Year: 2015

I don’t make much secret of the fact that I grew up in an actual honest to goodness sexist society. And by sexist I mean one that believed that women were sort of second best when it came to human beings.

No, this wasn’t micro-aggression, but the actual, stated opinion of most people in the society, including women. Teachers thought nothing of saying in front of a class “this might be a little more difficult for you ladies, since it requires logical reasoning.” They expected, in a co-ed class, that men would be better than the women at just about anything involving academics. In craft class, women were shunted to sewing and such, and I was told that no, I couldn’t do carpentry because that was weird and unnatural.

I don’t think it’s the same now. EEC, and a determined campaign to make women “equal” – which is probably… Never mind. We’ll get to that.

Fortunately or unfortunately I have a really hard time staying told. What I mean is, the more they told me I was inferior and had to defer to the better male brains, the more I set out to prove to the guys that I could run circles around them, mentally speaking.

It always gave me great pleasure when, by the end of the year, the teachers looked to me, and not to whichever boy they’d decided was the prodigy when they asked a difficult question.

This wasn’t always easy, particularly since by culture I was expected to take a great deal of the housekeeping off mom’s hands, while most boys went home and had no other duties than to study. But I studied harder; I read more; and by gum I worked to be better.

So – is this an extended whine about discrimination?

Shrug. No. I don’t know if I would be me – pig headed and stubborn as some species of weed – if it weren’t for those “handicaps” thrown in my way. I don’t know if I’d ever have learned to work hard, either. You see, if I had been handed things on a plate, I don’t know if I’d ever have made an effort. I’m very lazy, after all.

And if I hadn’t fought to be admitted to the confraternity of “the best” in each class, I’d never have understood the strange comradery that can flourish between men and women, when the men know a woman has bested them at their game and earned her position among them, they – at least the decent ones – tend to treat her as an equal.

Now, there are downsides to this, and we’ll talk about it in a moment.

I imagine, though I have absolutely no backing for this, that I resemble, in spirit and experiences the feminists of the 40s and 50s, when the point was to prove you could be as good as a man, and when the sort of work required and (perhaps in the fifties) effective contraception made it possible for women to have equivalent professional lives.

At least what I’ve read from those time periods, women’s attitude seemed to be “We can do it. We can be better than men, work harder than men, take knocks like men. And we ain’t no wall flowers.”

There was the inherent belief that, yes, the world was biased, but it was up to us to prove we could make it despite the bias. This was my belief when I lived in Portugal too.

I realized things were different in the US – very different – when my American literature teacher, fresh off the plane, used “he” to refer to indeterminate gender in a class full of females, in my third year in college and then started apologizing and ritually abasing himself for his “sexism.” The class of 20 some budding linguists blinked at him and said “but that is the default pronoun for indeterminate gender in English!”

I’ve never seen a man so astonished. Which prepared me for what I call “the feminist war on language” through the late eighties and nineties in this country.

Though I might say nothing prepared me for the piece of strangeness that was “Herstory.” Seriously, women, learn philology and stop embarrassing people with vaginas. It was as stupid as when preachers use English to decide that there is some arcane meaning in the Bible. It’s as though they don’t realize languages evolve. Which begs the question of whether they understand societies change, or whether they live in an eternal now, but that’s a question for another time.

And then things got ever weirder. One started getting dinged for not using his/her in any correspondence of non-fiction.

It made me a little …. Uncomfortable. Both as a linguist and as a human being. Look, language is language. Language isn’t sexist because language isn’t anything. Yes, there are fossilized meanings and fossilized attitudes in language, but they don’t “intend” or “mean” anything beyond well, the explicit meaning.

This is hard to explain, but suffice it to say half of my teaching career (teaching ESL mostly, but also French and briefly German) was spent saying “there is no why in language.” I.e. don’t ask me why “bread” is “bread” in English but “pao” in Portuguese. I don’t mean there is no explanation of how those words came to be used. Of course there is. Different invading people, different pervading cultures, etc. That’s what philology does and it’s fun for a winter’s night. (Okay, so I have a weird idea of fun.) BUT it’s not a LOGICAL reason. A lot of my students would say stuff like “but bread makes no sense. It doesn’t sound like the thing.”

I think the war on “he” as the default for indeterminate is the same kind of thought. “But it could be a he or a she. So we should mention both. Even if it just makes sentences really awkward.”

That was only part of what made me uncomfortable, though. What really bothered me was this sense that the woman (and it was always women) enforcing the he/she had this need to be noticed, even in a sentence that didn’t refer to them. It was as though they were saying “AND a WOMAN too.” (There are any number of oral story telling techniques that do just this, so you’ll say something like “Five hundred men, three elephants, and the flea in the captain’s beard.” That was sort of the feeling I got.)

Still, you know, language evolves with culture, and I figure this was part of it and just wished they’d settled for something other than he/she or a “they” that broke the number concordance. (Yes, I know Shakespeare did it. He did all manner of foolish things, as well as brilliant ones.) I thought even “it” would be better.

But the disturbing trend continued to grow. Bookstores started labeling history sections “herstory” with no irony whatsoever. College educated women honest to goodness thought there had been as many female medieval fighters as male and there was a vast conspiracy to hide this. (Where women were supposed to come up with the upper body strength for those weapons I don’t know. Yeah, some managed it. Maybe one in a thousand.) A vast conspiracy involving millions of people through the ages. A conspiracy of which we had no record. A conspiracy that never once broke ranks.

Then there was the sisterhood thing. You know, where every and any woman is supposed to understand me better than a man. That was jaw-dropping. I mean, I’m supposed to have more in common with Mary who does tatting for a living in some little village in England than with, oh, Larry, say, who writes for the same house I do in America.

And there was the “men are afraid of you” thing that was brought up as to why I didn’t get along with my boss when I was a lecturer in college. (It probably had more to do with the fact I didn’t intend to make a career of it, and wasn’t going to jump through his hoops. Oh, also, I was a smart-mouthed kid with no social sense.) This is used to explain any man not liking any woman nowadays and particularly any man criticizing a woman’s performance of her job.

But when I first realized things had gone off the rails was when a professor, in a well reported snit, ran out of a lecture hall, crying and threatening to throw up because a college president mentioned statistics and the relative, statistical position of women in intellectual fields and said it was the same as the relative IQ curve. That is, that women mostly occupy the middle ranks, while men claim more geniuses and more morons. This is a statistical fact. It doesn’t mean any woman is or isn’t a genius or a moron (you have to test the woman for that) but as a statistical fact it explains some of the distribution of women we see in intellectual and STEM work. (It also tends to mean those women at the top are good, as they fought all sorts of assumptions to get there.)

THIS – this statistical fact – caused an educated woman to feel personally insulted.

I thought this was insane, and perhaps she was off her meds. But the incidents just kept coming; too many for me to remember much less mention.

The ones that come to mind, though, are the dongle thing and the shirtstorm.

The dongle thing is where a woman heard two geeks talk about dongles and assumed a sexual meaning. Now, the descriptions of the actual event are so muddled, I don’t know which was true. It is entirely possible that the guys were just talking about dongles, and she read a dirty meaning into their words. Or it’s possible that they were making veiled dirty jokes.

Here is the thing: neither of them was about her. What I mean is, men have a different sense of humor than women. Any woman who’s fought her way to the top of a male dominated field, who finds herself considered one of the guys learns this very quickly. And the wise woman – you know, one of those that JUST wants to prove she’s good enough? – turns a deaf ear to it. (Or joins in, depending on personality. But if you want to continue pretending to yourself and others that you’re a lady, you just don’t hear those things. You learn to filter them out.) Guys do the same in a female intensive grouping. Trust me, the things we think are funny and joke about are just as shockingly bizarre and offensive to normal males. Both my gay and straight male friends have on occasion, hearing me talk to a female friend, said the equivalent of “stop. You’re tearing my illusions apart.”

However, the woman who overheard the talk knew it was all about her. (Even though I haven’t found anything saying that it was directed at or even referring to her.) She overheard this talk, and it was bad talk, and it made her feel uncomfortable. And so she set out to destroy the men’s careers. Because every place should be made safe for a gentlewoman of delicate sensibilities to wander through with impunity and without some word – even one she misunderstood – sullying her virgin-like ears.

Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.

Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?

But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.

And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.

Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and…

And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on tv tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.

Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order’s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.

An episode in which my younger son accidentally touched a girl on the behind – in 3^rd grade, when Mr. Hormone hadn’t visited yet and he had no clue behinds had anything to do with sex or being sexy – and the school tried to charge him with sexual harassment (Which stopped cold when I threatened to write about it for various mags and make them a laughing stock) gave me some insight into why women are reacting this way.

It’s not all their fault, no.

That little girl had it far worse than my son. Because you see, for having been touched by a rather innocent little boy, who was reaching into a group and trying to get her attention (to play “the space game” which was sort of a LARP in which they were in a spaceship in an alien planet. Hey, he’s mine.) this girl was put in COUNSELING sessions and was told that her life would never be the same, because she’d been – gasp – sexually assaulted.

I lost touch with the kids from that class, and don’t know if she still thinks she was victimized, but let’s say she was a little strange for months after the incident.

Of course, she was actually bureaucratically assaulted.

You see, the directive to make the sexes equal is being applied top down by a thousand little bureaucracies, none of them very sure how to accomplish this. They’re also in general trying to force the sexes to be equal, which is impossible, instead of equal before the law, which is desirable. This further muddles their attempts, particularly when you throw in the lovely academic theory most of them imbibe that “gender is a construct.” And gender might be, but whether your genes are xx or xy still affects your upper body strength (men have more), your endurance of pain (women have more) and several other things you can’t make equal by declaring it so.

The problem is bureaucracies are stupid. They can’t see finer shades such as “allow exceptional individuals to be wherever they belong” or “just let people be people.” No, they hear “make women and men equal and by gum, they’re going to do it if it requires being at war with reality. It’s kind of like performing brain surgery on your sofa, using a rusty saw and a soup spoon. Even with the best of intentions, you’re going to do more harm than good.

Now, do I think it was okay for the culture to be as it was in Portugal, where I was assumed to be an idiot because I lacked 250grams between my legs? Oh, heck no. But I also don’t want a culture where little girls are mollycoddled and little boys berated both in compensation/punishment for things that happened before their grandparents were born.

For one, it makes girls into sissies. For another it makes a lot of men give up on society.

And the girls into sissies thing is dangerous. Women who’ve been mollycoddled all their lives will think that anything is an attack or an aggression. Like, you know, being called Ladies. Or pinup shirts.

This means, more and more, as the younger generations come in, professional and academic environments with women become mine fields for men and histrionic opportunities for women.

And sooner or later, looking at our throwing up, swooning, crying, trigger-warned, peaceful amazon warriors, someone is going to say “you know, women are too fragile for the workaday world. Let’s put them in burkas and lock them up in purdah.” And then it will all be needed to do over again, the fight to let those women who can and will compete do so.

On behalf of my future great great great granddaughter whom I don’t want to have to endure that kind of things, stop this feminist charging forward to the fainting couch and the smelling salts, like some Victorian maiden that never actually existed.

Stop trusting what the bureaucracy tells you. Men are not the enemy. Most men welcome women who can work with them as equals. Yeah, they’ll still try to protect you and avenge you, because they, the same as you, have instincts. An unfortunate side effect of having physical bodies.

Accept them as they are so they can accept you as you are. Demand their best behavior, but don’t demand they stop being men. And don’t make them walk on eggshells around you. The power might feel good but in the end it betrays you, because it means you’ll never belong as a co-worker.

Oh, and fight the war for equality on the cultural level.

If we took over a Middle Eastern country tomorrow we could (and should) fix the laws, so women are the same as men before the law. But we couldn’t fix the culture the same way. If we made laws giving women job preferences, or telling men what they could or couldn’t do around women, what we’d do in the end is what’s happening here: women who are used to being protected/infantilized/subjugated by men transfer that relationship of power by putting all their trust to government.

And since government is force, it’s more abusive than any husband. And the end result will be subjugation.

Fight the culture war now. So your descendants don’t have to fight worse ones. Humans are not widgets and bureaucracy is stupid.

Make your own judgements, and tell bureaucrats and their fainting maidens coterie to go smell some salts.

 

 

*In a weird coincidence, I was writing about how we were devolving to Victorian maidens as they never existed, when Bill sent me this.  It’s not the post I will write — tomorrow — but it’s a good beginning.  And now I go paint walls.  – SAH*

Help, help. I’m being microaggressed- Bill Reader

 

Since Hillary Clinton announced, the feminists of the United States have undoubtedly been getting set to be outraged at things. We’ll see dozens of new wars on women, but we’ll have to check the news routinely to find out what they are because women are so oppressed in the United States that it takes whole academic departments and quite a lot of grant money to find examples of it. I figure this may be a good time, then, to talk about one of my personal pet-peeve memes, the microaggression.
It may surprise many people who use the term “microaggression” to know that the literal meaning of the word is, “one one-millionth of an aggressive action”. Or, then again, considering the things they complain about, perhaps it would not. From that perspective, you’d have to consider the word a masterpiece of liberal newspeak. It’s a word that, by right of its pithiness and the prominence of the root word “aggression”, sounds very threatening. But I’m going to guess that people would be taking the whole issue a lot less seriously if you went through every women’s studies paper written with the word and actually replaced it with the— I hasten to remind you— absolutely equivalent expression. Put another way, it’s a word that only makes sense if you don’t actually think about the definition. Ignorance, after all, is strength.

Now, some will quibble with me. One of my bedrock and most infamous stances is that words are best used as they are commonly understood, because definitions proceed from usage and, much as it may pain those of us who are semantically precise by nature, not the other way around. This is a fair point. So allow me to provide you, in its entirety, my article on what would happen if we replaced “microaggression” with its definition according to its popular usage, that is, “any action at all that annoys oversensitive fainting violets unprepared to deal with the real world,”:
ROFL
I mean, I could write you several pages of my laughing maniacally, but I think you can see my general thesis, here. Besides, that would be unfair. Many branches of academia are entirely built on people not dealing honestly with the subjects they discuss, and women’s studies is probably the most vulnerable on that front. No, I’d prefer to dismantle this meme from within. The problems with the concepts of modern feminism are so blindingly obvious from outside the fervor of the movement that the people inside by definition cannot be connected to the real world.

Now, I find the literal definition interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I could extrapolate from it and infer that feminists get very upset and turn the campus upside-down if, in the midst of 999,999 actions, you do any one thing they consider to constitute “aggression”. Now, I’ve had some training in science, and happen to be familiar with the standard thresholds for significance, as I’m sure many of the followers on this blog are also. The most standard test of significance is the 0.95 significance. Mathematically rephrased, that means that there is only a 1 in 20 chance of the finding being a mistake.

You’d be surprised by how thin a margin a lot of modern scientific papers pass this threshold. This can be because of limitations in the instruments or experimental setup or so on. Also, frankly, grants are usually written with an eye towards demonstrating effects efficiently. Beating that threshold by a really solid margin takes careful planning, rigorous control, and often larger sample sizes. The subtler the effect, the more important these things become. And it’s hard to get funding for that, unless, for some reason, the subtle effect is very important (there are examples of such important but subtle problems in, for example, relativistic effects on GPS tracking systems). So let us suppose that we turned a scientific eye towards human behavior and delineated non-aggressions as a positive result and aggressions as a negative one. You test, and find that there is only a 1 in 1 million chance of finding an aggression if you run the test a million times. Non-aggression is found at a significance of p < 0.000001.
I’d throw a party, personally. I can’t think of the last time I saw an effect this strong demonstrated in a paper. If I’ve seen it at all I would guess that it was in a physics paper discussing a fundamental law of nature. As for all the standard thresholds for p, we’ve pretty effectively blown the “extra-rigorous” test of p<0.01 right out of the water.
I’m saying all this for a reason. Scientifically, I could also restate the meaning of “microaggression” as “aggressive actions that occur so rarely as to be not just insignificant, but laughably insignificant.” Try that one in your papers, feminists. Let me know how that goes for you.
The saddest thing in all of this, though, is that it’s absolutely true. And I want you to think about something. We are allied with a lot of countries in the world that, especially with the way Obama is behaving towards them lately, might most accurately be described as “frienemies”. There are long-standing ones like Saudi Arabia. There are countries we’ve recently taken to getting on the nerves of, like Britain. There are countries we’ve gotten suddenly and alarmingly hostile to, like Israel (because, as surely as fire will burn, American liberalism follows the path that every totalitarian movement with the option to has, and goes after Jews). Let me ask you frankly: out of a million diplomatic exchanges with any given one of those countries, how many of them would you say are admonishing or critical? While I don’t pretend to know the full extent of ambivalent-to-positive diplomatic correspondence between nations, I can say that it would have to constitute many hundreds of millions of papers for the few negative memos and speeches that end up in the news to be only a millionth of it. And these, mind you, are our allies. They are, in many cases, people we are theoretically prepared to go to war to defend, to lay down the lives of our own citizens to protect.

And while you’re thinking about that, think about this, too. Right now we’re making overtures towards peace with Iran. Iran declared war on us several decades ago. In all that span, I doubt that that 1 in a million of the things they’ve said about us has been positive. No, in fact, I’ll do you one better. I doubt that 1 in a million of the things they’ve said about us has not actually included the phrase “death to America”. And this is a country that forces women to dress in hijab and have clitoridectomies. But that country, most American feminists, being liberal, fully support doing anything to make peace with. As for, say, Britain and Israel, where women do not face that kind of brutal, medieval persecution, and are free to hold any position and pursue any career and hold any religion and marry, or not marry, any person they wish, what do feminists say about those countries?
They say “Help, help. I’m being microaggressed,”.

I figure I should let you know I’m okay. It’s been an interesting day because yesterday was spent painting/cleaning and I did not sleep well. This morning, I had an interview to answer, and since I was writing in a hurry it’s immensely long.
So I haven’t been able to write here. I have guest posts but hate to “short” them on hours on the blog.

I’ll just give a quick update on where I am (I almost typed who I am, which tells you all you need to know.)

I am now off the pain meds except for super-motrim, and that for the anti-inflammatory properties. There are some hangover effects, though those are diminishing every day.  Just odd holes in my memory, but again, fewer every day.

The stitches are ALMOST healed, so I don’t feel like I should have a warning saying “cut at the dotted line.”

The infection is much better and I’m assured the antibiotic will act for another week.

Mind-wise, it’s coming back too.  I’m starting to get flashes of story, weirdly almost all short stories.  I think this is part of my mind KNOWING I don’t have the time to sit down and slam out a novel, or even the ending of one, while I’m fixing the other house.

That’s finally starting to show progress, after weeks of its seeming like I was working in vain.

Depending on when we can get a handyman in and if we can afford one, we should be done in another week or two.  A bit late, but since my surgery was FAR more invasive than expected, not too bad.

I have a bunch of donations to answer to — I am NOT forgetting you — it’s just the other house is eating all my waking time and Through Fire is getting the rest.

Once Through Fire is done there will be new stuff in the subscriber’s page.  meanwhile I’m contemplating starting to edit/add to drawer books, once the Darkships and Dragons are done, and that to will probably first appear in subscriber space.  Eh.  Maybe I should give you some shorts over there, in the mean time, as a way to scratch both our itches.

Okay, and now I have to (again) go paint walls.  Tomorrow there will be post, mine or guest.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post called Of Fists And Noses. It referred to a phrase often repeated in Portugal (at least in my school) after the revolution. It was “your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose.”
Like every other of those pseudo-profound pronouncements of the seventies, like “we’re all naked under our clothes” and “People weren’t born with scissors to cut their hair” it sounds like the result of long and deep thought, but it really isn’t. In fact, it’s the sort of sentence that would only convince someone who has been toking all day and it should automatically be ended in “man.” As in “We’re all naked under our clothes, man.”
Looked at one way that sort of pronouncement is obvious. Yep, we’re naked under our clothes, duh. And yep, for whatever reason our primitive ancestors must have had really long hair, duh. And yep, your right to swing your fist is not the right to run around punching people, duh.
But looked at from the practical point, all of those declarations are completely beside the point and the only appropriate answer to it is “And what?”
Because we’re naked under our clothes doesn’t mean it’s a jolly good idea to expose yourself to children, make restaurant chairs unsanitary and scare the horses by removing those clothes obscuring your nudity. And if our distant ancestors went about with hair to their waist, and tangled and matted and full of lice (they also weren’t born with soap and/or combs) it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a public health hazard for you to go around that way now.
Now, if you wish to keep your hair long and clean, (or dirty, provided I’m not forced to socialize with you) or go around naked, it’s none of my business, but the sentence used to justify it doesn’t, has nothing to do with it and taken to its extreme would set all sorts of crazy precedents. Like, you know, “Humans weren’t born in houses, man.” (No construction is needed) And “We’re all hungry before we eat” (So, why mitigate hunger.)
However, the fist and nose thing is possibly the worst ever. If your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, what if I move my nose and rest it on your fist, so you can’t move.
Oh, come on, Sarah, now you’re just being silly!
Well, if you had told me that objection when I was eleven or twelve, and though that a perfectly reasonable pronouncement, I’d have told you that the objection was silly.
It’s just that over the last thirty years I’ve seen that objection playing up.
In effect what it means is that no right is absolute.
Just yesterday I was talking to mom, whose house got broken into, thank heavens while no one was home (home invasion is rife in Portugal) and talking about the right to your property, which involves the right of defense.
She was appalled at my statement that if anyone breaks into your house in Colorado you can shoot them and not be tried for murder. Apparently a neighbor, tired of having his business broken into, constructed an elaborate trap to catch the burglar. Part of the trap was a noose. It somehow mis-fired and got the burglar around the neck, killing him.
Keep in mind this was the same burglar that had cleaned out this small craftsman TWICE before. The business owner was arrested, tried and convicted of murder.
His right to protect his livelihood ended at the end of the burglar’s nose. And the burglar brought his nose right into the craftsman’s property.
What right do you have to your property when anyone can break in and you can do nothing, lest you hurt them?
In the same way, take the right of owning guns for said self defense. Even in the US, arguably one of the most free gun-owning country in the world, we keep getting hemmed in with regulations demanded by loud people who imagine their nose is being touched by our fist (I.e. they imagine we want guns for offense, not defense, and it never occurs to them that those who do want guns for offense are not law abiding and get them anyway) so that depending on the area of the country you can’t own guns at all; you must lock them up so securely you can’t access them in an emergency; you can only own the guns the say you can own, etc.
Or let’s go with the most basic of all rights, the right of free speech. This is the one where touching someone’s “nose” is all the easiest. As two luminaries of science fiction found out when they used the word “ladies” to refer to women they admired, it’s always easy for the perpetually inflamed noses of those seeking to take offense at something, anything, to claim to have been punched.
As we found out in Sad Puppies, when we tried to break the stranglehold of a small clique on what was until two weeks ago claimed to be the most prestigious award in the field, the perpetually offended can claim you are racist, sexist and homophobic, because they “feel” you punched those noses, not even theirs. They can claim this even if it’s completely countered by the reality of the slate proposed. They can claim this because who is to judge whether their nose felt a punch except themselves? How can you counter it?
We’ve seen way too much of this, including that famous case in which a statue of a sleep walking male terrorized a whole college full of supposedly rational women; and the sad fact that literature professors now have to give trigger warnings before advocating the reading of anything even vaguely controversial.
And just recently, the Honey Badgers, the same nice people who interviewed Brad and Mike and I last week, got kicked out of a con in Calgary for “engaging in harassment of panelists.” Their recording of the panel is here and here. Judge for yourselves.
It reminded me of that quote of Moshe Feder over the Sad Puppies thing, you know: “starve them out: stop inviting them and theirs to conventions. That means authors, editors, cover artists, even whole publishers. ”
This because the perpetually offended can’t help but feel they’ve been punched when someone disagrees with them. Note that Larry Correia called for NOT punishing all of Tor for the actions of some of their editors. The other side, though? Yeah. Their feelings have been hurt. And they have no morals. Mostly because their right to hurt others has never been questioned, and when it is they try to shut down the questioners. (And, oh, Moshe, darling, you guys have been trying to do that to us for … my entire career. The only difference now is that we’re not afraid anymore. I don’t think it will be easier for you at this point than when we cowered in fear of losing our livelihood. There’s Amazon, there’s indie, and I’d like you to contemplate my middle fingers.)
In fact, when it comes to the right of free speech, it should be the most patently obvious that the whole noses and fists thing is insane. Because speech is not a physical action.
Sure it can have a physical consequence. Entertainment Weekly, the Grauniad, and lately the New Republic knew very well what they were doing when they painted Sad Puppies as racist, homophobic and sexist. They were trying to get the aggrieved-nose brigades to take action on their behalf. The fact that the articles were easily proven lies doesn’t matter unless people who read those outlets check the facts, something that so far they’ve proven notoriously averse to doing.
Now those three might have/probably have crossed the line into libel. I don’t know where the consideration is on legal action at the moment. It’s more difficult than it seems. Those are big publications, with legal teams, and we’re a rag tag of normal people with … normal to small resources.
The power to stop libelous or lying or hurtful speech is always a theoretical one. The power to stop your speech-fist by claiming it hurts my “nose” whether it really does or not is a power vested in those that already have societal power.
It requires amplification in the media, an ability to play the victim, and the approval of the ruling “elite.” Stopping speech, no matter who does it, supposed private parties or the government, is always a tool of power, an act of punching down. It requires the approval of the powers that be.
The entire libel against Sad Puppies is an act of the clique, allied to a larger cultural self-proclaimed “elite” to keep power. They deny the right of free speech of those who paid $40 for the right to vote on the best novel/short story/movie/associated post, etc. of the year, by claiming that speech is somehow “wrong speech.”
In the same way the bureaucracy in charge of the largest association of writers of sf/f punched down by declaring that “ladies” was somehow hateful and hurt people.
We won’t even go into the other craziness from that association.
And now of course, it’s wrong and evil for our side of things to defend itself and to set the record straight on attempts to suppress us. Having been self-defined from above as haters, our speech touches everyone’s metaphorical noses, even when it doesn’t.
The right of free speech is meaningless when you only have the right to say that which society approves of.
No one has ever tried to ban speech that lauds mother and apple pie (well, maybe now, but that’s a long story.) No one has ever had a fit over your complimenting their lawn.
The right of free speech is by necessity a protection for unpleasant, unpalatable speech. It is the right to call someone in power a right son of a b*tch. It is the right to say things that are hurtful, whether they’re true or not. It is the right to proclaim that the king goes naked, even if it hurts the self esteem of everyone who has been lying to herself and telling herself he wears clothes of the finest silk.
Sometimes the metaphorical nose of the listener needs to be pounded with the metaphorical fist of mean words. Because it’s the only thing that can stop tyrannical actions or misguided but widely accepted ones.
Absent the right to say what hurts others, a society can careen head first into an abyss. Because it’s always easy to claim you’re offended at something you don’t want to hear, and that therefore the speaker shouldn’t be allowed to say it.
And that speech-stopping power is never evenly distributed. It’s always higher on the part of those who have connections in the press, friends in the bureaucracy, and who can amplify their teary cries and stop what they want stopped.
The right to stop speech you don’t like is ALWAYS an act of punching down, an act of speaking power to truth. (Or lies, but it’s amazing how often it is the truth that those self-selected, connected elites want stopped.)
Which is why the idea that my right to speak is stopped by your right to take offense is an open door to totalitarianism and censorship. If claiming that speech “offends” someone is enough to stop it, you’re giving those who already have the power to defame, destroy and character-assassinate more power and preventing those who would talk against them from speaking.
Yes, words can hurt you, despite the old ditty. But the only way to equalize your ability to hurt with words is to remove all penalty for “wrong words” and “wrong thought.”
If I can’t tell you when your nose is pushing into my fist, how will you know you’ve become overbearing.
If you take away a civil society’s way to correct wrongs, you leave only an uncivil way. That way lies war, real violence, and far more things getting hurt than feelings.
Take your nose out of my fist, pull your pants up. Learn to interact in civil society. Before you lose it.

I wanted to call that a message in a bottle, but that’s only because if I weren’t on pain pills I’d be drinking heavily.
I’m not going to go on a Hugo-thing, because frankly saying Sad Puppies doesn’t want message is not anything we did, but the same craziness that has the other side dubbing me a white (I’m spun gold, thank you very much. Take it up with Lowes and their paintchips) Mormon Dude. It’s not what we said and answering the craziness just encourages the mad people. Or to quote Grandma “I wouldn’t engage with a mad person even to go to heaven, because he might throw me down from there.”
Yes, there was some grumbling (Brad? Me? Who knows. Us Mormon dudes all look alike) about Message Fiction but that’s not the same as endorsing books without message.
How not, Sarah? You ask.
Well, because I don’t think it’s possible to have a book without any messages. At least not a book worth reading. A message will sneak in even in the under-plots, sub-plots or character development.
Take the Shakespeare books (please? I could use some more sales. Back titles have been sluggish. I don’t want to run a sale until I’m ready to write the final two which at this point looks like next year) – they were self-consciously devoid of political message, since I was so deep in the political closet I could have benefited from the installation of louvers on the door for ventilation.
What I couldn’t empty them of was of Sarah. I mean, I was the one writing it, and my assumptions and ideas leaked into the world building. What we see of Tudor England we see through my eyes. Some other writer might have made Nan a termagant, while I just made her strong and a little exasperated by her husband’s… poetic nature. Some other writer might have had a lot more explicit sex in, given the gender changing elf, while I limited myself to an oblique reference to sex on the kitchen table. More importantly, I think (it’s hard to tell, because it’s my own) that a certain doubt about the rightness of institutions, a certain poking fun at the nature of creativity, and a certain slipperiness of what is reality crept in. Because I’m in. Could those be assembled into a message? I’m sure they did for many people.
Or take my shifter books, also written as apolitical (more on that later): in reading them to get situated for the next book, I can’t avoid the feeling that they have a message about young people settling down to the business of growing up and looking after themselves and others. Not on purpose. It’s just that the people who thrive in the book are people who forge friendship connections and work hard. There is also a message of “police your own, or your enemies will.” I.e. if someone you identify with, someone on your tribe, commits a heinous crime, it’s up to you to stop the criminal, or the police and the normal law will tear your group apart. (Note for the other side who will try to take this out of context: prove “my tribe” and then prove “crime.” I don’t believe in thought-crimes.)
On the something more on that – in Noah’s Boy I’ve seen reviews slamming the book as political. This puzzled me at first, then I remembered I have a character in the beginning talking about illegal immigration as a side effect of the minimum wage and also as pulling it down. Now, for the observant people, the character who says that is Jason Cordova (one of the fun parts of the Shifter books is tuckerizing all my friends, including Professor Squeak and some of my fans from the diner.) and while I agree with his opinion, that opinion was also almost verbatim a conversation we’d had. It was certainly not the ‘message’ of the book, since the rest of it has bloody all to do with immigration (illegal or not – though because of the nature of Shifters a lot of the characters have immigrant parents) or with economics. Unless, of course, we mean immigration from the stars and economics of soul-preservation. Or something.
Now the lines the character says are maybe 30? Interspersed in other stuff, and it’s there mostly to distract the reader from certain clues about the nature of the character.
Is there a message in those lines? Well, I’d like more people to start thinking of economics as a science, like meteorology and understanding that while you can make it rain, do it enough and you cause a distortion in weather patterns, metaphorically speaking. I.e. yeah, sure you can raise the minimum wage (or have a minimum wage at all) but there will be consequences. Are those consequences you’re willing to live with? This is a valid point, and I’d like a lot more people to think about it.
Is that the message of the book? No, I’m fairly sure if that book has a message it’s “don’t marry someone just because some dragon wants you to.”
On the serious side, no, it’s not the message of the book. It’s some lines in a book.
Someone brought up Starship Troopers in yesterday’s comments saying it absolutely was message because of Johnny’s Civics lessons and blah….
Yeah. Okay. Let’s establish it has a message. What is the message? The characters in that world believe in the civics lessons, but they also have some sort of math that applies to politics. So, that’s the characters. What about the author? Was the message that this would be the better way to live?
The discerning reader (eh) might want to consider the other hints given in the books, the signs of resentment between businessmen/productive class and the military and wonder at other things, such as would that restricted a society innovate enough.
I mean, yeah, sure, no crimes against people in parks, but is this the best society evah?
I have read the book a million times, give or take a thousand, and I can’t tell you. I can tell you that the book gave me a lot to think about on the intersection of security and freedom and how you can fall into excess at both ends.
However, the book itself isn’t set up to validate that this future world is ideal. There are, as I said, hints and cracks of resentment and nowhere do we hear utopia has arrived. In fact the very clash with the bugs betrays less than utopia. People are immigrating. People want off Earth. This is never ONLY for economic reasons, as anyone who has read history knows. And Johnny Rico’s arc has more to do with being a very lonely/spoiled little rich kid, who finds a place to belong. His character arc is one of acceptance and blossoming as part of something larger than itself. It could have been done with another family, or a cult. It’s done with the military because that supports the whole security versus freedom arc of questioning. Why Johnny makes that journey is perhaps best understood in his father’s attempt to buy him off enlisting (with a trip/money, not with attention/love) and in his father’s later description of his state of mind before he himself enlists. (I.e. suffering from stress induced by being a business man in challenging times.)
So, is there a message there? I don’t know. “Be careful how much security you wish for” or “Do you want a more regimented society where people are free to walk around unarmed after dark? This is how to do it. Now, is this what you want?” could be it. But MOSTLY (and we have Heinlein’s word for it) after all the important stuff like feeding his family, he wrote to make people think. Tons to think about that, and a good chance you’ll write entire books “refuting” Johnny’s Civic lessons.
With good writers it’s never a good idea to take the beliefs of the characters as the message of the book.
So what is this message fiction we complain about. Well, it’s Piers Plowman. It’s a story written entirely to deliver a message. Not only will the characters harp on it, but every detail of the book (including names) will be distorted to support it. In its worst instances it’s like Novel Ninja’s post on Piers Plowman. It will all draggingly support the message, and the characters will explain how the message was right, and the writer will obvious avoid saner plots in order to demonstrate the message.
Say in the “failed colonization” novel I vaguely remember reading in the seventies, the message was “humans shouldn’t colonize the stars, because there are things out there so strange that it will drive our smart/competent people nuts, and the insane people aren’t strong enough to colonize.” Now, is that the message I took at the time? No. The message I took at the time was “See how I thwart your dreams of space colonization, you stupid little reader and show how much smarter than you I am.”
I don’t remember much of the book. I appalled me. The two things I remember vividly is that the captain died in a stupid and contrived gun (blaster, whatever) accident and that the last surviving member was a rocking hysteric (by which I mean rocking back and forth) who chooses to end it all, because he wasn’t worthy of being in this world. Or something.
But I do remember that along the way characters often took actions that made no sense, just so they could die.
In other words, message fiction is where you see the author’s fingers firmly in control of the wires making the characters dance and ALL of it leads to a pre-ordained conclusion from which there is no escape, usually a conclusion that is announced at the beginning.
It is possible to read any book as message fiction, if you stretch. But as close as I’ve come to it, I lack the single mindedness to drive everything to that end. There will be other threads. There will be questioning of whether the idea is right, and there will be bad consequences to the idea, because there always are.
However, there has been a tendency in trad publishing to “reward the right message” with promotion and push (though the message is often only obvious because they know the writer is the “right sort.”)
I disapprove of that simply because I find message fiction boring, even when I agree with it. It’s like you’re using your characters to prove a syllogism. It might be good math-proof, but it sucks as entertainment, as conveyance of emotion, as the importing of others’ experiences to the space behind your eyes that is what fiction at its best does.
RES in comments yesterday made an analogy between message being either the pill wrapped in a tasty-pocket of fiction with characters and plot, or the pill being naked and shoved down people’s throats. He is roughly right. I can take the message in the tasty pocket, and while I might or might not swallow it, it will be more fun than the naked pill, which often gets – metaphorically speaking – spit out on the rug. However, as someone pointed out, the best message is the ingredient you can’t see with the naked eye, but which still hits the mind. In other words, what I used to do because my kids didn’t eat veggies was puree them and mix them in meatloaf. Which meant they ate veggies without noticing.
But while that is the “best” there is still another level of message. I’d say that’s what I tend to do, simply because I often don’t “see” what I was trying to convey until revision. That is the message that comes from the way you mix the ingredients. For instance my all meat meatloaf is half ground beef and half ground turkey (usually bought on sale and as cheap as bread) two glugs of whatever wine is left from the last time we had a glass with dinner, some Italian herbs, two eggs, and a few crushed cloves of garlic.
The exact proportions are so ingrained (I’ve been doing this for over twenty years) that I ajust for the meat I have, and sometimes add some olive oil if the mix looks too dry. I could give you the exact same ingredients and your meatloaf would come out completely different.
That level of message is the message you can’t avoid. Nor would you want to. After all assembling the meatloaf is what we do. Meatloaf is what you sell. And we can’t make meatloaf without combining ingredients in the proportion that feels right to us.
Now if I even realize what the message (or the theme) of the story is, during revision, I might go back and draw it a little more clearly.
But I have never, not consciously, let message overwhelm the story. And I have never spent time doing things like naming characters Lee Tletuerp or the equivalent.
So message in fiction? Good heavens, yes. Pretty much always. How can you avoid it when you’re projecting the past into the future and building an entire world? Your beliefs will leak in.
Message so obvious your reader feels like you pounded him or her with the message-mallet ™ ? Try to avoid it. It makes for boring fiction, even if we agree with the message.
The best way to distinguish between the two? First readers. Be aware that there is a range of reactions. Some people will think your subtly drawn characters are like message-mallets and weirdly sometimes those will be the ones who agree. Others wouldn’t see message if it bit them in the nose.
But Message Fiction? Consciously sitting down and writing an entire novel to support a message, even if the message is as innocuous as “be kind to our webfooted friends, that duck might be somebody’s mother”?
Why bother? You’re more likely to carry your point with honest non fiction. And the reader will feel less insulted.

*The French is the Free Range Mollusc’s fault and though I still read the thing effortlessly, my grammar is all gone.  So if you don’t like it, yell at him.  Post on message and fiction (encore) later. I slept late today – SAH*

Good morning to one and all, ladies, gentlemen, cats, dragons, plants, and nameless horrors from beyond the stars alike! I’ve a raft of books for you this weekend. A couple of new releases, several rereleases, and a few older books for those who may have missed them the first time round, with one by our beloved Shadowdancer leading the list. Whether one of the books here or an old favorite, go read a good book this weekend! Life is too short to spend on boring books.

As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Codemonkey, Word Polisher, Minion to the Stars

R.K. Modena

Sparrowind: The Dragon Who Lived As A Knight

Tiny Sparrowind can’t hunt from the sky, cannot hope to best his siblings in contests of strength, and scrapes by to survive. But in the books stashed in his parents’ hoard of gold and gems he finds a greater treasure: ideals.

Deciding to make his own way in life gives him more hope than he could have if he tried living only by the way of Dragonkind, but can this dreamer of a Dragon find his place in the world?

A delightful tale for all ages, that may be shared by reading out loud – either to a young audience, or those who are young at heart.

John Van Stry

The Sea of Grass

Portals of Infinity: Book Four

With no otherworld tasks to run for Fel, Will has spent the last year mainly helping Rachel consolidate her hold on her expanded kingdom. Barassa has been set back, for now, but Will knows it’s only a matter of time until they’re at odds once more and Barassa still has the bigger army. So taking the time to learn more about their enemy seems like a good place to start, and of course, Rachel has more things she expects him to do, even if he has no idea just how he’s going to do them.

Fel has things for Will to do as well, even if they are the more mundane jobs that a Champion of the faith must perform. Escorting missionaries isn’t the most exciting or glamorous job, but its one Will must do. At least the people are different, interesting, and friendly, and some perhaps a little too friendly. But that’s never gotten him in trouble before, right?

Peter Grant

War To The Knife

Laredo War Trilogy Book 1

Laredo’s defenders were ground down and its people ruthlessly slaughtered when the Bactrians invaded the planet. Overwhelmed, its Army switched to guerrilla warfare and went underground. For three years they’ve fought like demons to resist the occupiers. They’ve bled the enemy, but at fearful cost. The survivors are running out of weapons, supplies, and places to hide.

Then a young officer, Dave Carson, uncovers news that may change everything. An opportunity is coming to smash the foe harder than they’ve ever done before, both on and off the planet. Success may bring the interplanetary community to their aid – but it’ll take everything they’ve got. Win or lose, many of them will die. Failure will mean that Bactria will at last rule unopposed.

That risk won’t stop them. When you’re fighting a war to the knife, in the end you bet on the blade.

Mary Catelli

Newly released in print editions

Madeleine and the Mists

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went… the Misty Hills were filled with marvels.

Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old.

But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband.

She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king – and the Misty Hills.

Some things are not so easily evaded.

Also available from Barnes & Noble

A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry.

When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives – but all the evidence points to his having made the deal.

Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

Also available from Barnes & Noble

Curses And Wonders

A collection of tales of wonder and magic.

A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair.

A woman fights a curse on her lands.

A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things.

And more tales.

Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” – and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

Also available from Barnes & Noble

Enchantments And Dragons

A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon.

A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair.

An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic.

A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside.

And more tales.

Includes “Over the Sea To Me,” “Dragonfire and Time”, “The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn”, “The White Menagerie”, “The Dragon’s Cottage,” “Jewel of the Tiger,” and “The Sword Breaks.”

Also available from Barnes & Noble

Mackey Chandler

April

April Book 1

April is an exceptional young lady and something of a snoop. After a chance encounter with a spy, she finds herself involved with political intrigues that stretch her abilities. There is a terrible danger she, and her friends and family, will lose the only home she has ever known, and be forced to live on the slum ball Earth below. It’s more than an almost fourteen year old should have to deal with. Fortunately she has a lot of smart friends and allies. It’s a good things because things get very rough and dicey. They challenge the political status quo, and with a small population the only advantage they have in war is a thin technological edge.

And What Goes Around

April Book 6

The nation of Home and their ally Central seem to have bought some safety by moving Mitsubishi 3 from Low Earth Orbit to a halo orbit around L2 beyond the moon. It has added some expense to stay supplied, but it has unexpected advantages too. A little extra distance works just fine when Earth has its own problems. Like April and her close friends Heather and Jeff, Home is growing, developing its own character, and becoming more independent. They really have no choice.

Witchfinder

Part regency Romance (ah!), part adventure science fiction, this novel set in the magical land of Avalon will take you to various worlds (including ours) as Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater navigates a web of intrigue and treachery upon which hangs the fate of the world and his own family.  Buy from Amazon here.  (And I swear I’m going to resume Rogue Magic if not this coming weekend, then the weekend after — depending on getting other house up — and race it to the finish. – SAH)

*I have a slightly different take, or at least a better way of explaining the difference — I think — but I’ll use Tom’s as a jumping off point and explain tomorrow.- SAH*

The difference between message fiction and fiction with a message

By Tom Knighton

With this whole Hugo situation, once again we find ourselves embroiled in a discussion of “message fiction”. For better or worse, this discussion will never die, despite the numerous times we have said that having a message is fine, just don’t let it overpower the story. You see, this isn’t clear enough for some people. Either their mental processing abilities are deficient, or they’re simply incapable of understanding that we’re not trying to stamp out their books.

 

So, let’s start with two different terms to differentiate between the two types. Generally, I use “message fiction” and “fiction with a message”. Yes, there is a difference between the two, and it’s worth serious discussion and, I hope, even people who abhor my own political leanings will see the wisdom of what I will discuss.

 

First, message fiction. You see, message fiction is where the message is all important. The fiction is nothing but a vehicle to turn the idea into a novel rather than a non-fiction book that even fewer people will read. Some may enjoy it, but doing message fiction and making it enjoyable requires great skill that few people have ever mastered.

 

On the other hand, fiction with a message is work where the message is there as part of the story, but is not the overpowering factor it is in message fiction. For example, let’s say you wish to convey an anti-sexist message, but don’t want message fiction. You could create a strong, independent woman who faces sexism in her interactions with some folks while maintaining a realistic setting where some of the sexists are fellow women and some of your protagonists are strong, capable men who take no issue with her sex.

 

Maybe some real world examples could help illustrate this concept.

 

Atlas Shrugged may well be the most successful piece of message fiction ever written. I’m a fan, and I’ll admit it’s message fiction. The whole story of Dagny Taggert, Hank Reardon, and John Galt is nothing more than a way for Ayn Rand to convey her Objectivist philosophy in a more digestible format than a long non-fiction work would. While the story is good, the message is the driving force throughout.

 

By contrast, some have recently held up Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as message fiction, with which I disagree. While Heinlein may have felt it had a strong message, there is an important difference. You see, the story isn’t about the message. The story is about Juan Rico and everything he goes through during the war with the Arachnids, including losing his home and family (he thinks, at the time).

 

The litmus test that will tell you whether you’re dealing with message fiction or fiction with a message is simple. Would maintaining a position completely opposite from the perceived message eliminate the ability to enjoy the book?

Now, there’s a very important word there, and that’s “perceived”. It’s always amused me the number of left leaning individuals who report that they absolutely adore Atlas Shrugged, and that’s because so many of them completely miss the message as Rand intended it. She opposed almost everything some of these people advocate for, but that’s not what they got. They perceived the message to be something else, so they enjoy the book.

 

However, if these people recognized the message as something the opposite of what they stood for, would they enjoy it? Of course not. They’d argue about the silliness of the message and maybe argue that while Rand was a skilled writer, she was completely bonkers for whatever reason. They wouldn’t like the book though.

 

Let’s contrast that with Starship Troopers. Is it possible to love the book while absolutely abhorring the message? Yes. In fact, when I read it, I opposed the message about as vehemently as you could, and I absolutely loved the book. That was because acceptance of the message wasn’t necessary to become invested in the characters and what they were going through.

 

It’s important to note a few things for the sake of completeness. First, it’s entirely possible to agree with a book’s message and still think the book blows. Trust me, I’ve found more than a few in my day. Bad writing is bad writing, for one thing. For another, message fiction is, generally, boring. It’s hard to do well enough to be entertaining, even for people who agree with you.

 

Also, just because you hate a book with a message you disagree with doesn’t mean its message fiction. Again, bad writing is bad writing, so that could be the issue. For another, if the story just doesn’t appeal to you, then it’s not going to appeal to you. The question is then, could someone else enjoy it?

 

I’m not saying this litmus test is easy to apply, but I think it’s important to try and be as objective as possible when trying to determine which is which. I do think it’s an important distinction that needs to be made. We will never purge the desire to impart messages in fiction from people, and to some extent, that’s not a bad thing. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was pivotal is ending slavery. The works of Charles Dickens did wonders in reforming how society dealt with the poor. Messages in fiction have their place from time to time.

 

Even preachy message fiction has its place from time to time. However, it would be nice if we knew which was which going in.

 

Now, for some shameless self promotion. If you like this, you may like some of what you find over at my blog: http://tlknighton.com

 

If you really like it, check out my Amazon author’s page and spend some of your hard earned money on books that don’t have a message but have some fun action.

So for grins and giggles I looked up the definition of totalitarianism: Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever possible.

Of course the state doesn’t have control over every aspect of public and private life.  But it is undeniable that it’s seeking it.  More importantly, the people who want the state to have ever more power, those who are convinced that the individual can’t be trusted, those who agitate for every group to be considered as a group composed of equally privileged/victimized widgets, are pushing shock-troop like into every facet of our lives.  No facet can be free of social-justice ideology.  You shouldn’t be able to collect stamps or arrange flowers without being told to check your privilege and without being examined for thought crimes.  No fun, no relaxing, no mindless activity can remain free of ideology.  And absolutely no human relationship, be it friends, acquaintances or lovers can remain free of Marxist-Leninist ideology and classifications.

I won’t promise this is my last post on the Hugo — and this one is only starting from that situation — but it will be my last post on it for a while (and btw, if you’ve dreamed of seeing your name in lights at ATH, I’m trying to get a house ready for sale and finish books, so you have as good a chance as any now) mostly because thinking of it from your perspective, it has to be getting boring.  For you the science fiction field and the travails of authors who don’t conform are not life and death struggles.  They are certainly not fascinating.  For me, of course, it’s different.

The thing is, though, that I’ve heard of this happening — the exact same process — in atheist societies, in birding clubs and in fiber arts culture.  So, one more post is warranted.

We’ll start with where I was at the beginning.  Most science fiction writers weren’t quite real to me.  They were Olympian figures striding through a landscape of dreams.  They were people able to create cogent realities in which a very lonely child might get lost.  I never expected to meet one of them.  In fact, I didn’t find out conventions EXISTED as anything but TV sitcom jokes until I went to my first writers’ workshop.  As for writing to them, which admittedly I could have done, would you have considered climbing Olympus and poking Zeus on the nose just to tell him that you liked his thunderbolts?  No power on Earth could make me write a letter even to Simak or Heinlein.  My husband tried to make me write to RAH before he died.  He managed to convince me to write to Ginny after older son was born only because of postpartum confusion.

So that’s where we start.  I read everything (except Romance.  Read my first Romance at 37) but mostly mystery, historical and science fiction.  Of those, science fiction was my favorite.  As much as I shared dad’s love of mystery, and as much as Agatha Christie is my go to for sick days and down time, I always identified as a sci fi geek.

And to begin with I read everything.  I think I’ve talked here, or perhaps it was in the podcast a couple of days ago, about reading the truly bad sf of the seventies, when sf was very popular and so the publishers bought everything that vaguely resembled it.  Also when publishers were very leftist (at least younger editors, it was the hep thing to be — leftist, I mean) and often picked books simply because they skewered the west or the expected narrative or whatever.  I read them.  The unthinkable thing was being without a book to read.  Now, I didn’t enjoy them and I probably didn’t re-read them (unless I were all out of cereal boxes and newspaper that used to contain fish) but I read them once (usually borrowed from someone.)

Before my eyes went (I need to get a new prescription.  Right now they’re very bad) and I started getting ill with what culminated in this surgery (probably a slow creep over the last fifteen years, and a very bad escalation since the last “serious” miscarriage  and D & C eight years ago) I used to read six books a day.  This while looking after kids/house and writing two novels and two dozen short stories a year (trunk, of course, and yes, some of them will bear rewriting.  Others are just trash.)

In adolescence I read a book an hour which, my being broke, meant I couldn’t be choosy.

By the time I was in my mid thirties, married, with two small children, and a house I was more or less rebuilding from the inside out (when we bought that house there had been six families living in that Victorian and… well… it wasn’t very well kept.) I became more choosy.  Suddenly, I needed a book to capture me, or at least not to make me yell.

And my reading changed almost completely to mystery and historical.  I wanted to read science fiction (and fantasy, though I was never a big fantasy person.)  I still thought of myself as a science fiction geek.  BUT I had trouble finding stuff to read.

It wasn’t just the politics in the books. To a certain extent it wasn’t the politics at all.  I could take or leave politics and was really good at skimming past stupid stuff.  If it had been politics I wouldn’t have run headlong into mystery.  And it wasn’t the grey and dreary future that everyone assumed (and had been assuming since their little red wagon was broken when Carter wasn’t reelected — or at least that’s how I track it) was on its way.  It wasn’t even the despondent “we can’t write about the far future because humans won’t resemble humans” (says who?) or the loony “We’re living in a science fiction world so what’s the point of writing sf?”

No, what chased me out was boredom.  I realized that given the same subgenre, I could be reading two books at once (often.  I usually had one in the bathroom, in the unlikely event I got five minutes in there alone, one in the kitchen to read while cooking, one in the kids’ room to read while supervising, and one in the living room, again, in case I got five minutes to JUST read.) and not realize I’d changed books.  (Names didn’t stop me, because being dyslexic I often don’t even know the character’s full name.  He’s just “name that starts with J”.  Remembering names is a higher level of engagement than reading-while-cooking.)

The pattern was most obvious in the fantasy of mid eighties to the mid nineties (part of the reason I wasn’t big on fantasy.)  I remember going down a shelf at B & N desperately looking for something to read (we had a day without kids.) and getting annoyed at the blurbs.  They were all the same — ALL OF THEM — young female magic user.  Abusive father.  Escape to magical society.  Validation.  Saves the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The science fiction was close enough, though by the early nineties we had the truly crazycakes feminist SF with “the women planet is really very peaceful” (I think that this was bought by editors jonesing on the lesbian scenes, but I am a really jaded person) and various would be utopias with males “confined”.  Since I like men and prefer the company of men, this left me cold.  The ecological disaster left me equally cold (though in the early nineties there was this hilarious period where authors weren’t all on the same page and some wrote about us all freezing to death due to industrial civilization, and some wrote about us boiling to death due to ditto.  But unfortunately not enough to carry the books.)  Everything was rusty and leaking, and everyone was living in a danker and less hopeful version of 1984, only in this case it was all the fault of eeevil capitalism and industry and if ONLY big Brother had been watching.

The sameness and a weird sense the writer hated the genre and was smirking at me while he/she wrote as in “Oh, so you want to dream of the future, you nasty little human.  See what I do to your dreams” had me reading less and less science fiction and fantasy as time went on.

Curiously I found I wasn’t alone.  Years later in a group of sci fi/fantasy writers, I found that most of us had made that journey, out of sf/f, out of mystery by the mid 2000s, into historical creative non fiction (not sure how to describe it otherwise.  History told as a story.)  I’d been chased out of that into Romance four years ago, when indie came in, Amazon destroyed publisher control over what was on the shelves, and I could go back to reading sci fi.

This is of course a high-gloss, not instance by instance description of my relationship with the genre.  It wasn’t all bad, and my feelings weren’t all cut and dry. All through this, I could read some sci fi and fantasy, mind, beyond re-reading my favorites.  I discovered Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones, and eventually I came back to science fiction with Connie Willis’ Lincoln dreams, which is a very odd book and perhaps marginally science fiction, but which did draw me in and keep me reading.  And then I started looking and would now and then find an author/series worth reading.

One thing that became obvious in short order is that I could neither read “the years’ best” or “award winning” after a while.  I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember buying a year’s best fantasy and finding it was all “the west is bad, bad, bad, bad” and noble savage fantasies (often without a supernatural element.)  After that I stopped buying them.  (Had to be mid nineties because I just packed up through then for charity store. No, not getting rid of all books, but getting rid of 2/3 of the paper.  It’s that or not be able to live in the house, since I’m allergic to dust.)

I became a professional writer sometime in the late nineties.  (I’d sold short stories before, enough to classify as pro, but the novels were the real education.)  And that’s when I found out that the game was rigged.

Let me explain — I won’t claim to be the best writer ever.  There are certain quirks in my expression that can still be traced to ESL and some of the acculturation might be less than perfect, so what fascinates me tends to be highly individual and targeted.  I’ve been getting better — more transparent in writing, better at story telling — but I am no Heinlein.  H*ll, I’m not even Simak. I’m not fit to untie Pratchett’s sandals.

But I know where I stand, and I have the publications to prove it.  People don’t keep buying authors that don’t sell at all or who can’t write, and I published 23 (25? — I lose count and keep forgetting pen names, particularly since some are secret) novels, one way or another.  Also, the one novel that is not under my name and which the house has no reason to play games with (it’s a house name, and they get the lion share) is still paying royalties 12 years later.

I’m not stupid, and I work hard.  I’m used to obtaining a MODICUM of success in any field I attempt, from academic to furniture refinishing. I expected… oh, I don’t know, high mid-list.  Never happened.

In publishing, everything I did and every work I started was like throwing a pebble in a bottomless lake.  There weren’t even ripples.

I won’t explain here the methods by which publishers controlled distribution and the crazy method of ordering to the net that is now putting bookstores out of business (they deserve it.  It was a stupid idea.)  I’ve talked about it elsewhere on this blog.  (Look up “He beats me but he’s my publisher” in the search bar.)

Let’s say I discovered then that it wasn’t “no one is writing the good stuff” it was “the publishers are pushing the stuff they think I should be reading and the rest is impossible to find.”  Some of this filtering was loony, like when the publishers decided that cozies weren’t real mysteries.  Which means the demand eventually “created” craft mysteries.  (They brought this on themselves.)

I just knew the game was rigged.  As for awards — well, the mainstream ones, like Hugo and Nebula — it wasn’t just as Dave Freer put it that the same names kept coming up over and over again.  No.  Older friends in the field told me that if I wanted awards I had to make friends with the right people and log roll.

Well, I was never good at that sort of thing.  Part of me wants to win awards and be recognized, yes, but I want to do it by knowing I deserve it, not because I kissed the right… er… hand.  And the closest I’ve come to campaigning for one is “you could consider voting for x”.  I mean, even AFGM which I think is my best book, I could look at it and go “there’s better stuff out there.  I can give you some titles.”  I wouldn’t have been able to live with the knowledge I’d taken an award someone might deserve more.  Even though I knew people were doing just that.

So, I kept going.  Recently someone at a conference referred me to the young hopefuls as someone to ask about the field and said “You want to listen to her.  She’s an old pro.  She’s been through the mill.  She knows what’s what.”

And it startled me, but it’s true too.  Dave Freer says we have that thousand yard stare, that battle fatigue of working and working and seeing no result, but being unable to give up.

The unable to give up is important.

I decided to help Brad and Larry with this (last year too, but I was so ill I didn’t even realize there was a story of mine on the slate) because I am an old pro, because of what Brad was doing.  Larry proved the awards were rigged (see Dave Freer’s posts on the subject at MGC.  If you can’t find them, someone will point you to them) and was ready to quit, but Brad wanted to restore the awards.  He wanted to make them mean something again and maybe that way to change the culture of the field to “stuff worth reading” instead of “academic blather and log rolling” again.

That was something I was willing to work for.  I mean, given diverse enough (in thought.  Genetic diversity is poppycock and only counts if you think everyone who tans alike is a widget and thinks like everyone else with the same melanine level.  Also, if you think that, you’re a stone-cold racist) nominees, stories, winners the field would have to embrace its multitudinous variety and become a home for fans of all stripes again.

That’s all we wanted to do — restore the awards.

You know, I read a lot of history and I should know better.  The elites never go quietly into that good night, and they’ve had it so good so long, and controlled it so well.  Getting on the ballot has caused a storm of … character assassination.

They started out with the Creepy Pasta at Entertainment Weekly, Guardian, Wired.  When that failed to stick because of who we are and because accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia are self evidently stupid in our case (I think I have more gay fans than Lackey does, and most of those who contact me become friends over time) they’ve now descended to the Stalinist tactic of associating us with VD who copied the logo and some of the slate.  They have their big names — the names that even non-sf people recognize, like Martin and Willis and Gerrold — come out and punch down.  There is an element of the macabre in this as most of these people are on the other side of the age divide.  They came in when the field was fairer; they are if not internet illiterate, internet naive; they get pointed at the Daily Kos and think it is in any way a credible news source.  (It’s like when the village kids yelled a triggering sentence at the old lady, then hid, to get her to throw things at the next group of kids who walked by.)

Some of this has hurt me, just as it hurt me when people I thought were sane lost their sh*t when I pointed out they couldn’t win elections with a third party absent a massive cultural trauma (like us getting all our major cities bombed) and consequent fracture (and that third party then would more likely be totalitarian, not pro-freedom.)  Those people didn’t argue the idea, they attacked me and called me names.

In the same way, these people are not in any way trying to credibly pretend there were no cliques and no secret slates before (whereas ours wasn’t secret.) Martin admitted there were.  No.  They are attacking us.  It started with being wrong fans having wrong fun.  But it always defaults to calling us racist/sexist/homophobic.  Even if they have to tie us by third degree association to someone else, to do it.

And that part hurts, because some of the people acting most crazycakes are people I’ve enjoyed and admired and I keep thinking “I remember when they were sane.”

However — however — remember this for when the Hugo war comes to whatever you like to do; whatever your hideout and corner of fun; whatever your sacred space and privacy is: there is no backing down.

There is no backing down, because each battle the beast wins, each area they take total control of, causes them to want to devour more.  And having seen the totalitarians up close and personal, having seen how they’re willing to speak power to truth and punch down and obliterate characters and careers JUST to keep their power and their fake prestige, I can’t let it happen.  Yeah, I’ve been through the wars, but the battle is still going on, and so I must continue fighting.

Yeah, I get so bitter, I consider quitting — but it’s more of a “I dream of quitting.”  Only I don’t.  Because legionaries don’t cry and I don’t quit. I wouldn’t do them the favor.  And they have to learn the limits of their power.  Yes, they can shred my name and my reputation, but I’ll be back.  I’ll be back under another name they can’t guess at.  I’ll be back with more experience.  I’ll be back and build another career.  They can’t stop me.  And I’m not in the mood to give them what they want.

I keep getting emails lauding my courage.  My younger son said, “They mistake ‘all out of flips to give’ for courage.”  (Only it wasn’t flips.)

He’s not wrong.  And you know the best part of it?  Courage can be destroyed, beaten down, threatened.

“All out of flips to give?”  That’s forever, and the more they attack the more out of flips I am.

Like the dead or the long gone, they can no longer touch me.  You’d think a bunch of writers, if they were minimally competent would get that if you want to create an invincible foe you take away everything the character cares for that you can control.

But apparently not.

And so, courage or lack of flips, I’m here to stay.

Because if this goes on none of you, none of our children, none of our hobbies, none of our fun, none of our family life, no area of action or love or thought will be safe from the all pervasive “improvements” and will to power of the totalitarians.

And that is a future I don’t want to live in.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

 

 

 

 

Apparently we have now entered the era of the grand jeté.  In ballet this is means a jump starting in a high kick in which the dancer leaps off from one leg and lands on the other.

In real life it means someone hears that a friend is supporting a cause they heard is racist, sexist, homophobic, and after demanding explanations and a grand Maoist self-examination, picks up her tulle skirts and LEAPS into deciding the friend is really an enemy in disguise, I guess having been taken over by pod people.

This didn’t happen to me.  I only saw the leaper’s announcement — rather proud — of her grand jeté.  The person she was sure was now an enemy and had changed beyond all recognition is a friend of mine, one of the most honest, decent people you’ve ever met, who has, in many ways paid for his high principles with a slow career and monetary loss. (Yes, as have I in a way, only my principles aren’t as high, I just can’t look at myself in the mirror after supporting a cause that killed a hundred million people, so I don’t, even by inference.)

Now, I’m handicapped here by having seen only one end of the conversation — i.e. this person’s claim she’d asked my friend for explanations, and that his response was “underwhelming” — and so she was unfriending him, denouncing him, burning him at the stake. Okay, I made that last one up, but only because they aren’t close enough geographically for her to do that.

Knowing my friend, I’m going to guess the “underwhelming” came from the fact that this fan who had been a friend was asking him to renounce and denounce positions that had never been his.

For some reason, more than the creepy pasta of Entertainment Weekly (Creepy pasta, as I understand from hearing my kids talk is an internet horror story, designed to disturb and frighten the readers. It often involves monsters and it’s set in the modern day and often around geek preoccupations. It is also understood that it shouldn’t be believed. I mean that’s the underlying assumption of the genre. The term comes from copypasta — a block of text that gets copied and passed around — and I’ve never seen a more perfect description of what Entertainment Weekly did, telling a scary story about racist/sexist/homophobic monsters in science fiction in a way unbelievable to anyone who did even a modicum of research); more than the professional colleague unfriending me over my support of Sad Puppies; more than the twitter sh*tstorms in which I was proclaimed a white mormon male, this made me incredibly sad.

It made me incredibly sad because this person was a friend’s friend and I remember when she was sane. It made me sad, because she swallowed whole the lies of a howling mob, rather than think first “this person I know, he is sound.  If the strangers are all howling in unison, maybe there’s an agenda.”  It saddened me because my friend is less involved with this than I am, and the level of character assassination over casual assassination is scary.

It saddened me because of this are things like the cultural revolution woven.

When I posted about this on FB, one of my “friends” came forth to howl that you know, people would think I was homophobic, since I’d put so much effort into getting a Hugo for Vox and John C. Wright.

I’m pinching the bridge of my nose and bowing my head and betting G-d to give me patience.  This is what I meant.  If you’re inclined to the Grand Jeté, you should at least do a modicum of googling to prove your facts before you leap.  Vox is nowhere near Sad Puppies 3.  Yes, his house is, but none of us writers has full choice over the houses we get bought by, nor do we police our publishers’ beliefs.  We’re in this to make a living.

As for John, he doesn’t need me to defend him, but I’ll just say his beliefs are more nuanced than his posts often give the impression, but even if they weren’t I am not in the habit of evaluating authors by thought-crime, imputed or real.  If I were there are lots of my colleagues I couldn’t read since they are at least soft supporters of communism, an ideology responsible for the death of a hundred million people.

But I’m not in kindergarten.  I don’t demand artists I enjoy be carbon copies of me.  I can read around the parts that offend me.  I can also understand how sheltered Americans, misled by their excellent educations can have come to believe communism was good.  I don’t assume these people are evil, nor do I scream to burn the witch.

The other side, on the other hand, seems bound and determined to set fire to the world to defend their right to keep rigging the Hugo.  They seem to want to implicate us in all sorts of crimes, explicit and implicit, of association and of declaration, for the sake of making sure they keep control over science fiction.

Science fiction, people.  The backwater of the genres as far as sales.

This where this grand battle is taking place.  It would be like fighting world war three over someone’s backyard.

It would irk me less if they hadn’t been taking science fiction down the sucking drain hole of “literary cred” (which in the modern age largely means Marxist utilitarianism.)

As it is, though, we don’t have a choice.  Because they’re fighting for what is our home, what we believe in, we must stand and fight.

I suspect, my friends, that this fight — oh, not over the Hugos, but over something else equally small that you care about passionately — will come to you.  Into your hobbies, into your job, into your home and into your friend circle.

When it does remember that you have no choice but to fight.  The end gambit the other side is aiming for is a Cultural Revolution of Chinese proportions, in which all dissenters, and eventually members of the revolution themselves perish.  If we let them continue with this, if we let it have its way, the grand jete will go on, jumping to conclusions and creating exclusionary tribes out of out of context quotes, wrong words, wrong thoughts, wrong associations.

It might seem what you’re fighting for is too small to bother, only remember they’re fighting for this because they already control the large arenas.

And we must fight now, now that we’re driven to the narrow personal spaces.  We must push back and take the larger institutions from them too.

It won’t be easy and it will hurt like hell, partly because humans are social and tribal creatures, and many worthy but not very bright people will swallow the slander, the out of context quotes, the guilt by association and because the other side fights by all of those means and always have.

But a human being has to stand somewhere.  And standing on the side that isn’t howling for absolute compliance in thought as well as in did seems like a good place to me.  Because I’ve seen the other side in action, and they can’t run their own heads, much less the world.  And because they are working from a set of assumptions that has nothing to do with reality.  And because their beliefs always end in mass graves.

In the end we win, they lose.  Because the very devices that allow them to win the war of words handicap them in reality.

Stand and don’t give an inch.

This post was brought on partially because of a line of thought I developed yesterday while on this interview with Brad and Mad (political Mobius) Mike (Z. Williamson) yesterday.  Link here for seriously uncaffeinated unslept Sarah.  (You get a bonus chance to hear one of my cats, Euclid the very Neurotic, yelling at mommy for doing this stupid thing instead of pets.)  Note for those who haven’t heard me before, yep that REALLY is my accent.

Anyway, some of you probably remember that I once almost sent a snippy letter to Orson Scott Card over his mis-understanding of the Portuguese language in Speaker for the Dead.  (I think.)  Then I realized that maybe ten of the many people who read that book gave a d*mn, and dropped it.  Also realized that for someone who hadn’t ever SOLD a word to pick a fight with a bestseller would be stupid.  Yeah, took a while for that to get through my head, because I’m that GOOD in social situations.

Anyway, one thing that Card got right (though not in the twentieth century in Portugal, but no answer for certain parts of Brazil because I ain’t never been there) was the… well, we should call it the inherent fanaticism of the Portuguese soul.  I know that sounds mystical, but I don’t know how else to explain it.  Consider it the remnants that stay with the culture from invasion to invasion.  I’ve read a book that claimed the inherent fanaticism of the Portuguese character came from the Carthaginians/Phoenicians, most of whose proper names also made reference to religion and most of whose thought/conversation was completely bound up with their gods.

When I talk of the historically oppressive and all-pervasive character of Portuguese Catholicism, that’s what I’m talking about.  Even through the Renaissance, though more humanized, the art was ONLY religious themes.  In fact, Catholicism so perfectly scoured the region of the previous religions that there are no legends of fairies and elves, even though the North of Portugal was heavily Celtic.

Mind you, there are standing stones aplenty, but no charming legends of kings turned to stone, nothing.  In the South of Portugal there’s remnants of Moorish legend, but even those are rather faint and not “serious.”

The only fairy tales I knew were the mannered fairy tales imported from France in the nineteenth century.  Which probably explains my reluctance to fantasy.

Mind you, you can catch echoes, but you have to be deep in village circles, and even there they only speak in hints and deflections.  Like the stories of women who fall asleep in the woods and this one village woman that grandma hinted (to one of her cronies) strongly had birthed a faun (if I understood it correctly.  Something supernatural, anyway) which ran off into the woods.

BUT the culture at large tumbles from fanaticism to fanaticism, from compliance to compliance.

My family was, for various reasons, odd.  My female ancestresses, as far back as I know, for instance, didn’t have “Maria” in their names.  I and one of my cousins did, but only because of insistence from the person we were being named after.

This is not an explanation, but might be a contributing factor (remember no matter how alienated you feel, humans being social creatures, if you live in a culture some rubs off) for why in my teens I wrote the sentence “It is better to be useful than to be happy.”

Maybe.  Because you see at that time Portugal had flipped from Catholicism to a sort of Marxism in which you should sacrifice yourself to the good of society or something, and this was as pervasive as Catholicism had been.  And both of them might have come up with that I idea.

Mind you, in my teens I knew d*mn little of either happiness or usefulness, or for that matter misery.

You see, I’d led a very sheltered life, that allowed me to spend a lot of time searching for “meaning.”  And if you’re thinking upteen revolutions with upheaval in my life and going hungry off and on for two years was not sheltered, you’re wrong.  You’re sheltered so long as you don’t have the full power of decision in your life, and as long as someone will cushion you from truly dreadful decisions.  So, you know, yeah, I’d gone hungry here and there, but it wasn’t MY fault, and it wasn’t my responsibility to haul us out of it.  And the same way, I’d been pretty contented, but it’s hard to experience happiness as such when you’re not your own person.  So  I had no idea what I was choosing between, I just felt, I guess, that I was a rather useless person and so wanted to be useful.

Now, what does this all have to do with the price of kumquats?  Well… In that podcast I found myself explaining how, when Western Civ turned against itself after WWI, we ended up looking for other ways to evaluate art/a lens through which to evaluate reality.

Part of it became a “tear down the past” lens, still fossilized in all the people who think they’re speaking truth to power and who, really, after 100 years, are speaking power to truth.  This leads to “ever more shocking” stories and art pieces.  If you’ve ever strolled through the modern art section of a museum, you’ve seen them.  (If you haven’t, we’re considering selling tickets for a stroll through Denver Museum of Art called “Desecrate Art with the Hoyts.”  We’ll donate the proceeds to charity, or something.)

And part of it was co-opted by the Marxists.  This was especially true in literature where, in the long form at least, you can make it a blind scream fest at the west and civilization, but if that’s all you bring, you can’t even get intellectuals to read it.  (We were forced to read a book that bragged of being plotless, when I was in college.  “It breaks one of the units of story telling.”  Oh, my, it sure did.  It was two people in a car, talking.  It was so new and revolutionary that I used it as a cure for insomnia for years.)

So, instead of just a “tear down” the stories had to be a “build up” of something.  The book I had to read in the eleventh grade was about the futile struggle of the proletariat.  Okay, “read” is a misnomer.  I read the prologue, couldn’t stomach more, (by then we had read four or five books by this charmer, whose only vivid descriptions were of defecation) so in the test about the book I wrote how the prologue prefigured the book.  (It was a snake crawling into the sun for warmth and getting burned to death.  No, really.)  I got an A so I’m going to guess I guessed right.  The author has since won a Nobel prize.  My second agent contacted me about translating that book, and I told him I’d rather gnaw my arms off at the shoulder.  And I meant it.

But the problem is that this “usefulness” rule for literature and art has pervaded the “elite” judgements.

What I mean is, our universities, our high brow critics, our theorists of literature evaluate writing not on what it is, or even what it does emotionally, but on what it does for the “cause” which is muddled version of positional good (“We’re better than bourgeois society because we understand the West/civ is bad) and “advances progress” with progress understood as the march to a Marxist state.  (The future of the past, you could say.)

In that sense, you can see why If You Give A Dinosaur a Redneck, er, If You Were A Dinosaur My love, hit both of those square on (i.e. it positioned the author and readers who liked it as “enlightened” and it reinforced the Leninist idea that the working class was eaten up with false consciousness and that only the intellectuals could lead the revolution.)  Hence its stunning success in nomination for awards.

So, now we know what the other side views as “Good.”  This is the lens they’re evaluating stories under — a lens reinforced by literature classes in college where because real impact of real literature is very hard to explain and Marxism is easy and positional good, this is how they teach you to appreciate stories — and why they’re running around screaming that our nominees are very bad and “taint” the Hugo.

We don’t fit into the parameters of what they consider good.  I.e. we neither shock the (no longer really existent but they’re still kicking the corpse for effect) traditional, hidebound Western civ, nor do we proclaim the glorious Marxism to come.

So we’re bad, bad bad bad baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

Don’t hold it against them.  Most of them are very sheltered university people, who, like my younger self, have never really experienced either happiness or usefulness, but are sure that usefulness is good, because they were told so.  And for sheltered people “usefulness” is easier to evaluate and understand than the REAL effect of truly good literature.

I know it will shock the heck out of you guys, but I despise received wisdom and regurgitated pap, which 100 years into the left-utilitarian movement in fiction is what most of the output of the proponents of Literature-as-useful are putting out.  In fact, in any art form I’d consider boring as an insurmountable defect.

To put this in Renaissance/Catholic terms, what I object to is not that the painting is of the nativity, no.  What I object to is that it’s not The Virgin of the Rocks, with its ethereal light which makes you feel as though you’re in another realm, it’s the tenth copy of the nativity painted by a guy who knows it will be appreciated because it’s the nativity and he can futz the details and paint by rote.  (Even if he’s not conscious of doing so.)

To put it another way: no one has an obligation to consume your “art” and though some will as a “positional good” the ever falling print runs should tell you that your “art” is failing of its primary purpose.

And what is the primary purpose, you ask?

This is entirely my opinion, because, you know, art has been taught this way before the Marxists.  For a long time what was considered “good” was stuff that promoted the state religion, whatever that was, or which flattered the people reading it.  (Actually that’s always a good route to elite-supported art.)  Or even what promoted morality.

The thing is the stories that stayed did more than that.  Shakespeare was very much a captive poet of the Tudors and protestantism, but his plays that stayed are the ones that were not considered very useful at the time, but only “entertaining.”

However what things like Romeo and Juliet do is go beyond message (yes, of course it has a message) to affect the reader in a way that the reader integrates it as “lived experience” and therefore interprets/lives it in his/her own way.

The same say with Way Station (mentioning it because it’s the last book I read.  Starting City today.)  For me, for instance, it is a novel about loneliness which reflects on my loneliness and allows me to deal with it/see it, and see it not as an involuntary tragedy but as a condition that refines and enriches parts of my life, when I accepted loneliness for a purpose.

I’m sure the reason it won the Hugo is because a superficial reason could see the moral as “the USSR and the US would get along if they only talked” which is false (as there were real differences, and also the USSR was a horror of human disaster and not a covalent system) and which is not, btw, endorsed by the book itself (the talisman had a deeper effect and would “redeem” the bad actors.) but it’s one that would have appealed to the number of voters (and there’s always a number like that) who are looking for correct messages.

We could then say that to me, at least, a successful/good story is one that produces a cathartic effect.  (Yes, this is familiar!)  I.e. it allows me to deal with some of the consequences of being human through a perspective not my own and to experience consequences that don’t actually hurt me, vicariously.

Now, if you look at my reading and preferences, I don’t read only “good” (by my lights) books.  A lot of the books I read are purely a good plot/fun.  But some percentage of the books I read stay with me and are processed along with my own experiences, resolving themselves as they go.

Because this experience; this ability to port your emotions/feelings into someone else’s head preferably wrapped in a fictional ICBM of good world building and good storytelling is highly individual, such stories tend to be far less of a snoozer than the utilitarian Marxist ones.

Thus, for instance, my favorites can range from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, to Bridge of Birds, to Passage to Way Station to The Tomb.  Oh, and from non SF, Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Effie Briest and Tom Sawyer, and…

This is not an exhaustive list, by any means, but I hope it explains how and why the selections of Sad Puppies, which I by and large agree with (though of course, these are Brad’s selections and mine would be different but the spirit of selection would be the same) are causing such fury on the other side.

We’re not merely suggesting different stories.  We’re taking an ax to the pillars of their taste, the very thing that constitutes a great part of their claim to being WAY more enlightened than average.

In other words, we’re devaluing their positional good.

It’s as though everyone were wearing shell jewelry until someone starts selling metallic jewelry and people realize they like the shiny stuff better.

The elites who have accumulated a vast store of pierced shells see their investment devalued and are striking back.

Or in other terms, we’re speaking truth to critical power and power doesn’t like it.

Or in yet other words, it’s getting ugly and it’s going to get uglier.  No one ever said a revolution, even when it starts in our little backwater, is easy or without consequences.

Hold on to your hats, though, and stay firm.  The other side is not even any longer aware of why they consider something “good.”  They’re running on the fumes of their predecessors convictions and all they have is received wisdom.

We can and will win this war (by which I don’t mean the Hugos, or at least not this year.  Eventually, though?  Sure.)  But it’s a long war.  Don’t get tired and don’t flinch from the ugly thrown at us.

Ça Ira.