stepped on.
• Or you can come here, to Blacksburg, Virginia. Why, I’ll even loan you a decent gun. Pussy.
• I’ll keep you posted on my progress in identifying you, pussy.
• I cna [sic] only agree that you’re a pussy. A coward. A liar. A piece of crawling shit.

So, that’s the people we are dealing with. Key group members, chatting along with Brad. I like the trying to find someone’s home and the gun threat. It just really dots the i nicely.

I read the entire exchange, and in context this schoolyard callout effort was a little over-the-top, but in response to challenge and evasions by a trolling poster. As I said in the beginning of this piece, both “sides” have their outrageous affiliates — Requires Hate and K. Tempest Bradford (with her “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year” piece, for example, ruling out Neil Gaiman as too white-cis-male to expand her mind.) On the Puppies side, anti-Puppies cite Vox Day as representative (he’s not), and John C. Wright, who’s made a number of statements that I personally would object to, as a homophobic and racist devil (which I’m pretty sure he’s not.) None of us are responsible for every single bad thing some other person in a coalition says or does, and when you observe selective examples used to discredit others and make a comfortable establishment happy that they are deserving of their high position in a stagnant hierarchy under threat, you should immediately find a more thoughtful and independent source to help form your own opinion. Sites that highlight the worst of people you already disdain only feed anger and self-righteousness, which is the enemy of understanding and empathy. When you actively select the items that outrage you and pass them on, you are only increasing the width of the gulf between the tribes.

Hatred and prejudice harm real people, but the harm echoes on through the generations as the original victims teach and promote an us-vs-them worldview that harms everyone. The people who are less wrong learn to understand where the hateful emotions come from, and start to cut off the sources of funds and fury that feed the continuing conflicts. Understanding the backgrounds of the partisans and arguing toward acceptance of others’ right to be wrong is the beginning of reconciliation and cooperation. I think we can get most reasonable people to agree that an award that supposedly recognizes the best SFF should be more broadly representative of the readers, including the vast majority who can’t take time out from busy lives or afford to go to conventions. Having a tiny in-group select award winners from their friends and people they know leaves out most of the writers, and almost all of the readers.

—

[author]

Jeb Kinnison writes on attachment issues at his blog JebKinnison.com, and about science fiction and his Substrate Wars series at SubstrateWars.com. He asks (tongue-in-cheekily) that you consider his latest novel Nemo’s World for nomination in 2015’s Hugo competition.

This is not a blog about writing. This will only sound like a blog about writing at the beginning.

Here’s the thing: fiction is not real. I know, I know, this was my exam in my last year of Theory of Literature, and I spun a whole lot of cr*p on fiction being the reality and the reality we think we know just the shadows on Plato’s cave wall. Sue me. I’m good at spinning fiction after all, and that’s what the teacher wanted to read, and I could serve it up. (The second question about the use of punctuation in a poem was more worrisome, since I missed the classes on the use of punctuation in every language I learned. That’s my story. So I had to ace the first.)

That was a piece of fiction, yes, but it served the essential purpose of fiction: to cut reality into a logical fragment of action-reaction the reader can understand (in this case the action being I flattered the teacher and the reaction being I got the degree.)

Seriously now, in real life any event has way more than an origin. Those of you who are war gamers know that. Those of you who are historians, too.

On my shelves sit several books entitled “the causes of WWI” or words to that effect. They agree on say 80% of material, but the rest will be different, and the chain of sequence will be different.

Yes, some of this is for the same reason I wove the nonsense about Plato. You need an original thought for a thesis, so you extrude one no matter how unlikely.

But the other is because in the real world complex events – not even wars, but things like “why did this meeting happen at this time” – involving several people can be interpreted from several angles. It’s a big like a puzzle. Was it the shooting of the archduke? Was it the theory of war the colleges had been teaching? Was it the machine gun? Was it a million other big and small events: the lack of access to a warm port; Germany’s ascendant industrialism; the family politics of England. Etc. etc. There is no definitive answer, no clear chain of events.

Fiction is satisfying because it presents you with a clear chain of events. If the horse hadn’t thrown a shoe, the battle would have been won. Or, if the tyrant hadn’t ordered the arrest of the revolutionary, then everything would have gone smoother. Or—

Humans like clear chain of events. It’s entirely possible that it is what led to our ascent to primacy as a species (after grass. Everything in this world is designed for the comfort and convenience of grass.) But the events we’re supposed to chain in a sequence are simpler chains. They usually involve an individual.

It’s sort of like they say our brain is rigged to relate to maybe 100 people and civilization and population growth have outstripped our ability to connect? Also, we tend to think people we see routinely, even on television, (not me. I don’t see television routinely) are friends, so people overestimate the size of their circle? Like that.

Our brain is supposed to be able to chain action reaction on a simple scale: Ogg went hunting tiger alone, Ogg got digested. Bad idea, don’t be Ogg.

Our simplest stories, which formed the base of learning in pre-literate society, run along those lines. The moral is clear, the story short (sagas served a different purpose, usually the binding of a human tribe together or the impressing of the neighbors) and the chain of action clear.

I was born into a very old culture. Some of the stories I learned were Roman and probably come from older cultures than that. Like the one with the mother asking the goddess to grant her boys the greatest boon possible. She struck them both dead. Grim people, the Romans. But what it meant is that you have to be sure what you ask for is clear to the other part. And the chain of action/reaction is clear.

That is the root of our fiction. Well, that and the sagas. Those fit the way our brain works. Because our brains, let’s face it, were designed for things other than the world we created with them. Even the sagas have simple chains of causation.

Even the Illiad. … “the son of Peleus was furious, and his heart within his shaggy breast was divided whether to draw his sword, push the others aside, and kill the son of Atreus, or to restrain himself and check his anger.”

The beginning of the chain of events that ends in grim classic fashion.

And that – THAT – is how our brain works. It’s also why we tend to get frustrated with grey goo fiction where you pull the strings and nothing happens.

But this is not a blog about writing.

We’re living in a world saturated with fiction. Novels, games, movies, tv-series. It could be reasonably argued that the common person, in the day to day, has never had more fictional narratives pushed at them. We’re fed stories from the moment we’re born.

But, you say, wasn’t it always like that? Grannies told stories, didn’t they?

Sure, grannies taught them. But grannies had limited time, and so did kids. Read sometime about 5 year old colonial kids minding the cows.

We have more leisure than any other humans at any other time. And we have more fiction.

This in itself is not bad, and you won’t hear me complain. I labor in that vine.

To an extent, even novels aren’t that bad. They allow a chaining of events that has more than one source. Well, the best ones hint at it, sometime. For all the complaints about Heinlein he did that.

But our favored sort of fiction, the action/reaction is in control of the hero. We want a minimal of elephants falling from the ceiling. And that’s what good writers give us. Successful writers.

This is not a blog about writing.

This is a blog about the human brain, about its preference for simple stories, about having its stories fed back to it in the form it prefers.

This is a blog about how it’s important for us to check ourselves. I consume as much fiction as anyone else. Maybe more. So I have to check myself. Particularly when an idea sounds seductive.

Lately there has been talk about “how long America has” and about “America having an amicable divorce.”

I’m told the talk is on both sides of the fence. I have been sick/busy lately (getting much better, thank you, and finally reading and writing. I think for several reasons – not just one cause – my brain has been shutting down from the top down, and it’s now recovering from the bottom up. Eh.) and haven’t checked lefty blogs. But I’ve seen this on the right.

“Amicable divorce” for a country the size of ours.

What a pleasant dream. No more engaging in the culture war, nor trying to change the political equation which, yes, is down stream from the culture. What an alluring wonderful dream.

In a country the size of ours.

The fight over the assets alone would turn hot in a New York minute. The division of people by belief? How do you even accomplish that? How many of you are in politically mixed marriages or have kids or parents who don’t agree with you and who, for some reason, can’t be moved away from you? How many of you work in an industry/are trained in a skill in a field where most of your colleagues, let alone your boss, is to the left of Lenin?

How can grown people, humans who are otherwise smart, talk about this, as though it were even an option, something on the table?

I know they’re thinking the USSR broke up into multiple nations without major blood shed (so far. Nations collapsing/empires collapsing is something that involves decades. Never mind.)

But that was an ersatz empire formed of ancient nations/entities. It was a conglomeration of tribes. When pressure comes, humans return to their basic tribal affiliation (which is why Europe is going to get very ugly in the next few decades.)

The US isn’t tribal. The Marxists (I first typed this Marxissss. We should start hissing it back at them as they hiss other words ending in ist at us – mostly mistakenly. Only we won’t be mistaken) have managed to convince some of the more begnited that they’re a tribe, but even they aren’t, and when pressure comes they’ll fall apart.

We’re a nation of belief, and our division lines are along belief lines. Individual versus group; state power versus individual action; free association versus regimentation; distributed benefits versus earning your way.

There are shadings to beliefs. There are shadings to tribes, too, but people can believe they belong even when fractionally related. It’s harder with beliefs.

Into how many groupings do you break this country? How do you make people move? What happens when they don’t want to?

Could it happen? Peacefully? It could be argued it’s happening. People tend to move where they feel safe and can thrive. Hence the benighted being left in control of the wrecked cities.

BUT such a natural process, to happen peacefully (and peaceful is relative. There will be incidents) will happen over centuries. It’s not over night. This is not a story. This is not a made-for-tv movie. There is no Kobayashi Maru trick that hands us the keys to a safe “divorce.”

When dealing with millions of people and a nation the size of a continent, fast isn’t peaceful and peaceful is glacial.

Because it’s not a story.

In the stories we’re steeped in from childhood the chain of events has to be clear to be satisfying. In the real world, when dealing with more than 10 people, chains of events and decisions get muddled. Dealing with millions, you have a chaotic system and those are dicey to maneuver.

I was puzzled how anyone could even suggest that. Intelligent people.

I’m used to the left side of the isle coming up with this stuff, at least in their fringe elements. They also thought they could levitate the Denver Mint. But… rational people? Rational people who know history?

And then I looked from the other side. It’s a wonderful dream. And our culture is fraught right now. It’s fraught because we’re fighting back. So there is a “war in heaven” or at least a war in haven, from our hobbies to our work place, to our very families.

It would be easier, it would be oh, so appealing, to be able to say “depart from us in peace. You do your thing, we do ours.”

Unfortunately that’s fiction. That’s not something we can cram into the lifetimes we have allotted in reality.

In reality the best we can do is to continue the dirty, tiring, slogging fight in the cultural trenches.

Remember the left screams loudest and gets more unhinged when they’re losing. When they’re winning they can pass for reasonable. And remember we conceded this fight before, and that’s how we got here. We conceded it because we thought culture didn’t matter, only political decisions did. We were wrong.

Now we must fight to take culture back: inch by inch, hobby by hobby, profession by profession, discipline by discipline.

I doubt we’ll finish in our time, though we might get lucky. It might flip suddenly. But it won’t flip cleanly. It won’t flip without a fight.

You can choose to fight mano-a-mano with words and thoughts, or you can have your divorce. But it won’t be amicable, it won’t be easy or fast, and people like me will probably end up with nowhere to go. Heck, most people will. After unimaginable devastation most of us will end up without a homeland of the heart.

Or we can stay together and fight for our culture. The only way out is through.

In the end, we win, they lose. But we must keep fighting.

Be not afraid.

 

*So I’m an idiot and set this for the wrong date and just noticed.  Sorry Caitlin! Note I only noticed because I wondered why you weren’t getting comments.  DERP – SAH*

 

Signposts on the Way to Oblivion
by Caitlin Woods

From what I can tell, a lot of us here at AtH have had a lot of the same experiences when it’s come to reading Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When we’re young, everything is pretty awesome–we’re reading everything we can get our hands on, and our brains are exploding outward with new ideas and stories and fights. A lot of you cite Heinlein and LeGuin and Simak–I’ll be honest, here’s where I was head-over-heels obsessed with KA Applegate and Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman.

But after a time, our passion faded, and we found ourselves wandering to other genres or other media entirely. Of course we wandered back–once we discovered the issue wasn’t with us, and there still were books worth reading, even if our betters didn’t want us to read them. (Much better to push the fake memoirs of a drug addict or whatever, I guess.)

We’ve all heard that part, though. We all know each others’ tales of how we found indie and life was improved and sci-fi/fantasy regained its meaning.

I want to talk about the other side.

The road to oblivion is rarely smooth, a gradual descent into nothingness. No, it’s littered with debris of previous fights, of sudden descents where someone makes a Big Change or small climbs when someone reworks the formula.

And, of course, there are signposts–individual books that tell you, whether or not you realize it at the time, where all of this is going. And that it’s not going well.

Those books are the ones I want to talk about.

My signposts were in middle school. Because middle school was a little bit of a magical time for me.

I mean, it was kind of terrible in some ways–due to Things, Weird-as-hell me (I?) was living with my sister and my mom, mom’s biker boyfriend, his wannabe gangster brother, and their traditional Mormon parents, which resulted in all kinds of multigenerational misunderstandings that would probably make a decent sitcom. School was miserable, I had few friends, no privacy, and no understanding of just how big a sacrifice everyone was making to make sure my sister and I were doing more or less okay.

But, in a very real way, none of that really mattered.

Because I had a bookshelf.

I suspect it was Biker Boyfriend’s sister’s, who by this point was married and on mission in… Czechoslovakia? Unsure. But it seems like she was a giant sci-fi/fantasy geek, and had left behind a treasure trove of books for me to read at my leisure, without even ever taking a book out of the house. (I… lose things.)

It was amazing. I fell in love with so many books at this point–Steven Brust’s Taltos series (I need to catch up with that one, I fell off around Orca), Steven R. Boyett’s Ariel, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s The Darksword Trilogy and Death Gate Cycle…

But with the good (or, at least, enjoyable to middle-school me) was a lot of… less enjoyable. And stuff that, looking back, I realize was kind of emblemic for what I hear folks complaining about now.

(It all also came out around when I was born. But I figure it doesn’t really matter when you come to a thing, if it still describes the situation.)

Signpost #1: Delan the Mislaid (Laurie J. Marks) (1989) has the honor of being the first book I ever, in my life, consciously decided not to finish.

It was a hard decision, even so. I defined myself, at that point, by being a reader–the sort of person who, if nothing else was available, would read ingredients lists and the backs of movies. (I never quite pressed myself to reading the phonebook–which is sort of a pity; creating interesting names is something I still have trouble with.) If I started a book, I was going to finish it.

But… I just couldn’t.

Delan, you see, is Different. Delan doesn’t look like anybody else in Delan’s poor, oppressive and mean village; Delan has strange, sensitive lumps on Delan’s back, and while it’s presumed that Delan is a girl because Delan doesn’t have a penis, Delan also never grows breasts or any other markers of sex.

But it turns out that Delan is a member of a wonderful, winged, hermaphroditic race that can never be really understood by the poor, awful creatures who walk the ground. We get a quick lesson in proper pronounology from another creature of Delan’s race who comes to have a quick sex scene and talk about how Delan was beautiful and special even if Delan had always thought that Delan was ugly…

…and anyway, what really killed it for me was when I was partway through the book, and Delan was chained up in some evil ground-guy’s basement, being tortured and pissed upon daily for some damn reason, and… I just didn’t give a shit.

And usually, someone being tied up and treated poorly is something that pulls at my strings enough to make me forgive a number of literary sins. But… oh my god, the sheer amount of this poor perfect enlightened darling being tortured beyond any reasonability for no other reason than his being special… just made me want to kill people.

I believe I did launch this book. Which is another habit I’m happy to generally avoid.

So, yeah. Special Post-Gender Snowflake Abused By the Masses. I’ll call that a signpost.

Signpost #2: Refugee: Bio of a Space Tyrant #1 by Piers Anthony (1983).

Reading reviews on this, the reason I don’t care for this one is more or less the opposite of why everyone else hates it.

The basic premise is that you’ve got a refugee Hispanic family from one of Jupiter’s moons taking a boat to Jupiter, having gotten on the shitlist of one of the local ruling families (’cause one of their members tried to rape the main character’s sister, and MC hurt (killed?) the guy.). Along the way, they’re boarded by every space pirate in existence, all of whom beat and rape and poison (or whatever) the refugees before going on their merry way, often either taking folk with them when they go or leaving behind a massive body count.

The reviews I read about this dislike it due to its sexism. Women only exist to be beaten and raped, and it happens often enough that it seems like blatant titilation to the author. For goodness sake, give us women who aren’t solely victims.

My problem, however, was that… everyone in the world appears to want to torture and rape our poor Hispanic refugee barge, because humanity is scum. (Well, Jupiter’s forces don’t want to do any of that. They just want this unauthorized shipment to go somewhere else.) It’s just an entire exploitation film on the fact that people trying to do nothing more than get by will be tromped on and abused by absolutely everybody in the universe.

(There’s also an extensive side-note at the beginning that it’s unfair that Initial Rape Threatened Sister is only desired because she looks really White, and shouldn’t every culture have its own beauty standards? Which makes me think that it’s Trying to be sensitive. Kinda. And hell, one of the rapists IS a woman, so… I suspect that’s one non-victim?)

Which doesn’t sound that different than the other thing, but I think it is. Either way. I didn’t go on to read the other books in the series. Because characters aren’t compelling because they’re abused. And… what do you know. A lot of the Right Literature is marked by characters whose sole (supposedly) compelling feature is… being abused. Signpost.

So, yeah! Those are mine. (Minus Sea of Glass, which I remember hating and… very little else about it.) But this… this is just the tale of a partial reading of a single bookshelf, where the trend was in fact genre-wide. Tell me about yours?

*This post is unusually typo-ey because author is finishing novel.  Deal.  And say a prayer for my copyeditors.*

In yesterday’s post, Jason didn’t openly point out what was absolutely weird about the fisked post. Yes, it was part of invoking Zombie Heinlein to come scold us.  (They are so wrong.  Even as a Zombie the man would get what’s going on better than they do.)

I’m going to post the two/three points of weirdness below.  The first, is the normal accusation of what the Sad Puppies want is a return to the pulps (forget that no one on the sad puppies side said that, ever) this time with a side of “pulps just like Heinlein wrote.”

Finally, let’s consider one of the deities the Puppies claim to idolize: Robert Heinlein, who wrote a lot of terrific pulpy action adventure back in the day. One of the Puppies’ major goals is to get more of that kind of stuff and less preachy message fiction in the Hugos, after all.

Hello.  There it is.  Apparently Heinlein wrote a lot of terrific “pulpy” action adventure back in the day.  And our goal is to get more of that kind of stuff.  (That would be nice on that kind of stuff.  Does anyone know how to find someone of Heinlein’s caliber?  No?  Yeah, me neither.  Because we’ve been eating our seed corn and giving the benes to the PREACHY* Message fiction.)  As to the claim that Heinlein didn’t write message fiction, this is when they bring Heinlein out to scold us:

Except the Puppies are kind of forgetting something. Heinlein was no stranger to “preachy message fiction” himself. In fact, he had some pretty harsh words for critics who wanted all adventure and no message:

He will permit any speculation at all” as long as it is about gadgets only and doesn’ touch people. He doesn’t care what mayhem you commit on physics, astronomy, or chemistry with your gadgets but the people must be the same plain old wonderful jerks that live in his Home Town. Give him a good ole adventure story any time, with lots of Gee-Whiz in it and space ships blasting off and maybe the Good Guys (in white space ships) chasing the Bad Guys (in black space ships) but, brother, don’t you say anything about the Methodist Church, or the Flag, or incest, or homosexuality, or teleology, or theology, or the sacredness of marriage, or anything philosophical! Because you are just an entertainer, see? That sort of Heavy Thinking is reserved for C. P. Snow or Graham Greene. You are a pulp writer, Bud, and you will always be a pulp writer even though your trivia is now bound in boards and sells for just as much as Grace Metalious stories and you are not permitted to have Heavy Thoughts. Space Ships and Heavy Thinking do not mix ” so shut up and sit down!

The rule is: Science Fiction by its nature must be trivial.

This of course rules out a large fraction of my work” and all my future work, I think.

Now, read those two quotes.  Consider they were in close proximity in the essay.  He tells us that Heinlein wrote some terrific pulpy stuff in the day, but also that Heinlein wrote message fic.

This has been happening all month, for those keeping score at home.  The indoctrinated drones of the establishment have been spinning by here in high dudgeon and sure they have a killing argument and telling us both that we want “pulpy stuff like Heinlein” and that Heinlein was often “preachy.  And messagy.”

They’re d*mn right Heinlein had message in his fiction.  Or at least he had a purpose, which isn’t the same as a message. I can’t right now — look to where I’m actually working again — find his quote on the reasons he wrote, but I know at the very bottom of those reasons, after “to feed my family” was “to make the reader think” though that was qualified with something like “if I can.”

A lot of the EXPLICIT (aka preachy) messages these people think they see in his books are not really the message of the book, but a way to make you think.  Again, if Starship Troopers world were an utopia, they wouldn’t be so desperate to send out colonies.  (Yes, yes, population pressure, but weirdly this is one of those books where it’s not really shown.)

A lot of his other “messages” are not really.  They’re the way he saw the world and the way his characters acted.  Some of them are dead wrong, but were thought rational and logical at the time, and are still believed on the left side of the tree.  This includes the “we’re all going to die from overpopulation” which is normal in all the juveniles.  It includes “put not your faith in princes” (and priests and shamans)  from a lot of his characters.

But each book ponders at least one serious question, which usually relates not to “tech, wow!” which a lot of people before him wrote, but to “how will this tech change us” which is of course the important question.  Simak labored in the same vine, though he was less transgressive.  Because Heinlein was transgressive.  Not as offensive if you think about what material he was dealing with and what he was doing, but in a way he predicted stuff like “A superabundant society will become obsessed with sex and gender” which we are seeing in the West right now.  And for those who are going to bleat “but incest” — do you have any idea how you’d feel if you time traveled to see your mother when you were a few thousand years old?  Do you have any idea how it would work?

Here is the thing — he wanted to shock people into thinking, not give them answers.  And most of the time he succeeded brilliantly which is why we still have panels in conventions that could be headed Robert A. Heinlein, Threat or Menace.  Curiously, even those on the left side of the isle that claim to admire him hate those later books.  They claim to hate them because of politics (perhaps because in things like Friday he shows the silliness of their schemes — women’s bathroom?  Are you discriminating — because honestly, where does he show the perfect libertarian society anywhere in the last books?  Nowhere) and “rampant sex” but given what they write (and also that any romance has way more sex, way more explicit) I’m going to guess they hate it for that itch at the back of the brain that makes them think.

And thinking is their enemy.

Look at those quotes above.  Heinlein wrote some “terrific pulpy” stuff.  Yeah.  Even his juveniles — arguably particularly his juveniles, at a level, before he got into “how will man change himself” — have such terrific pulpy action as in Red Planet pondering the utility of the right to bear arms/submission to authority versus rebellion/that man might not be the big boy in space, and that some species might be so unimaginably more advanced than us, we don’t even comprehend them/colonialism versus the rights of the original inhabitants/what is “maturity” in a political sense.

Wonderful action pulpy stuff, innit?  It’s like Tarzan of the Apes or something.  (Which in itself had a subtext, but to be fair had a lot more emphasis on the action and pulpy adventure — I have a theory Burroughs prospered by plugging directly into the collective unconscious, or the favored myths of mankind, or something but that’s a post for another time.)

They know it.  If they didn’t know it, they wouldn’t bring the quote from Zombie Heinlein saying he wrote message or at least meaning to scold us.

However, the party line requires them to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time: that the sad puppies side wants “meaningless” action adventure**. AND Heinlein, whom we “idolize” (guys, you do know that “genuflect” and PBOH are sort of fond jokes on our side, right?  No, never mind.  you don’t.  Humor ablated when you went over to the cool kids’ table.  You only laugh on command anymore.) wrote some “wonderful pulpy stuff” but Heinlein also wrote message.

It’s not just this post, it’s the seminar poster after seminar poster in my comments going on about how “Heinlein was preachy” and “Heinlein wrote message” while at the same time claiming Heinlein was pulp and “all manly men doing manly things.”

How is it possible to even hold those two thoughts in your head at the same time?  Even if you have never read Heinlein?  (And I have reason to believe the author of that post has at least HEARD about Heinlein from non adversarial people.)

This is not the only place their views do this, either.  You also get the “Peaceful planet of women” and “we have always fought.”  (Which is it going to be, guys?  Women are inherently peaceful, or women have always been warriors?  And no special begging about women only fighting against men.  If women are such awesome warriors, there’s native aggressiveness there.)

Then there is the super wonderful super state, and their dislike of “authority” (unless it’s them, but that’s a long story.)

I think since the fall of the USSR, and since it became obvious just how busted and corrupt that country was despite its appearance of success, the left has not only been running scared of itself (which is why they continue to deny the real conditions in places like Cuba) but has also become — like all messianic beliefs under attack by reality — a bit cultish.

Because they had already captured the bullhorns of culture when the USSR fell, they’ve managed to hide just the extent of the debacle communism was in the one country that managed superpower status despite it.  (China is a more complex question.)

But the people at the top know.  And they will take no lackeys they can’t trust.  And so, like all doomsday cults, they require that their followers perform acts of self-abasement, so the top can be sure of their loyalty.

We should be lucky it’s not something like cutting out their mother’s hearts.  It’s more the proclaiming of contradictory ideas in the same breath with seeming lack of awareness they are contradictory, even though no one capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time could fail to see the lack of logic.

This ritual self-abasement earns many a place on the left side of the table.

But I have to believe — because I believe in humanity — they get up in the morning and look in the mirror and see what they’ve become.

And now you know why the nomination of a counter-slate to their “already sure to win” (and yes, they were proclaiming on blogs last year that Ancillary Sword was sure to win this year — even though most of them can’t have read it yet, and certainly hadn’t read the competition) whispered slate caused such unbridled fury that they descend to character assassination, to baseless twitter-calumny, to a storm of false comments on books they haven’t read.

Those who sold their soul for a place at the cool table, and now see the coolness of the table threatened, must fight with all their strength to keep it the cool table.  Even to the point of descending to despicable, unimaginable vileness.

Why not?  They already knowingly contradicted themselves, and refused to think about it for coolness and status, demonstrating in public there’s nothing they won’t do for a positional good.

Status is all they have.

Not excellence, not craft, not ability.  Just status.

And we’re threatening that.

Put on your seat belts.  this is going to get rough.  But you know how it ends.

In the end, we win, they lose.

In the end we win, they lose because we can read everything and think everything, and enjoy and not enjoy whatever we want, while they’ve restricted themselves to approved thoughts, approved ideas, the narrow path of those books and thoughts that are “safe” and “not hateful.***”  And thereby they’ve become (yes, you knew that) Heinlein’s definition of unfree men, shackled to a tyranny:

I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. -RAH

We are free men (and yes, women, for those philologically challenged) and you can’t take that from us, and arguably even if we all die, we still win.  Because we will never be controlled.  You can’t have us.  You can only have the loneliness of your shriveled and forfeited souls.

*I don’t even object to preachy message as such, though if the story can’t carry it, then to heck with it.  I’ve read and enjoyed some relatively preachy stuff (what you think Left Hand of Darkness isn’t?  How quaint of you.)  I just object to preachy message that reinforces the same “accepted” establishment messages that we’ve been getting all along since elementary, at least if we’re fifty or younger.  You know things like “Men violent, women peaceful” and “women are better than men” and “a non-capitalist society would be better and more equitable” “a career for women is more important than a family” and other preachiness that I’m sure was daring and mind-breaking at the dawn of the twentieth century, but which is now old and in many cases busted (you can’t argue that a non-capitalist society is better at anything unless you’re ignorant of history.) Science fiction, if it is anything is a literature of thought.  You take some big idea/thought and explore it and extrapolate its future.  You don’t just read from the hymnal.

**Which means they’ve read precisely zero of Larry, or Brad, or for that matter me.  I don’t blame them so much for not having read other people on our side, like Kate, or Amanda, or Cedar but oh, yes h*ll I do.  If you’re going to war against someone, the least you can do is read them.  At least Larry.

*** Not only has the other side publicly declared they wouldn’t read anyone nominated by Sad Puppies because they have bad-thought cooties, but those who claim to have read Larry have CLEARLY not done it (like, they missed all the women in the book: strong, and powerful women at that) and they certainly haven’t read Brad.  And then there was, (and I wish I had the link but no time to look, and doubtless one of you can find it), the precious flower having hysterics, because what if one of us wrote a book under a pen name and she unknowingly read it and became tainted with wrong-thought?  This is a very real worry, and the buttercups SHOULD be worried.  Because some of us have plans.

Broken Hugo Fisking – D Jason Fleming

So somebody named Chris Meadows has decided to weigh in on L’affaire des chiots triste, and as with most of the mainstream “explanations” of what’s going on, his take is, to use a favored word of good Social Justice Warriors everywhere, problematic.

Why the Hugos are broken, and who’s breaking them now

Gosh, sounds promising, doesn’t it? And authoritative, too!

The Hugo Puppies affair proceeds apace. As it will for at least the rest of this year, and probably the next as well. Everyone is having their say, and some excellent things have been written about the whole matter lately. I’ll get to those in a moment.

One of the things that the whole Sad Puppies Affair has brought to the fore for me, personally, is my total lack of patience or respect for what you might call the Argument By Posture, or Argument From Attitude. There are a great many people, largely on the left, who believe that no logical argument is needed, all one need do is express contempt or, sometimes more artfully, mere dismissiveness by affecting a certain pose and using loaded words without dealing in actual content.

(I have been blocked by any number of these people after both pointing out the vacuity of what they were doing, and treating them to precisely the same thing. I am, of course, always the bad guy in such situations.)

So, let’s just say that Meadows sets off my alarm bells with “proceeds apace” and the affected world-weariness of the first two sentences in general.

Also, it’s hilarious to note that he does not actually count those on the Sad Puppies side of things as having anything “excellent” to say, because of course not. This, also, is of a piece with the Argumentum Ad Poseurum, since he again is inserting his judgement before anything else, a rhetorical placing of the thumb on the scales. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The Internet Breaks the Hugos

Whether you’re for the Puppies or against them, there can’t be any argument that the Hugo nomination and voting process is badly broken. The interesting thing is that the process hasn’t changed appreciably for years or even decades. It didn’t just break on its own. No, the same thing happened to it that happened to so many other processes and industries that had long been taken for granted. The Internet happened.

Well, actually, there has been a lot of argument that the Hugos were just fine, dammit, until those dastardly Sad Puppyvolk came along and Ruined Everything. It is in fact only in the past week or so that there has been acknowledgement that the nomination and voting process is deficient.

Which, please note, is what Larry Correia has been saying for three years.

But, of course, the Sad Puppies cannot be permitted to be correct, so the Old And Busted argument is “the Puppies ruined it allllll!” and The New Hotness is now “Everybody Already Knows About This, And The Fact That These Jerks Are Winning PROVES It And They Must Be Stopped!”

But Meadows goes further, with an argument that’s, well, interesting.

I mean, “the internet broke everything”? Really? Yes, he is apparently serious.

The music industry. Movies. Television. Books. Newspapers. All of these institutions have found the solid bedrock foundation on which they built their business crumble to shifting sand as the Internet gave people ways of either getting their stuff without paying for it, or getting the same stuff legitimately but more cheaply. The Internet has been a great democratizer, and that hasn’t worked so well for institutions that relied on a top-down distribution model.

Openness and “piracy” are ruining everything.

Ignore, for the gods’ sakes, that gigantic pachydermic-looking thing in the middle of the room.

The music industry? The one that tried suing kids for millions upon millions of dollars for daring to make mix tapes? The one that tried to get away, in the ’90s, with claiming that you did not “own” CDs you purchased, and had no right to resell them, share them, or even let anyone but the purchaser even listen to them? The industry that deliberately set things up so that no musician could become a success while retaining ownership of his music? (Don’t believe me? Then listen to Buddy Holly, in 1957, begging his former record company to allow him to record his own songs.) But forget all that, the problem is the internet letting those damned kids record and copy and share without permission. Their business was built on a solid bedrock foundation. Yep.

Movies? There are lots and lots of problems with the movie industry, and despite the shrieking hysteria you occasionally hear from Hollyweird, “piracy” really isn’t one of them. An industry whose budgets are outpacing inflation nearly as badly as universities’ has inarguable problems, and those budgets aren’t caused by “the internet”, they’re caused by magical Hollywood accounting under which no movie ever, ever shows a profit, and unions jacking up their rates to try to compensate for that.

And on and on.

The actual problem is that the internet eliminated the need for gatekeepers, and The Establishment in each industry no longer gets to dictate to everybody else what they will like and what they can and cannot do.

Does piracy exist? Sure. Is it a problem? I tend to think not, generally speaking. Unless, of course, you try to force prices higher than the market deems reasonable, in which case, yeah, you’re going to get pirated a lot and paid very little. But that’s another blogpost.

But no, ignore all that, ignore all those industries violations of decency and cronyism with Congress to keep gaming the law (remember the Disney copyright extension of 1997?), and all other evidences of their corruption and glorious comeuppance once the internet hit.

IGNORE IT, I SAY!

Because the internet is ruining everything. There, isn’t that much easier? Much happier? Now shut up and eat your garbage!

(Who wants to lay odds that Meadows really, really hates Fox News and yearns for the days when media bias and malfeasance was never exposed “didn’t exist”?)

But the Internet hasn’t had to affect institutions directly to cause these problems. Sometimes all it takes is connecting people together outside of those institutions. The entire point of the Cluetrain Manifesto was to warn corporations that consumers now had the power to talk to each other the world over about those corporations’ products, and if the corporations didn’t take note and engage in a two-way dialogue, they were going to be roadkill on the Information Superhighway. When Cluetrain was first published, in 1999, this was a pretty bold statement. In the years since, it’s become recognized as a fact of life, not just for corporations but for everyone.

I’m not sure which is more interesting here, Meadows’ pimping of his own past work, or his use of the 1996-fabulous term “information superhighway” with the not-clever-since-maybe-1997 roadkill metaphor.

What has this to do with the Hugos? Um, well, internet. It’s destroying everything, you know.

Anyone remember in the late ’80s, early ’90s, when the Japanese were buying up everything and that was what was wrong with life, the universe, and everything? No?

So, here we have the Hugo Awards, adapting their voting process to the Internet by making it possible for associate members to enter ballots by web instead of just mailing them in as before, without taking into account that the Internet makes it possible to organize concerted campaigns by letting people post communications to everyone else on the Internet. Something like this was inevitable. Perhaps the only thing to be surprised about is that it didn’t happen sooner. (And, given that this is the third year in a row there has been Puppy activity, and it takes two years to implement Hugo rule changes, perhaps the Worldcon folks should have started considering this problem a little earlier, before it became the full-blown crisis that it is this year.)

“Perhaps the only thing to be surprised about is that it didn’t happen sooner”?

Meadows, in a capital feat of Missing The Point, manages to ignore that the Sad Puppies maintain that it did happen sooner — that’s why Sad Puppies exists.

Oh, and Harlan Ellison was saying that it existed way back in 1995.

And the other thing Meadows completely fails at noting is that Sad Puppies played by the rules as they stand, was open and transparent about what they were doing, and were decrying the secret, behind the scenes collusion and deal-making.

You know. The whole point of the exercise.

And this could be only the beginning. When I was chatting with SF and romance novelist Mercedes Lackey the other day, she made this prediction:
I cannot WAIT until someone lets the Romance Writers know about this, and how to get a book on the Hugo ballot.

Romance readers outnumber SF readers by about 100 to one, and a very high percentage of them would be gleeful to only pay $40 to get one of their beloved writers an award.

Romance writers are extremely savvy women about energizing their fan bases. They were using social media for that long before SF writers started.

I want to see their faces when Diane Gabaldon takes the Hugo in 2016.

You know, I was chatting with Bigfamous Namedrop the other day, and she said:

So Diana Gabaldon might win a Hugo? She’s been writing a time-travel fantasy series for, what? Twenty years? More? Sure, it’s romance, but it’s also time-travel fantasy. Does the “romance” label somehow render her Too Uncool To Deserve A Hugo?

As a point of interest, when your horror-show hypothetical result is still more deserving of a genre win than an actual Hugo-winning story — and yes, I mean the dreadful dinosaur piece of wankery — then maybe, possibly, perhaps you are arguing from a position of weakness.

Food for thought, Meadows.

Are the Hugos out of Touch?

By now we’re all familiar with the Puppies’ contention that the Hugos no longer reflect the popular reading tastes of the general public. But did you know the Puppies may have at least part of a point? No less a personage than Eric Flint has spoken out to say that the Hugos are somewhat out of touch after all—but not for the reasons the Puppies think, and they’re going about trying to “fix” it the wrong way. The far-far-left Flint would seem like the last person one would expect to agree with the Puppies on anything, but he makes a pretty good case.

Again, let us look at the ever-shifting goal posts. (In all fairness, I have no idea if Meadows ever did this shift, but since he’s arguing the “Everything Is Awesome” position, with careful attenuations to admit that not quite everything is awesome, but the Puppies are still drooling morons, it’s completely fair to bring up this shift.)

Old & Busted: Baen Books Is Not A Real Publisher And Is Conservative (BOO! HISS!), Too.

(Another logical fallacy is implicit here, the Argument from Cooties — if something is “conservative”, it has cooties, and everyone even tenuously associated with it has cooties, too, and therefore doesn’t need to be dealt with, merely smeared.)

New Hotness: Baen Books Superstar Eric Flint Is Lefty And Therefore Awesome (because he lets me argue that the Puppies are right, but still wrong wrong wrong!!!)

Now, let us pause to consider the argument, made by more serious-minded folks than Meadows, that the Sad Puppies are indeed correct that something is wrong with the process (note: yes, a distortion of the SP’s actual position, but let it pass for now), but incorrect about how to fix it.

Note that, prior to the Sad Puppies victory this year, according to “everybody” (that is, the popular establishment opinion), Everything Was Awesome except for Larry Correia’s Hugo nomination which, because Larry is a nasty non-leftist, was Too Abhorrent To Discuss. But the problem was Larry, and Vox Day, and the wrong kinds of fans getting involved in the process.

But this year, the Sad Puppies dominated the nominations before the whisper campaigns got certain authors to withdraw their works because of cooties. And while, at first, we still heard that Everything Was Awesome, that excuse just wasn’t flying anymore.

So, now, thanks to Sad Puppies 3, people who have a violent allergic reaction to any nonconformist wrongthink are admitting that, well, okay, something is wrong.

In other words, the Sad Puppies ended up both Speaking Truth To Power and Starting A Conversation.

Why are these things only awesomesauce when lefties do them? (Yeah, yeah, I know, “Because SHUT! UP!”)

Flint is so long-winded in his explanation that it’s hard to find bits to quote, but the fundamental causes he lays at the feet of Hugos’ disconnection are threefold: First, there’s simply too much stuff being written these days for people to read more than a small fraction of the potential output while it’s still eligible for nomination. Second, the categories the Hugo covers (novel, novella, novelette, short story) no longer reflect the ways in which fiction is actually published. Third, the tastes of the people who care enough about these awards to bother to take part in them have diverged over time from those of the average person.

[Eric Flint quote omitted.]

Flint also thinks that limiting the awards to one particular item per specific year leads to a lot of excellent works failing to be considered—both because there’s not room for them all to be nominated, and because many people may not even get around to reading something until years after it was published.

Flint’s proposed fix is expanding the categories to account for more types of fiction than are currently covered, or even scrapping the current system of annually-delimited awards outright in favor of more overall-in-field recognition. But he admits that institutional inertia makes it unlikely such a thing will ever happen.

It’s quite cute that Meadows is trying to enlist a Baen author’s arguments against the Sad Puppies (whose organizers are largely comprised of Baen authors and indies).

The problem is, Flint’s arguments would have been just about equally apposite in the early 1990s.

Too much stuff being written these days? Gardner Dozois’s “The Year’s Best SF” anthologies always documented raw numbers in an expansive introduction, such as how many genre novels were published in a given year. I got that anthology from 1989 through about ’94, and every single one included an implicit apology that Dozois could not possibly have read all ~500 novels published in the preceding year, and then noted books that others had mentioned thinking highly of.

If that aspect is broken now, it was broken twenty-five years ago too, and why is it only okay to discuss it now?

The answer is “never mind, we’ve found an argument that will co-opt the Sad Puppies and still let us mock them for being stoopit”.

The second point, that the categories don’t cover how fiction is published, is incredibly open to argument on both sides, pro and con, and that lies outside the scope of this fisking. If the thing needs to be hashed out, it will be, but for now, readers know what a novel is, what a short story is, and the in-between categories of novellette and novella aren’t exactly hard to figure out either. If changes need to happen, well, that’s what Emergent Order is for. It will happen if it needs to, without anybody needing to control it. (Which, come to think of it, is what so frosts the Anti-Sad-Puppies like John Scalzi. They don’t get to dictate, and that’s Wrong.)

The third point is interesting, though, in how Meadows is trying to square the circle.

“Third, the tastes of the people who care enough about these awards to bother to take part in them have diverged over time from those of the average person.”

This is, shall we say, a problematic argument to make when you also accuse “people who care enough about these awards to bother to take part in them” to be “ballot stuffing” because they’re voting in ways you don’t approve.

See, the Hugo is “the fan’s award”, and has (until this year) always been presented as such.

But in recent years, a certain cadre has “cared enough to bother” with the award. And Sad Puppies comes along, declares “we care enough, too, and there are more of us!”

Which has lead to rather delicious public admissions, such as Theresa Neilsen-Hayden declaring both that the Hugo is not “the fan award”, and that “the wrong kinds of fans” must be kept out of the voting process.

Which, by the by, is exactly the sort of mindset and behavior that Larry Correia and the Sad Puppies said was the problem to begin with. Not that “the process is broken”, but that the process had been taken over by a self-appointed, self-congratulatory “elite”, and that they would not take well to intrusions from the riff raff.

Well, thanks to TNH’s admissions, among others, we have crystal clear evidence that that supposed “elite” was not theoretical, but real, and they have very publicly Not Reacted Well to being exposed and shown up.

So what it comes down to is this: if “average people” suddenly “care enough to bother to take part” in the Hugos, does that mean that the tastes of the average person are now more closely aligned to the tastes of people who care enough to bother to take part, or does that mean that suddenly the rules must be changed to keep these awful people out?

The Sad Puppies are simply trying to make “the people’s award” reflective of the people again, and not a self-appointed clique that took over the process to puff its members up while pretending to represent the mass taste.

The Anti-Sad Puppies just want to shut out these knuckle-dragging uncouth savages from the process.

Understanding Vox Day

It’s also worth noting that laying all this disruption at the feet of the Sad Puppies campaign might actually be a mistake. If you dig through the statistics, you’ll find something interesting: the Rabid Puppies campaign by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale), whose slate had significant but not total overlap with Sad Puppies, actually did better in the nominations than Sad Puppies. When the two slates conflicted, the Rabid choices won out. Ten works that were on Rabid but not Sad made it into the final ballot, while only three works that were on Sad but not Rabid did (and they generally did so only because Rabid didn’t nominate a full slate in those categories). It’s possible that if no one had submitted a Sad Puppies nominating ballot at all, the end results would have still been largely similar.

And now begins the part of the game where smear-by-association sets in, with the super-neato twist of using it also to denigrate the target further by insinuating that Evil McBadPerson is more effective/competent/lock-steppy than those silly Sad Puppies.

More argument-by-cooties, in other words, with the extra attempted insult of “cooties are better than you!”

Doesn’t this mature, respectable, and, hell, I’m not afraid to say the word, honorable behavior just make you puff up with pride in all the Good People who aren’t so stupid as to actually associate with Sad Puppies? Doesn’t it? Huh?

The thing is, a lot of people don’t seem to know a lot about Beale beyond the fact that he was kicked out of the SFWA for using its official Twitter feed to disseminate a blog post in which he called author N.K. Jemisin a “half-savage.” Beale’s defenders have tried to insist that his words (and those of multiply-nominated author John C. Wright, whose work Beale publishes) are taken out of context, but lately (and to John Scalzi’s amusement) Sad Puppies leaders Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen have tried to distance themselves from him. (A bit too late, given that he’s already gotten what he wanted out of them, but better late than never I suppose.)

Dear gods this is tedious.

Yes, Chris Meadows, yes: Cool Kid John Scalzi will now confer upon you Righteous Awesomeitude, okay? Could you just, you know, do the fellating somewhere the rest of us don’t have to watch? The whole toady-on-bully thing just doesn’t do it for me, you know?

Now, apart from the porntastic aspects of this, the (pardon me, but it is the word) smear continues. Just a few points of interest:

1. Vox Day is not a part of Sad Puppies. Yes, yes, some of his work was included in the recommendations of Sad Puppies 2. He has no connection to Sad Puppies 3. It is not defensive to say this, especially as people on the Anti-Sad Puppy side continually try to smear by association.

2. Rabid Puppies was, as I understand it, inspired by two things: the partial success of Sad Puppies 2, and the fact that it would piss off John Scalzi and all his toadies.

Rabid Puppies is the responsibility of one man, Vox Day. And he is responsible for himself. Neither Larry Correia nor Brad Torgerson are accountable for the words or deeds of another adult human being. That’s because, he’s, you know, an adult.

Unlike Chris “I learned to argue from the mean girls in eighth grade” Meadows.

(Now watch: if he responds, he’ll ONLY bring up argumentum ad hominem, and not the many, many, many, many, many factual deficiencies of his position, which I’ve been pointing out at length.)

3. Vox was ejected from the SFWA in violation of the rules of the SFWA.

Just kind of a minor point about how The Establishment operates. They are totally willing to break their own rules, just so long as they win.

Unlike, say, the Sad Puppies, who are openly playing by the established rules. And winning.

Here’s a great opportunity to remedy that lack of knowledge. Writer Philip Sandifer has written an epic analysis of Beale and Wright’s political and religious position and how it informs the stories they’ve written and nominated for Hugos. I think that this should be required reading for anyone who wants to take part in the the discussion, whichever side you’re on. I hope I remember this piece when next year comes around, because I feel it should earn Sandifer a place on the 2016 Hugo ballot for Best Fan Writer. It’s extremely long, but well worth reading.

[quote omitted]

Vox is a bad-wrong-odious-wrongthink-BADPERSON, we get it already.

Also? He’s not part of Sad Puppies, and thank you for reviving guilt by association as Totally Awesome. The shade of Joseph McCarthy smiles upon you, Chris Meadows.

What Would Heinlein Think of the Puppies?

As I’m about to demonstrate, if you want to know the answer to this, Chris Meadows is pretty much the last person to look to.

Finally, let’s consider one of the deities the Puppies claim to idolize: Robert Heinlein, who wrote a lot of terrific pulpy action adventure back in the day. One of the Puppies’ major goals is to get more of that kind of stuff and less preachy message fiction in the Hugos, after all.

Chris Meadows would appear to bathe in pure smug. It takes quite a lot of smug to do a double-reverse implied scare quote, after all.

Yes, there are scare quotes around “deities”, you can feel them purely through the power of his contempt.

Actually, this is so jam-packed with idiocy, I’m going to deconstruct it phrase by phrase:

Finally, let’s consider one of the deities the Puppies claim to idolize

As my added emphasis makes clear, Meadows is striving mightily to engage in impression management. The snarky “deities”, the stiletto of implying that Sad Puppy claims are inherently untrustworthy, and the not-at-all accidental implication that we’re insane religious fanatics, all in less than a dozen words.

This isn’t an argument, this is inept propaganda.

Robert Heinlein,

Hey, I managed to cull two words that weren’t a sneer! Yay me!

who wrote a lot of terrific pulpy action adventure

As to “terrific”: right.

As to “pulpy”: great Hera, I could do an essay on this one attempt to sway readers through implication instead of reason and facts, but I won’t.

But let me say this: Meadows is either a fool or a scumbag. Take your pick. [We’re going with both – ed.] Robert A. Heinlein was the very first science fiction writer in America to break out of the “low brow”, “ghetto” of the pulp magazines and into the “respectable” slick magazines. The very first. He was the guy who was So Good, the snooty editors could not deny him because of his genre. This is the author being praise-dismissed with the word “pulpy”.

“Oh,” Meadows is going to claim, “I was praising his quaint, old-fashioned, non-modern style!” Well, not in those words. But make no mistake, it’s left-handed praise, and it’s meant that way.

So is Meadows making it because he’s an ignorant twit, or because he’s a mendacious jerk?

And really, does it matter?

To continue, “action adventure”: Another loaded phrase that can be excused as “positive”, but as everybody who is ANYBODY knows, “action adventure” just isn’t literary old chap, not important. You know. It’s not nearly on par with a first novel that deliberately calls every character “she”, because Gender Is Socially Assigned, you know. What what?

back in the day.

Get that? Heinlein is OLD, people! And, as every Mentos commercial made in the ’90s informed, us, old is stupid, and young is awesomesauce, automatically!

One of the Puppies’ major goals is to get more of that kind of stuff and less preachy message fiction in the Hugos, after all.

For a guy who, I don’t even have to guess, is on the side that claims to be Far More Nuancier Than Thou, Meadows sure has a rough time understanding a not-at-all difficult to understand distinction between what he claims here, and what Sad Puppies is actually about.

Mr. Meadows, I know this is hard for you to get entered into that gray matter you have, but do please at least try: What we want is fiction that tells an entertaining story first. It can have A Message, or No Message, that’s more or less beside the point.

We’re just tired unto death of fiction that has no story, eschewed in favor of Just One Approved Message, or else a story that Makes No Sense because the message trumped story logic.

We don’t mind messages. We don’t even mind messages antithetical to our own views (unlike you and your hate for Vox Day for having The Wrong Message, as noted above). We just want A Good Story, and if it has a message, fine and dandy, but the Story Must Be Good first.

Which, if you notice, is not what you say above. Because you’re wrong. Whether you’re wrong because you’re too stupid to understand a fairly minimal level of nuance, or because you’re an impression-managing manipulative lying jackass, again, I leave as an excercise for the reader.

Except the Puppies are kind of forgetting something. Heinlein was no stranger to “preachy message fiction” himself. In fact, he had some pretty harsh words for critics who wanted all adventure and no message:

Harsh words for critics who want what the Sad Puppies avowedly Do Not Want. As explained above. So, you know, GREAT ZINGER, DUDE! Just, too bad it doesn’t apply to the people you thought you were zinging.

Dumbass.

This is the Heinlein quote (which he got from a comments section, rather than, you know, sourcing it himself):

He will permit any speculation at all” as long as it is about gadgets only and doesn’ touch people. He doesn’t care what mayhem you commit on physics, astronomy, or chemistry with your gadgets but the people must be the same plain old wonderful jerks that live in his Home Town. Give him a good ole adventure story any time, with lots of Gee-Whiz in it and space ships blasting off and maybe the Good Guys (in white space ships) chasing the Bad Guys (in black space ships) but, brother, don’t you say anything about the Methodist Church, or the Flag, or incest, or homosexuality, or teleology, or theology, or the sacredness of marriage, or anything philosophical! Because you are just an entertainer, see? That sort of Heavy Thinking is reserved for C. P. Snow or Graham Greene. You are a pulp writer, Bud, and you will always be a pulp writer even though your trivia is now bound in boards and sells for just as much as Grace Metalious stories and you are not permitted to have Heavy Thoughts. Space Ships and Heavy Thinking do not mix ” so shut up and sit down!

The rule is: Science Fiction by its nature must be trivial.

This of course rules out a large fraction of my work” and all my future work, I think.

I defy Meadows to find one individual even remotely related to Sad Puppies who thinks SF should only be about gadgets. Go for it. Try.

(Which is even funnier, because his Biggest Complaint about Vox Day and John Wright’s fiction is that He Does Not Like Their Speculations About People, because wrongthink!)

If the Sad Puppies have a rule for SF, it is this:

The rule is: Science Fiction by its nature must be entertaining.

This is a rule Heinlein never broke. (You, yes you, the one about to kvetch about The Number Of The Beast — be quiet; you would only be admitting that you missed the joke of what Heinlein was doing in that book. [Seconded! – Ed.])

It’s like he’s speaking directly to the Sad Puppies from beyond the grave, isn’t it?

It’s like Meadows is an idiot savant, except for the “savant” part, isn’t it?

Growing up Alien- A Blast From The Past from September 2007

Apropos the last entry — multi-culti tutti fruti — my husband said the child should do a presentation on the culture of writers.  Laura then expanded on this with several perfectly apropos observations on what the children of self-employed intellectuals learn.  This got me to thinking about — specificaly — what growing up with parents who both write science fiction, fantasy and mystery has done to our kids.  I don’t know if it qualifies as a culture, mind you.  our family is arguably a group — just not a large group.  We could, arguably, be considered a sub culture.  Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock talked about just such a splintering of subcultures, some with very little to do with the other, none really having much to do with people’s antecedents.  He didn’t of course factor in the internet, which makes such cultures geographically spread out.  My kids and Dave Freer’s kids understand each other completely — over Skype.  They’ve never met in person.  Most of Robert’s classmates think his points of reference are bizarre.

So, if Robert wanted to write about the subculture of kids growing up in a house with two writing parents who are both sf/f geeks, he would write this:

When I was very, very young, I thought “editor” was a swear word — it was just the tone mom said it in.  It took me till I used it in Kindergarten to realize that it wasn’t.

Names that my parents hold in utter reverence — Heinlein, Bradbury, Pratchett — are utterly unknown to my classmates.  On the other hand, when I found out my history teacher (10th grade) read Baen, it was like meeting a long-lost uncle.

When I was five and wrote a Winnie the Pooh story — twenty pages long and with a complex plot — mom and dad did not congratulate me on my achievement.  Instead they sat me down and explained I should never use someone else’s copyrighted characters.  Never, ever, ever.

Mom and dad would forgive dirt behind the ears.  They would never forgive bad grammar, though.

Apparently when you demand chocolate in the grocery store, other parents don’t answer TANSTAAFL.  Other parents don’t quote the sayings of Lazarus Long at their kids.  Other parents don’t tell their children their lego spaceships would never fly, nor exhort them to “do the math.”

On the other hand, most other parents don’t subscribe to science news and don’t leave books on forensic crime investigation in the bathroom.

Some of the worst arguments I’ve had with my mother are over vocabulary.  She has a this thing about words she calls “ugly” and “clunky.”  Then there’s my dad.  We argue about physics and math.  And have shouting matches over what exactly the fourth dimension is.

When I was twelve and still not published, I got a long discourse on how I was just being lazy and refusing to learn to plot.  Then mom gave me ten books to read on the subject.  Mind you, I wanted to write, but they wanted me to do it right.

There are books in every room in the house, even the bathrooms.  There are books in laundry baskets under the guest bed.  There are books in steamer trunks in the attic and in plastic boxes in the basement.

The worst social gaffe a friend of the family ever committed at our house was when she told me — aloud, during Thanksgiving dinner — my stories were not very logical and my universe should be more like Star Trek.  You could see dad biting his tongue.  And I think mom went into the kitchen and laughed.

My brother and I never played catch.  Or hide and seek.  We have however, since Eric  Marshall was very young, played a make-believe game in which our house is an interstellar spaceship and all four of us are explorers.  The cars are our away pods.  The office is the control center.

People discussing plots at the dinner table is just normal.  We learned to chime in with ideas by the time we were two.

On the other hand, it’s not a good idea to describe these plots to your kindergarten teacher.  She calls your mom and interrupts her.  And she gets “concerned.”  (Woman thought Robert was claiming to have seen an alien.  Sigh.)

It’s not a good idea to interrupt mom when she’s really writing fast.  She throws books at you.  And while I know she aims to miss you — she aims very badly.  And dictionaries HURT.

If mom is in one of her writing frenzies, you need to remember to feed pets.  You also need to remind her to eat.  Sleep.  Bathe.  And there’s really nothing alarming if she suddenly looks up and says “What’s my middle name?”  These things happen.

It’s not polite to call dad an “editor” even if he’s edited two anthologies.

Mom and dad both expect you to learn a bunch of things on your own.  If you fail to do it, you get pointed at the appropriate bookshelf.  Sometimes at the inappropriate one.

NEVER tell either parent “I’m bored.”  You’ll find yourself buried under a mountain of books.

Sometimes the plumber who just came over to fix the back up in the basement will ask for mom’s autograph.  He’ll do it while you’re sitting right there at the breakfast table eating your cheerios.  Mom says she didn’t pay him to do that, and mom is an honest woman.

Sometimes people in appliances stores will give your parents discounts because they’ve read their stuff.

But the weirdest thing is that mom and dad inhabit a world all their own.  For instance, while visiting the aquarium in Denver, we came across an aquarium where ALL the piranha were facing in one direction.  In neat rows.  Dad immediately got up on a little stand nearby and started speaking to them — in the “you’ll never go hungry again” style.  Yes, we were alone there at the moment — but then a woman came in.

The look on her face reminds me, that as the son of SF/F writers, I grew up alien.

Manly Men Doing Manly Things in Manly Ways

By Tom Knighton

 

I don’t recall exactly who, but one of the better known authors of our genre once claimed that all people like me wanted in our books was, “Manly men doing manly things in manly ways.” Obviously, this was a snide way to say that I and people like me have no interest in female characters. So, I thought I’d take advantage of Sarah’s platform to talk about some of the books that have impacted me in various ways and see if this attestation holds any water at all.

 

For me, the list should start with Michael Z. Williamson’s Freehold. You see, that’s the first science fiction book I’d picked up in a long time (had been mostly reading fantasy, which I’ll get to in a moment). Manly men? Well, unless I’ve been completely misreading everything Mike wrote about Kendra Pacelli, not so much. She is a she, to start with. It’s through her alien eyes that the world of Grainne is explained to the reader. Mike takes a shot at those who complain about diversity, and it’s awesome.

 

Now, what about “manly things in manly ways”? Well, a nice chunk of the book deals with an invasion of Grainne, and Kendra does her fair share of kicking butt, so that might qualify. However, considering how the left feels about stereotypes, this should be a good thing. Kendra, a female, easily handles combat and dealing with males in a combat environment.

 

After that, let’s talk about Larry Correia’s work.

 

First, the Monster Hunter books. Yes, Owen Pitt is a man. He smashes things with his fist, he shoots things with his gun, and he makes monsters into corpses. Manly man doing manly things in manly ways.

 

Oh, but what about Julie Shackleford? I mean, she’s a badass too, serving as the team sniper (and anyone who thinks sniping doesn’t require a level of badass doesn’t know squat about sniping). She’s also described as a brilliant negotiator who sets up most of the team’s contracts and just generally smart as hell. Owen knows she’s smarter than he is, and is remarkably fine with that.

 

Yeah, yeah, you might think. She’s just a token chick with a gun, right? WRONG!

 

On the very same team is Holly Newcastle, one of my favorite characters in the series. Holly is a former stripper who is now one of the more vicious members of MHI. Her viciousness isn’t some symptom of “irrational woman” either, but is deeply rooted in her backstory. You see, for those who haven’t read the series, to be recruited to work for MHI, you have to survive a monster encounter. Holly’s is one of the more brutal and terrifying of the encounters.

 

Larry’s not done with just one series either. Take his Grimnoir series. Throughout the series, the most dangerous of the badasses is Faye. The Oakie girl raised by Portuguese dairy farmers is easily one of the most deadly of the heroes.

 

“Oh, but Tom, listen to the way she talks. Correia made her an idiot!” Again, WRONG! I don’t want to include spoilers, but let’s just say it’s revealed that Faye is also one of the smartest too. She’s uneducated, but she’s not stupid. The way she spoke was actually typical for rural folks of that era. Larry has her speak like that for a very good reason.

 

Now, let’s give a shout out to our esteemed hostess. Darkship Thieves, which features Athena Sinistra. Again, Athena isn’t a dude, though she’s not a typical woman either (again, avoiding spoilers). However, she also doesn’t engage in your typically male daring-do either.

 

Plus, I have to make a confession. Patricia Briggs. Yeah, love her Mercy Thompson series. Very much a case of “not a male” as well, and they’re some pretty good stories too in my opinion.

 

Then you take books by people like Robert Heinlein that routinely included non-male characters as the protagonist, and not in a whiney “damsel in destress” type of way either, or Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, or any of a number of other talented authors who included strong female protagonists doing things in whatever way worked for their stories.

 

That’s the amusing thing about the accusations slung around. The books I’ve laid out are ones that many here have read and enjoyed to some extent.

 

By now, it should be abundantly clear that anyone who trots out the “manly men doing manly things in manly ways” meme is either disingenuous, ignorant of the works they’re disparaging, or perhaps a combination of the two. Just look at the examples Mad Mike gives of his own work, and that becomes incredibly clear.

 

What they’re insinuating is that those they attack—people like myself and many of you—are nothing more than unsophisticated in their choice of science fiction entertainment, which brings us to the root of the problem. You see, people who like many of these works are people who don’t care how beautifully you turn a phrase, but whether you tell a story that makes us turn the page.

 

The phrase is designed to paint us as sexist in our choices of entertainment, but I think it’s pretty easy to disprove that. So what are some of your favorite works that aren’t about manly men doing manly things in manly ways?